Wrapping up the year of reading, finishing up books from the almost done shelf. I briefly thought of scanning in each cover but then, how about this instead?

There’s not much linking this set thematically. Some books overlap in style or obsessions but as a group it’s more time and place than subjects. 163 total. With the gender stats at the end and a link to all the book lists from 2013.

154. How to Love a Lonely Man by Rhonda Douglas (Apt 9 Press, 2013)
     I look forward to the longer collection of this which is entitled “For”. I’ve heard some of these at open mics and I think it’s her strongest work to date. If you don’t have one the print run is only 50 at Apt 9 so get it if you still can. Lovely ideas turning against ideas. It mixes intellect, emotion and concrete observation in a good fuel ratio. Here’s a sample out of “One Year Later”,

     When rejected the brain in an MRI
     lights up as in love.
     Look, I’m a Christmas tree for you,
     the fridge light that won’t go out,
     ache that tastes like nothing,
     evaporation of ice.
     On the stairs in my front hall
     a gift for you, bought in a moment
     of weakness at Heathrow, T5, Also, a card,
     Smithson’s, T3.

     “Song for July 1st” is superb for its playfulness, intensity and melding of geography, geology, and bodies. Can I take a core sample from it? It is best in entirety but to take it from the middle,

     Everything between us is Pre-Cambrian now –
     let’s say this means we haven’t quite peaked
     yet my love, let’s say tis iambic echo of breath signifies [ ],
     slide of skin over skin some manifestation of what happens
     in the middle, round about Manitoba. Touch me here and
     invoke the three seas. Oh, I never thought I could love
     Moose Jaw like this.

155. Six Weeks by Richard Scarsbrook (Turnstone Press, 2013)
     I guessed the title comes from either 6 week fling or 6 weeks after a fling. It is obsessive thinking about a past lover. The title poem is about being separated for potentially 6 months like Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant in the movie, then deciding on 6 weeks. It makes a lot of reference to Gene Kelly era musicals. Most of which I haven’t seen so I’m the wrong audience.
     Some have a chatty tone for internal monologue. There’s a 6 page list poem of why I love you such as “maybe I love you because of the way/your small perfect breast/fits neatly in/to the cleft in my chest/when we dance”.
     I liked “Rule of Three” where 2 dozen common words to block together are set up in contrast

     liberty         equality         fraternity
     faith         hope         and charity
     paper         scissors         rock

     “This Poem Has No Cash Value” was a chuckle, set up as a coupon to surrender.

156. This Isn’t the Apocalypse We Hoped For by Al Rempel (Caitlin Press, 2013)
     The title is catchy. Apparently everyone loves a good Apocalypse. Flipping though p. 13 “sleep-soaked” is a pretty awesome phrase but it is more pleasingly dense than most of the book.
     The poems broker in general anxiety of sedentary domestic life. There’s a fuzzy calm and fuzzy anxiety. There’s a lot of sitting and waiting poems, on a ridge, in bed, on lawn chairs, on a dock, on a porch, in traffic. The narrator is watching sky, rain, swimsuits, malls, accident memorials, imagining then unimagining, children in the bath are in danger. There are poems that play in hypothetical surreals like p. 43, “Urban Dreams” that ask, what if when you dream or being a bear or crow, if you can’t stop dreaming?

     but what if one night, before dawn
     you couldn’t quite get back into your body?
     ribcage too tight, lips pressed
     and not wide open in its usual clatter,
     toes – I don’t know where
     you normally get in
     or go out – curled under
     like hotel sheets tucked in at the end
                 what then?

     I rather liked, p. 46 “This Day, All Day, The Trees are Drapes” where “flowers put on lipstick for the bees, pucker/ I can almost hear the p./ except the birds are hanging around, singing/when she sits down at the café, she pulls out a parachute/attends to it with needle and nylon thread/the way lips attend to the edge of a porcelain cup”. Later in the poem the seamstress “looks around at the sky the way birds do”

157. Radiant Life Forms by Diana Brebner (Netherlandic Press, 1990)
     I felt remiss for not reading this. Yet it is a hard book for me to get into because it’s a checklist of against my grain. Full of general nouns, like vaguebooking: light, earth, glowing, blood, ghosts, spirits, angels, children, (always stripped of their individuality) birds (always stripped even of their species), cry, terrible. No critical mind. The first set of poems was about kids being beaten and immolation. Somehow the kids being beaten seemed abstract and pretty. Odd. Still, it’s not your materials but what you do with it. One can make great art with duct tape if you have the eye. The poem I came closest to liking (despite the vocabulary, punctuation, stanza and line breaks) was p. 53

     Bioluminescence
     I come to you with this luminous heart. It
     wasn’t always transparent, or glowing. Now,
     I shine in the dark like a primitive fish.
     Radiant life form. Bioluminescence is such
     a big word for what has happened. Perhaps
     it comes from drinking the water. Nothing
     is safe anymore, when I know you can look
     right through me. It is nice though, to
     shine like a nuclear clock at night. You find
     your way to my green delight, bask in the
           radiance of my affection.

     One grows more by reading what one dislikes that what goes with the bias, I’m told. Let’s assume she intended the effect so end of lines don’t act like semantic anchors and break against the flow of syntax to disrupt or trouble the reading. It sets that up against flowery language. Was the poem before or after her chemo? “I shine in the dark like a primitive fish.” and “You shine/your way to my green delight” are the lines that sing for me. Is it about love with a person or comic relationship to cancer treatment? Or both?
     p. 30 has the sweetest poem, “Awake to the Silent Morning” (which incidentally uses the same line techniques despite a very different tone) starts,

     This is a new definition of silence: amid
     the unnatural quiet of children, awake in
     their rooms, but not yet awake in ours,
     and the sounds which count as quiet in
     our world: snow falling, birds drifting
     down to the feeder to quarrel over seed,
     the snow-plows out on the highway moving
     between the three fir trees and our red
     maple, bones creaking through a long winter.

     And eventually the kids detect the parents are awake. It’s nothing I’ll ever experience but the report rings true from here, lifelike and even touching. And that’s what writing is good for, to experience what you wouldn’t otherwise.

158. Surge Narrows by Emilia Nielson (Leaf Press, 2013)
     When did Leaf Press make the leap into spine-books? An articulate book grounded in internal and external observations, I like Pass Creek chapter with the upper 2/3 of page devoted to walking a landscape and the bottom with an italic line of self talk. p. 44 exemplifies the poet at home with contradiction. In the last half of the poem

     A late night phone call makes me long for a pickup
     grinding down the dirt road and, after fucking,
     to be held. The blue desire.
     Song breaks through radio static;
     robins whistle as wind tears through trees.
     Fill the outdoor bathtub with rainwater,
     kindle pine branches and spruce sap, light a match,
     smoke and steam rising while I soak,
     buoyant, unable to move
      
      
      
      
     Become lost, undone. Return to what was never lost.

     The “light a match,/smoke” is a playful turn, referring back and forward, hinging it well while the idea of being buoyant therefore lifted, and yet fixed, paralyzed almost, by relaxation contrast sweetly.
     Later, In Sensorial, p 55

     ii
     Agog in this landscape, loose,
     whole being eager – tongue.
     Every highway we’ve travelled
     flanked by broom, azure lupines.
     This diction, amorous. I don’t
     recognize my life on the page.
     Spread and winged, my hand
     searching the small of your back.

     A hand as wing searching is unexpected and lovely. I have a soft spot for poems that question themselves and double-back against themselves. What is deemed “poem-worthy” is good to question. I like the sharpness of rebuking the poem and yet, letting it stand. The lupines aren’t ejected but the tone is corrected. And then it goes on even more amorous and yet more tactile. I admire a poem where there is not the poet isolated from the rest of humanity with a gap. We travel the highway. In other hands, the poet is a passenger and incidentally there is some other human with an infinite distance or bitterness or otherwise back of palm to forehead.

159. The Grey Tote by Deena Kara Shaffer (Signal, 2013)
     Another book about parental death and cancer. Who says there is no quintessentially contemporary subject. It’s cancer. She conveyed the pluck and contradictions inherant in disease and death, p. 35

     Comeabout
     She needed the endline,
     the terminal verdict.
     Hopelessness renwed her
     hope, made her funny.
     In knowing it wouldn’t be
     long, she sought harder to thrive.
     Held both the soon of ending
     and faith in remiss.
     Scans injected
     momentum. Paralysis made her
     hungry. Her cancer wasn’t catchable,
     but boy, her belief in wellness was.

     Later in “Grief Management” she acts as a witness to other ways we cope assuring self or reader, we do what we do. Life persists even happily, even when it seems absurd or inappropriate.

160. Engagement Calendar by Mary Aird Rutherford (Inanna Publications, 2013)
     Also another memoir in poetry of cancer and death, but in this case, also, the husband is ill and has gone deaf, the mom dies, the dog dies, the narrator goes through cancer, the sister has an aneurism and a break-in. Annus horribilis. Poetry acts as a witness, testimony and I suppose support because people feel isolated in such circumstances and to have a log on the fire saying, come, someone else has been there too stores up some heat.
     It’s not about what happens for plot in poetry so much as how it is expressed, conveyed. My favorite piece from the book is “Primum Vivere”, p 37-40. from a section of p. 38

     Two millimeters separate healthy tissue from diseased.
     To think a millimeter is a measure smaller than this dash –,
     Each unexplained ache, each twinge seems a sign of cancer
     spreading, rogue cells infiltratin liver, brain and bones.
     You find sanity in simple acts: cream on chaffed hands,
     lighting dinner candles, squeezing breakfast oranges.
     Morning are spent walking in a nearby park. A child
     threads a red kite under clouds. Such power.
     Such possibility. A woman on a bench, glasses askew,
     reads headlines in the news. Even with glasses
     firmly on our face, cancer tricks your vision:
     a “tiny dancer” becomes a “tiny cancer,” a book cover,
     Carry My Bones, turns into Cancer in my Bones.
     Obituaries are your daily reading. Your hoard the age
     at which the victim died, how long she battled for her life.
     There no one whimpers into death, all seem so brave.
     You pull yourself tall, not wanting to seem wanting,
     wonder when the blue jays’ brassy call, the soughing
     in the trees, the scent of lupins will once again astonish.

     Ah, lupines again. Another odd cross-tie. Over the last 3 days, 3 books separately mentioned Camus, hummingbirds and cancer.

161. Blindsight by Rosmarie Waldrop (A New Directions Book, 2003)
     This was a much underlined book. It spurred off all kinds of poem fragments. I got torn about reading faster or stopping because I didn’t want the book to end. Checking how many pages left was more not wanting the number to be small.
     Although there’s a rotation of vocabulary like Brebner’s, it’s more of a return to theme from a new context than revolving in the words. Each line may not follow from the previous so the reading is different than lyrical storytelling. for example, a section from p. 32 with its questioning perception and interrogating one’s own thoughts and notions that float out there,

     A riddle is anything pure. In pure memory (what is pure memory? and where?) I might know my image. But not find a caption. Though a name of my own I have no matter what time of year.

     p. 44

     And how to talk to. I don’t know. The dead. We’ve drained the symbols so our stories be cool. But it would take. The depth of years we stand on. The sea. Frequencies out of range. And air. Insurmountable in its lack of resistance.

     Love those last two sentences in particular. I can’t say why but my hair stood up.
     I hear reference to We Real Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks in there.
     The poems construct and decontruct. You never know where it will turn next. Each stanza is a room. p. 61,

     When he leaves the room, he recaptures a memory called meaning. A matrix where a word is carried by a foreign language. Say “th.” Say the whole word: “death.”

     A backwards forwards sort of surprise. If the element symbolizes the whole, why should only the first letter stand for it? Why not the last sound for the last thing? Each line feels intelligence driven, long thought out and impulsively fresh, both.
     In “Musil as Potential, Aloof” p. 68-69,

     His strange attachments. No logical objections can be advanced in small areas. So that philosophers could see what kind of unborn forest for the trees. He takes refuge in the next thing to be done. He’d go mad inside the blindspot, the place of no proof.

     Ah salivatory and salutatory. It is that arguing something with pedantic logician who dismisses everything as insufficient proof, too much unmeasurable subjectivity, so one’s lived experiences are invalid as evidence of harm.

162. Cascadia by Brenda Hillman (Wesleyan Poetry, 2001)
     This is apparently a part of a multi book series, each exploring water, air, earth and fire. I shall have to get others in it. A delight to read. I wonder if Vivian Demuth in Fire Watcher had read the same text, p. 4 is right justified. I’m not sure I can do that without right justifying everything. El Niño Orgonon has “punctuation like beach-flies”, hotels, stars and this,
     
     When you think it ends, the medium is played with. The next page has centred mid-page

     (enter: The “we”–)

     A lovely playfulness.
     And later, in Fresno Lunette/Predella environmental protest, a history of religion, agriculture, cash, life choices all mix together freely and hip-bump hard enough to bruise.
     

163. Revelator by Ron Silliman (BookThug, 2013)
     
     p. 42
     The 5 word lines that comprise the whole book create more structure than I expected. The lines that end-stop give a whomp. The others create juxtapositions. “On the window glass, because” for example stands alone as our nature is to be a moth beating on a window glass, but then it elaborates a different direction, “we are heliocentric”. What animates thoughts? The bloody boned machine itself? Does the thought send word to bone and bone word to thought?
     Later p. 68, at Yosemite falls, the sidetone because sidenotes also comprise the whole,

     “Yohemite,
     h, not an s, means
     in West Miwok, speaking of
     the Aliwahnee, “some of them
     might be killers”

     then travel along to p. 71

     by the corner of where
     the garage used to be
     bougainvillea that ate childhood home
     any ghost there would be
     my mother’s mother, unquenchable anger
     echoes forward even now, some
     of them might be killers
     San Quentin’s sad yellow expanse
     no longer remote

     The same subjects of the terraformed world loop back, including San Quentin which is another part of the book-length poem was remarked on for being all green inside. The image seemed to make it, like the sea, like a shell that catches grit.

Overall so far as CWILA count goes, I was surprised at how even the numbers turned out. A run of male authors in a row and I think it’s going to be skewed.
Out of 163 books, 19 books by mixed gender, 71 by males, 73 by females. Some of those by males were about females, or published by females, and those by females about males, published by males. Here’s a link back to all the list. You may remember a year ago, I just listed titles and deciding that not very useful started adding excepts as well.
Part 16, Part 15, Part 14, Part 13, Part 12, Part 11, Part 10, Part 9, Part 8, Part 7, Part 6, Part 5, Part 4, Part 3, Part 2, Part 1.

Books I thought I’d finish by year’s end but didn’t quite make it. Brenda, note you pushed me over the edge; I got The Civic-Mindedness of Trees for myself for xmas.
Absent from the photo: A Writer’s Life: The Margaret Laurence Lectures and Deconstructing Product Design edited by William Lidwell and Gerry Manacsa (Rockport Publishers, 2009) . Also reading on digital, The Idiot by Fyodor Dostovesky, The Ambassadors by Henry James, The Innocence of Father Brown by CK Chesterton and Utopia by Sir Thomas More.

I’ve let so much time lapse, it’s a bit of scramble to reconstruct the order of what I read.

142. Astrophel and Stella by Philip Sidney (1580s), from sonnet 34
     

     Come, let me write. “And to what end?” To ease
     A burthen’d heart. “How can words ease, which are
     The glasses of thy daily vexing care?”
     Oft cruel fights well pictur’d forth do please.
     “Art not asham’d to publish thy disease?”
     Nay, that may breed my fame, it is so rare.

     They are fascinating sonnets, some of the first in English. Some, the meaning I missed by a mile. Some transfer well. The process of transposing them into a new sense is still underway.

143. illiterature: issue iii (Puddles of Sky, 2013)
     It’s in an edition of 100 copies. If you’re interested in visual poetry, minimalist poetry or want more from: Nelson Ball, Gary Barwin, derek beaulieu, Judith Copithorne, jwcurry, Amanda Earl, Jesse Patrick Ferguson, David Fujino, Geof Huth, anatol knotek, Nicholas Papaxanthos, Aram Saroyan, Gerry Shikatani, Sandra Stephenson, George Swede & Mark Truscott, well, then you know what you have to do.
144. How to Get Over Yourself by Susie Petersiel Berg (Piquant Press, 2013)
     The book varies in tone, such as the light comic touch such as Ransom Note for My Bad Poetry” which is a list poem of all the ways poetry “should be” “Get rid of the word ‘I’. Excise all references to love” until most of the way through the list poem is “Scrap all list poems.”
     There are other poems about poems, and a series of cancer poems, which at the rate of cancer spreading through people will become more standard than love poems I suppose. p. 51 is one done particularly tight,

     Welcome Back to Cancerland
     — after Rabbis Phyllis and Michael Sommer
     The word oncologist mde my heart fall through my knees.
     The word relpase is the like the word collapse.
     The definition of ‘good’ is a Talmudic one.
     Believe that prayer is prayer.
     The routines are the same.
     Things you wanted not to remember.
     Up here on 5E, you live moment by moment.
     Amazed at how fast and slow it all seems to go.
     It feels like the last time, like the times before.
     But it’s not.
     Dear cells, please proceed with your healing.
     You can never beg too many blessings.

     I wasn’t so chuffed about one thread running though, one of these head-hopping works where the modern writer enters the mind of a historical woman, in this case the book pursuing the notion of woman as muse in order to upend the idea as simplification and diminishing of the woman. She doesn’t seem to enter into the heads to expand each person into her own alternate history story, only restate the thesis.
     I admire the defiance but the refusal doesn’t go far enough, keeps a holding pattern that maintains victimness instead of just moving past somehow to another strength or a sense of relationship left. That may be the axion of poems must always be written in the perennial present working against that momentum.
     The text addresses other unhealthy relationships to various ends such as “Lighting matches” which is an eloquent slow description of burning old letter such as p. 43 which I rather like for its religious twistedness of the Lord is the My Shepherd,

     Addiction Psalm
     You are my addiction, I must not want,
     you talk of crisp sheets
     of me against the window
     you between my legs.
     You lead along broken roads;
     though I walk through the valley of the shadow of jealousy,
     in m mind you are with me
     my hands and lips are on you
     I prepare the room
     with wine and music
     I anoint you with my tongue
     my mouth overflows.
     Surely if I find just the right way
     I can make you follow me in all the days of my life
     and you will dwell with me here forever.

     Beautifully done. They seem like necessary poems to be out there and find people where they are at.
     Some of the book feels like raw, fresh young work overall but that said, it’s a very marked up book now with underlined wow lines and stanzas and checkmarked, glad-I-read-that poems.

145. Earthly Pages: The Poetry of Don Domanski (2007, Wilfred Laurier U Press). Meditative but tighter than later books, here’s a sample of Walking Away.
     

     Walking Away
     what does it mean to walk away from everything
     reeds so still along the riverbank
     like the eyes’ motion held back against the heart
     the water is a binding of one day to another
     but never the day you live in at the moment
     I walk and the hills are straining
     in the stamens of asters held away from the wind
     walking among spruce trees that fence in
     a private light around each piece of dust
     around each dandelion seed shaped like a casket
     worn down by children inhaling sorrow
     from inside its plush interior
     wandering away from everything
     passing the miles from hand to hand
     the wings of sparrows hide in the cheekbones of deer
     when my footsteps are heard in the brush

     There’s a touch of the mystical fanciful but still the images are grounded in the specific. The ragged right margin is a Cole’s note of the poem while the front end of the lines just convey further forward.

146. Learning to Ride by Susan McMaster (Quarry Press, 1994)
     A quick read about learning to ride a horse. Most is literal description and observing the difference in behavior of young vs. experienced horses. It is a worthwhile read of building relationships between horse and human.
     Some forays into lessons for the human, such as p. 26 on doing up a horse’s mane, Braiding

     everyone is clumsy,
     everyone must learn
     patience, and how to comb
     out the ravels of blame.
     The only real tangle
     is to not forgive yoruself.
     All else can be woven
     into the skein.

     The images are scraperboard by Robert Verrall. Easily frameable illustrations.

147. Happiness Threads: The Unborn Poems by Melanie Dennis Unrau (The Muses Company, 2013)
     I can’t say even as a cultural anthropologist I can get much traction in mommy or daddy poems. One chapter is found poetry off Stay at Home Mom message boards and the community of acronyms. Without the index prefacing the chapter I would have been as well reading Swahili. It was the most thumbed page.
     p. 78

     Re: work-life
     post by wow on Jan 10, 2012 7:51pm
     WOHM
     if you SAH or even WAH go ahead + post it
     but never introduce yourself as WOHM let them
     get to know you first see what a great M you are how you can
     craft bake volunteer at school like
     the rest of them you can throw a mean birthday pary
     they’ll know of course they smell you
     guilt + last night’s takeout
     some will judge you
     for processed lunch hours logged at day
     care just ignore it your
     looking bad is what makes them good

     The other chapters are pregnancy and child poems. One that’s not very representative, but I did like, was p. 87 with its brief sketch.

     business
     i.
     sunrise a quick
     kiss at the airport
     i drive into the dropped jaw of morning.

148. Fire Watcher by Vivian Demuth (Guernica, 2013)
     The typesetting is a bit odd and distracting with widely kerned all caps of her name and the title on top the of facing pages too close to the body of text. This one is an autobiographical book which has notes citing the news stories are real, the context of living in a forest fire watchtower is actual. It bills itself as ecopoetry.
     One poem “Wilderness Climb’s, A Woman’s Climb” is remixing the jargon of filling out the forms of Human Rights forms of discrimination (and being dismissed unheard) and a rock climbing narrative. There’s some description of grouse and snipe, sparrow chick and wolves. A lot are from the perspective of grabbing emotive moments of sun and isolation to cast across the long geologic future. One with particular intense energy is a prose poem from p. 48

     Chicken Creek Area from Copton Ridge
     To sit writing impressionistic lines on the electromagnetic stage of copper-iron rocks on a muted summer says is to confess creeks, but not chickens hiding in verbs of vermillion pack-trails, or lighter deciduous adverbs that leak dark urgencies of a territory carved by straight lines, not of ochre strokes bandaging blue hills with hidden roads at a bearish horizon below long vowels of light interrupted by muddy nouns sliding on grey shores o sky, not sobbing onto sentences of forest sculpting a play of designs — an umber Native burial ground, for example, that is not hungry for silver phrases from glossy archives.

     I like it being firmly grounded with two anchors, one to the specifics of this space out doors in this landscape, and the other aware of being inside a wordscape in a sort of self-awareness without being self-conscious. it rolls and hooks forward in a playful sort of way dwelling in the act of writing without having to do a hero’s journey. There’s a lot of ecstatic energy through the book. The easier path is to be sullen in poetry. I appreciate her risking the “Rufous” route, p. 45,

     There’s a hummingbird
                  in my throat
     I can’t stop
                sipping
                 the sparkling wine
     of her buzz

149. Game Plan by Karla Doyle (Ellora’s Cave, 2012)
     And on a completely different note, a page turner novel. It covers a lot of ground, from trying to understand other people’s psychology, the ex-husband who insists he is husband, full stop. The ghosts of past people who stand between people and interpreting on old patterns. And plain fun and bits of banter quick as1930s movies,

     A hint of ink on his finely shaped chest peeked out at her. Tattooed men ranked highly in her personal fantasy time. Bad, meet worse. She was so toast.
     “I like these shoes. Sexy.”
     And things just got toastier. “Not your size, sorry.”
     “I prefer them on you.” He winked and swiped one finger across the high-gloss, hooker-red polish on her big toe. “You have very pretty feet. Nice toes.”
     “Thank you, I grew them myself.” She hadn’t flexed her flirt muscle in years, but it sprang into action. Pheromones and adrenaline rushed her system.

150. The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by G. K. Chesterton (1908) was a fun romp. It starts in a park where a soapboxing poet/anarchist finds another poet stepping out of the crowd to debate him,
     

     Mr. Lucian Gregory, the anarchic poet, connected the two events.
     “It may well be,” he said, in his sudden lyrical manner, “it may well be on such a night of clouds and cruel colours that there is brought forth upon the earth such a portent as a respectable poet. You say you are a poet of law; I say you are a contradiction in terms.
     […] said Syme irritably, “what is there poetical about being in revolt? You might as well say that it is poetical to be sea-sick. Being sick is a revolt. Both being sick and being rebellious may be the wholesome thing on certain desperate occasions; but I’m hanged if I can see why they are poetical. Revolt in the abstract is—revolting. It’s mere vomiting.”
     […] For the first time a red patch appeared on Gregory’s forehead.
     “You don’t expect me,” he said, “to revolutionise society on this lawn?”
     Syme looked straight into his eyes and smiled sweetly.
     “No, I don’t,” he said; “but I suppose that if you were serious about your anarchism, that is exactly what you would do.”
     Gregory’s big bull’s eyes blinked suddenly like those of an angry lion, and one could almost fancy that his red mane rose.
     “Don’t you think, then,” he said in a dangerous voice, “that I am serious about my anarchism?”
     “I beg your pardon?” said Syme.
     “Am I not serious about my anarchism?” cried Gregory, with knotted fists.
     “My dear fellow!” said Syme, and strolled away.

     And after that there is car chase, pony chase, secret underground bunkers of anarchist, a police sting. And much lush language and descriptions of characters and absurdity. Political and social commentary and regular pips of wit such as “Who would condescend to strike down the mere things that he does not fear?” or “Through all this ordeal his root horror had been isolation, and there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one. That is why, in spite of a hundred disadvantages, the world will always return to monogamy.”
     I inhaled it entirely quickly.

151. Slow Lightning by Eduardo C Corral (Yale University Press, 2013)
     All the surrealness and stickiness and wanting to be along for the ride of the book but quite a different creature with working in a deep symbolic language that doesn’t surface in the same way that Chesterton eventually does making his allegory more plain, after a fashion. But Corral dips also into the same bank of religious allusion but takes it a different direction. For example, p 22 in Self-Portrait With Tumbling and Lasso, “An apple/ in my mouth. I know/ what Eve/ didn’t know: a serpent/ is a fruit eaten to the core”. At that point I can go home happy.
     The phrase that sold the book came in the last three lines the last part of “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, p. 4-5

     The deer passes me.
          I lower my head,
     stick out my tongue
          to taste
     the honey smeared
          on its hind leg.
     In the field’s centre
          I crouch near
     a boulder engraved
          with a number
     and stare at a gazelle’s
          blue ghost,
     the rain falling though it.

     Anyone who can make that image is welcome to show me more. In Watermark “Too poor to afford lilies,/she walked down the aisle carrying a glass of milk.” The unexpectedness of the image dazzles. The sense of non-arbitrariness compels. Even the useof pun is observant, apt and touching, p. 35, “Dólar/ store cologne”.
     Caballero, p. 45-47 has an intensity to it that likens the poem to one of grief of a parent, although there’s no indication that it is. “Once a year/ he eats a spoonful of dirt/from his father’s grave”…

           he polishes his boots.
     Rosa salvaje. Corazón salvaje. The inner-
               most part of a castle
                       is the keep. Andale, pues

     .
     ;   When I ride him at night I call out
     ;   ;   the name of his first horse.

152. The Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yeats (1893, 1902).
     Well, I pecked away until I finished it. That’s almost as much as can be said. They seem like really good stories but why did Yeats just give the Coles Notes brush to so many. If you collect tales, the upshot isn’t the thing is it? One of them, Dreams that Have no Moral runs out to 13 pages and has some detail of a combination of Cinderella and Jack and the beanstalk. He says, p. 40, “I tell these things as accurately as I can, and with no theories to blur the history. Theories are poor things at best, and the bulk of mine have perished long ago.” So he aims not to embellish but he pared much, and spends time saying the Scottish take their fairy tales to brutal ends of enemies with the other world while the Irish embrace stories to comic ends, the fairies are friends, and it all being more of a continuum. He interjects often such as p. 43, “I am not certain that he distinguishes between the natural and the supernatural very clearly”
153. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself, by Harriet Ann Jacobs, 1813-1897.
     This was an intense read. Her hardships and the hardships of slavery are detailed. It took me a couple years to get through it. Tough but worthwhile going for some parts.
     “There are wrongs which even the grave does not bury” she says and luckily for human history, history hasn’t buried her autobiography. It peeks into the U.S. and corrects some of my sense of North vs. South and the “free lands” which she herself expected to be much more free of bias against complexion than she found it to be. The notion of race is complex and it is presented often that black people are black. Her own children were to her slave master/ really mentally unwell abusive dude, and her daughter light as to pass. Her kids were bought but not freed as promised. The idea of free vs owned was nebulous with people as chattel being re-stolen. She lived 7 years in a slot of earth under a shack to not be discovered, and years more looking at ways to escape to be free, and to free her children.
     She related conversations overheard or news passed such as what was said at the funeral of her aunt who had 6 miscarriages and 2 children who died in infancy while she was nanny to her slave master’s children.

     Mrs. Flint had rendered her poor foster-sister childless, apparently without any compunction; and with cruel selfishness had ruined her health by years of incessant, unrequited toil, and broken rest. But now she became very sentimental. I suppose she thought it would be a beautiful illustration of the attachment existing between slaveholder and slave, if the body of her old worn-out servant was buried at her feet. She sent for the clergyman and asked if he had any objection to burying aunt Nancy in the doctor’s family burial place. No colored person had ever been allowed interment in the white people’s burying-ground, and the minister knew that all the deceased of our family reposed together in the old graveyard of the slaves. He therefore replied, “I have no objection to complying with your wish; but perhaps aunt Nancy’s mother may have some choice as to where her remains shall be deposited.”
     Page 222
     It had never occurred to Mrs. Flint that slaves could have any feelings. When my grandmother was consulted, she at once said she wanted Nancy to lie with all the rest of her family, and where her own old body would be buried. Mrs. Flint graciously complied with her wish, though she said it was painful to her to have Nancy buried away from her. She might have added with touching pathos, “I was so long used to sleep with her lying near me, on the entry floor.”
     My uncle Phillip asked permission to bury his sister at his own expense; and slaveholders are always ready to grant such favors to slaves and their relatives. The arrangements were very plain, but perfectly respectable. She was buried on the Sabbath, and Mrs. Flint’s minister read the funeral service. There was a large concourse of colored people, bond and free, and a few white persons who had always been friendly to our family. Dr. Flint’s carriage was in the procession; and when the body was deposited in its humble resting place, the mistress dropped a tear, and returned to her carriage, probably thinking she had performed her duty nobly.

I don’t know if that’s it for 2013 or if I’ll get a few more finished up. Probably a couple. There are 3 days after all.