Month: May 2005
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Campo Santo by W.G. SebaldTranslated by Anthea BellRandom House, 2005
Sebald writes about art and literature and memory, both personal and national. He also writes, compellingly, about the threads that run through life and thought, that occasional tantalizing feeling that nothing is quite coincidence, everything’s connected, and some things are inescapable. (His strings of associations prompt the reader to do the same: I’d been listening…
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Return to the City of White Donkeys by James TateEcco, 2004
A book of poems that uses plain language to describe a surreal world in which police officers appear at a man’s front door for no apparent reason, asking about 40-year-old alibis or whether there’s too much happiness in the house. Body parts talk, and if you set out in a car or bus, there’s no…
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School of the Arts by Mark DotyHarperCollins, 2005
Time and age and beauty and art. Color and light, illumination. Consciousness as attention, the focused outward gaze that takes the world in. Several “Heaven for _____” poems, all beautiful. Heaven for Stanley, Heaven for Arden, Heaven for Paul. This is a book that I am glad to own, that I know I will enjoy…
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Time’s Magpie: A Walk in Prague by Myla GoldbergCrown Journeys, 2004
This is the kind of book that’s perfect to read in one day, start to finish: on the subway to work, waiting for the elevator, over lunch, at home, before cleaning or having dinner or opening the mail. Small and lovely, well-chosen stories of a city, wonderfully accompanied by Ken Nash’s illustrations (perfectly drawn buildings,…
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Knowing the East by Paul ClaudelTranslated by James LawlerPrinceton University Press, 2004
Winged details: pinecones like rose petals, the curves of a pagoda’s roof, yellow soil, narrow streets. I love the poem on cities: London, Boston, New York in 1896 but it could almost be now. The trouble is how to capture joy, ideas: sometimes it works, sometimes it’s all overblown, exclamation points and rhetorical form. But…