Month: April 2007
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Dog Years: A Memoir by Mark DotyHarperCollins, 2007
I’ve been reading this book on the train and finding myself getting a little teary from the tenderness and sweetness and sadness of it, how Mark Doty articulates sorrow and hope and the joy a dog is/has/brings to people. As usual, Doty’s writing is detailed, vivid: he conjures such clear images of his beloved retrievers,…
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The Glass Age by Cole SwensenAlice James Books, 2007
A book about “what it is to see, and what it is to look through” (p 7). Swensen writes about window-glass and canvas: Pierre Bonnard’s paintings, Caillebotte’s “Young Man at His Window,” Alberti’s De Pictura, Hammershøi’s paintings of doors and light. Light and surfaces: where perspective draws the eye, or curiosity: a small object in…
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Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life by Wendy MassLittle, Brown and Company, 2006
It’s a month from Jeremy Fink’s 13th birthday when a mysterious package arrives at his apartment. Inside, there’s a locked wooden box with four keyholes; the box is engraved with the words “The meaning of life: for Jeremy Fink to open on his 13th birthday.” Jeremy recognizes the engraving as the unmistakable work of his…
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The Mislaid Magician or Ten Years After by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline StevermerHarcourt, 2006
Another excellent romp featuring Cecelia & Kate, and the magical England in which they live. The year is 1828, and a German magician/surveyor has gone missing near Leeds, while investigating a new railway line. Lord Wellington asks Cecelia’s husband James to look into the matter, and Cecelia travels north with him to see what’s going…
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The Last Time I Saw You by Rebecca BrownCity Lights Books, 2006
These short stories have a distinctive voice: wry narration, strings of synonyms: “I willfully purposefully doggedly […] pursue follow chase desire” (p 28), parenthetical asides. There’s a preoccupation with the past, with remembering and misremembering: in the title story, every concrete detail slips and shifts, the story is one “maybe” after another. (If the facts…
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Captivity by Laurie SheckKnopf, 2007
In this slim (but not slight) collection of poems, Laurie Sheck draws from a number of inspirations: the notebooks of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christopher Smart, William James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, American captivity narratives. Poems who take their titles from phrases within them (“But couldn’t cross,” “This austere and fierce machinery”) are interspersed with poems called…