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| She Did Go Home Again A wonderfully intelligent and frank memoir about the Mennonite upbringing Rhoda Janzen returned to after an emotional and physical crisis. feeds.nytimes.com |
Paperback Trade Fiction Top 5 at a Glance1. PUSH, by Sapphire2. BED OF ROSES, by Nora Roberts3. SAY YOU'RE ONE OF THEM, by Uwem Akpan4. THE SHACK, by William P. Young5. THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, by Stieg Larsson feeds.nytimes.com |
Poem of the week: Living by Harold Monro Poetry Bookshop founder Harold Monro's work strikes a balance between the 'dark Scot' and the life-hungry idealistWhere does your muse of literary nostalgia like to roam? 1920s Montmartre, perhaps, or 12th-century Provence? To the Anglo-Saxon mead hall, the Mermaid Tavern or the "local" where you and a few young hopefuls once swapped photocopies of your latest masterpieces? One time-travel destination I rather fancy is the Poetry Bookshop, c 1913. Ruth Tomalin evokes it memorably in her preface to Harold Monro's Collected Poems (ed. Alida Monro, Duckworth, 1970). We see Ezra Pound, blazing-eyed, preaching the laws of Imagism, while Ralph Hodgson changes the subject to boxing, and Charlotte Mew quietly purchases some children's rhyme-sheets to colour in at home. In a nearby coffee shop, a young Wilfred Owen broods over his rejection slip from the Poetry Review.The Poetry Bookshop, Tomalin tells us, was housed in an 18th-century building at 35 Devonshire Street – a working street in those days, mainly occupied by gold-beaters. It offered publication and readings as well as books for sale and fireside hospitality: it even gave temporary accommodation in its attic rooms to wandering poets (Robert Frost was one). The bookshop owed its existence to the passion and the modest private income of Monro (and later, of course, to the indefatigable Alida Klemantaski, the young Polish assistant who became Monro's second wife). Monro wanted new poetry to reach a bigger audience. He was at heart a Shelleyan romantic who nevertheless responded excitedly to the radical poetics of his age. He saw criticism as vital to the art, and was the founding editor of the Poetry Review. In its first issue, he wrote a stirring manifesto calling for a new, unsentimental but non-realist poetry "springing from the roots of life". Although he was never a thorough-going Imagist, Monro was no insipid Georgian, either. This week's poem, Living, is a psychological meditation that is as fluid as Monro's personality, and gives voice both to the death-haunted depressive and the ardent, life-hungry idealist. Its startling range of imagery includes a sketch of the functions of the nervous system, a builder's crane, a drab interior with clothes-peg and clock, and a gloriously expansive outdoors.Today, Monro is probably best known for a curious little dialogue-poem, Overheard On a Saltmarsh, an inconclusive contest between a nymph and a goblin who covets her green glass beads. The poem became a schools anthology favourite – to Monro's surprise. It wasn't intended for children. Yet there is undoubtedly a childlike quality flitting through some of Monro's poems – not connected to the thought itself, but to those moments of sing-song repetition. Living, for instance, has the repeated use of "I" as a rhyme-word, and "Why?" occurs three times, as if spoken by a plaintive child.Critics suggest his work is not always entirely his own, but that impression may, ironically, result from the fact that other writers picked up its original note. TS Eliot, for example, who thought very highly of the senior poet, and published him in The Criterion, undoubtedly echoes Monro's style at times in The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock. Monro pushes at the edges of thematic and formal conventions without drawing attention to the fact. There are not many gestures or efforts at fancy footwork. The "dark Scot" (as his friend, the imagist poet FS Flint, called him) is nearly always present, and guarantees an absolute seriousness of tone, even when the rhythms seem playful. At times, the writer he seems to resemble most is Virginia Woolf: he, too, travelled on a slow, meandering stream-of-consciousness, interested as much by things seen as by thought-processes and the passage of time. He believed that, for contemporary poets "the spirit of Darwin" was inescapable, and simultaneously suffered anguish as he forced himself to accept the absence of individual immortality. "Living" takes us into that anguish, and out again into hard-won affirmation.LivingSlow bleak awakening from the morning dream Brings me in contact with the sudden day. I am alive – this I. I let my fingers move along my body. Realization warns them, and my nerves Prepare their rapid messages and signals. While Memory begins recording, coding, Repeating; all the time Imagination Mutters: You'll only die. Here's a new day. O Pendulum move slowly! My usual clothes are waiting on their peg. I am alive – this I. And in a moment Habit, like a crane, Will bow its neck and dip its pulleyed cable, Gathering me, my body, and our garment, And swing me forth, oblivious of my question, Into the daylight – why? I think of all the others who awaken, And wonder if they go to meet the morning More valiantly than I; Nor asking of this Day they will be living: What have I done that I should be alive? O, can I not forget that I am living? How shall I reconcile the two conditions: Living, and yet – to die? Between the curtains the autumnal sunlight With lean and yellow finger points me out; The clock moans: Why? Why? Why? But suddenly, as if without a reason, Heart, Brain, and Body, and Imagination All gather in tumultuous joy together, Running like children down the path of morning To fields where they can play without a quarrel: A country I'd forgotten, but remember, And welcome with a cry. O cool glad pasture; living tree, tall corn, Great cliff, or languid sloping sand, cold sea, Waves; rivers curving; you, eternal flowers, Give me content, while I can think of you: Give me your living breath! Back to your rampart, Death.PoetryCarol Rumensguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
TBR: Inside the List Writers who had best sellers in 2009 share their reading-related New Year’s resolutions. feeds.nytimes.com |
Infinite Jest goes on (to the screen) Columbia University has had the bright idea of commissioning film-makers to realise the works of James Incandenza, hero of David Foster Wallace's magnum opusHow surreally wonderful to discover that an entire exhibition devoted to the "works" of David Foster Wallace's fictional creation James Incandenza is set to open later this month. A cult filmmaker, Incandenza is the star of Wallace's seminal novel Infinite Jest (the 1,000-page book centres on the missing master copy of his film of the same name, so entertaining it renders spectators incapable of doing anything other than watch it).As was his wont, Wallace included a footnote in the novel about the filmography of Incandenza, and now using the author's "detailed list of over 70 industrial, documentary, conceptual, advertorial, technical, parodic, dramatic non-commercial, and non-dramatic commercial works", Columbia University's Neiman Centre has commissioned artists and filmmakers to make the movies. They don't appear to be taking on the Infinite Jest movie itself – creating something that renders an audience catatonic with pleasure would be something of a challenge, I suppose.Wallace is, of course, an author who inspires this sort of obsessive devotion – and his own extensive footnoting (Infinite Jest contains almost 400) means there's plenty of material to explore. But there must be lots of other fictional creations that deserve a life outside the page – David Barnett pointed last year to a trend for novels by fictional characters, but are there any other fictional filmmakers whose work you'd like to actually see? Artists? Musicians? I, for one, wouldn't mind seeing the paintings of Elaine Risley, she of Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye, I'd love to read the children's stories of AS Byatt's Olive Wellwood from The Children's Book, and perhaps it's only because we saw him in the office on Monday, and got somewhat overexcited, but wouldn't it be great if an artist recreated the illuminations from Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red? Please share your own ideas – and maybe we can inspire someone to take the projects on.David Foster WallaceFictionAlison Floodguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |