5 Books for 5 Moods

The past couple of weeks have been fortunate as far as book choices go. Most times you read a couple of reviews, flip through a few pages on Amazon and you’re still not sure it’s the right book for your mood. This time I got it right with a string of five books, some new, some not, one something I’d been meaning to read for a long time. It’s unusual to hit upon five in a row that all prove to be the right choice. Here are those that did it for me:

Continental Drift (1985) by Russell Banks

This is the book I had been meaning to read for the last several years. I’ve read a couple of other books by Banks, so to some extent knew what I was getting into. Continental Drift is about a luckless guy from New Hampshire who uproots his family from all and everyone they know and drags them to Florida trying to catch his dream. Like others before him, he falls prey to people looking to exploit, one of many looking for the chance to better themselves in a new setting. The story is built upon a marvelous cross section of characters that range from black and white, to old world and new, from the living as well as the dead. Continental Drift gives us a bleak perspective of opportunity in the America of the 1980s.

Long, Last, Happy (2010) by Barry Hannah

This selection of old and new stories was published shortly after the writer’s death. For a while there, Hannah was a blazing comet across the skies of American literature, a reputation ignited by his first novel, Geronimo Rex, published in 1972. He followed that with another novel before showing readers that his true power lay in short stories. Barry Hannah could do just about anything with words, leaving images on the page that you hadn’t thought were possible. The problem often arises that his beautiful sentences and use of language, along with his fascinating oddball characters never find the plot, or at least one that’s clear. For the reader with an interest in southern writing, Hannah shouldn’t be overlooked. He wrote a good many incomparable short stories that are taught in universities. Long, Last, Happy is a good sampling.

The Painter (2014) by Peter Heller

After reading Heller’s earlier book, The Dog Stars, his new book grabbed my attention at first glance. The author has written mostly non-fiction, but makes the shift to fiction without the least stumble. In the two books I’ve read, Heller tells a story of moral ambiguity, the main characters in each at battle with the laws, traditions and culture that have shaped them. The Painter is about a man successful in his painting but with less luck in his personal life, where violence seems to almost seek him out. Jim Stegner is trying to outrun his past but keeps bumping into reminders that threaten to undo him. The story is set in Colorado and New Mexico, a landscape that is as rugged as it is lyrical and Heller soars in his descriptions of fly fishing in creeks meandering along canyon walls under an overhang of lime-green cottonwoods. With short, abrupt sentences and paragraphs you would expect the story to flow with less grace. Not so with Peter Heller.

The Son (2014) by Jo Nesbo

Saw this book in the window of my tiny local library and checked it out mostly because I had never read anything by a modern Norwegian novelist, or anything set in the city of Oslo. From the first page this crime novel grabbed me up and didn’t let go. Jo Nesbo has a new fan and after the last page of The Son, I jumped up to order two more of his books. The son in this story is a young man serving time in prison for the crimes of others. He is accepting of his sentence until learning that his father’s suicide was not that at all. He escapes from prison (very cleverly) and begins working down a list of those who he believes killed his father. The question is, who will get him first, the cops or the criminals?

The Keillor Reader (2014) by Garrison Keillor

I have long been a fan of Garrison Keillor for two things in particular. It is a long custom of mine to begin each day with a cup of coffee and the latest online edition of The Writer’s Almanac. That has led me to read Keillor’s several compilations of poetry which have done a lot to re-shape my appreciation of a form that high school taught me to hate. By hook or by crook find a copy of Keillor’s splendid introduction to Good Poems for Hard Times (2005) wherein he explains what poetry really is and who it is meant for. The Keillor Reader is something just out and is a collection of his writings over the last forty years. There is so much humanity and warm humor in this writer’s stories that natural reaction is a smile that lasts for 358 pages. Never read any of the Lake Wobegon stories? This one’s for you. I took great enjoyment from this little snippet out of “The News from Lake Wobegon.” 

    

‘I wish to be cremated… I wish my ashes to be placed in the green bowling ball that Raoul also gave me, which somebody can hollow out (I’m told), and then seal it up, and I would like the ball to be dropped into Lake Wobegon.’

Velveeta & Beer

A portion of the days around here include an unavoidable wandering between staggered piles of books, an on-purpose arrangement that maintains a desired curiosity about what book is where. Nothing follows alphabet, subject or author. Books are stashed in random places that often end with a Mexican cookbook nestled up to Emily Dickinson. The way I want it, and a system that keeps daily browsing off-balance and unpredictable. The unpredictable on Wednesday was a poem from the usually astonishing ‘gathering’ of Garrison Keillor. I can only imagine that Keillor spends an hour or two each day perusing poetry collections with the aim of finding work that brings the genre another step closer to the average reader, searching for poems that make a daunting form more approachable. Mentioned once before perhaps, but surely deserving of a repeat: Treat yourself to a reading of the Introduction in Keillor’s Good Poems for Hard Times.

Ronald Wallace is the author of twelve books that include poetry collections, short stories and literary criticism. His latest is the 2008 poetry collection, For a Limited Time Only. He is the founder and co-director of the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is Felix Pollak Professor of Poetry and Halls-Bascom Professor of English. He lives on a 40-acre farm in Richland County, Wisconsin.

“Fat of the Land,” the poem below, is taken from Wallace’s 1991 book of poems, The Making of Happiness. It is also found in the Garrison Keillor anthology, Good Poems American Places. Wallace’s poem abounds with words that play off the American penchant for piled plates, large sizes and the effects of it all. From cornucopia to Velveeta to triple chins he paints a picture of ‘one big happy family’ living on the fat of the land and comfortable in their loving likeness and ‘love’s large company.’

THE FAT OF THE LAND

Gathered in the heavy heat of Indiana,

summer and 102°, we’ve come from

all over this great country,

one big happy family, back from

wherever we’ve spread ourselves to thin.

A cornucopia of cousins and uncles, grand-

parents and aunts, nieces and nephews, expanding.

All day we laze on the oily beach;

we eat all the smoke-filled evening:

shrimp dip and crackers,

Velveeta cheese and beer,

handfuls of junk food, vanishing.

We sit at card tables, examining

our pudgy hands, piling in

hot fudge and double chocolate

brownies, strawberry shortcake and cream,

as the lard-ball children

sluice from room to room.

O the loveliness of so much loved flesh,

the litany of split seams and puffed sleeves,

sack dresses and Sansabelt slacks,

dimpled knees and knuckles, the jiggle

of triple chins. O the gladness

that only a family understands,

our fat smiles dancing

as we play our cards right.

Our jovial conversation blooms and booms

in love’s large company, as our sweet

words ripen and split their skins:

mulberry, fabulous, flotation,

phlegmatic, plumbaginous.

Let our large hearts attack us,

our blood run us off the scale.

We’re huge and whole on this simmering night,

battened against the small skinny

futures that must befall all of us,

the gray thin days and the noncaloric dark.

Donuts & Ethel Rosenberg

Another cold day in beachtown, just right for sitting at a sun-filled window with a good book. But before anything else I tested the air with a little outdoor breakfast in my big patio chair overlooking the blue. Enjoyed some time of wandering the beach near-stifled in the bulk of sweater, hoodie and scarf then returned to the warmth of indoors and a bright window of slanting light. I keep an ever-growing file on the iMac of poems that I like, and though not always the case, on many occasions poems discovered on The Writer’s Almanac end up on that list of favorites. Let no one doubt Garrison Keillor’s eye for poetry. For those unfamiliar with it, his introduction to Good Poems for Hard Times is a classic for anyone desiring an everyman’s approach to poetry. Should be required reading in classes starting with Poetry 101 and going right up to graduate seminars.

In my list of favorite poems from The Writer’s Almanac is one by Michael Heffernan, a fine example from a March 2011 edition of TWA. A Detroit native, Heffernan has taught since 1986 in the MFA writing program at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. His ninth book of poetry, At the Bureau of Divine Music was published last March. Heffernan has won three NEA grants, and two Pushcarts, along with the Iowa Poetry Prize. This latest collection of poems combines meditations on the ordinary happenings of daily life with thoughts on the passing of years, on love and infidelity, and on remembrance and regret.

From that book, “The Art of Self-Defense” shows us the poet looking back to a time in his Detroit youth in 1953. The ending, which comes in six short, staccato-like sentences suggests that the thoughts, memories and feelings in the poem are crucial, possibly moments that shaped the poet’s growth.

THE ART OF SELF-DEFENSE

Another day’s stint in the free world
begins here in the donut shop. Standing in line
wondering how many cheese Danish and apple fritters
as well as donuts I should buy, while the creamy girls
in their summer dresses are licking their profiteroles,
I see myself as a boy in the summer of 1953
salting sliced tomatoes with my grandfather
in the white shirt he wore. The kitchen was big and sweet.
The breeze from the electric fan swung by us and away.
The oilcloth on the table was cool and slick.
The leaves of the tree of heaven dappled the sill.
In line in the donut shop is a man in a straw hat
between a woman in pigtails and a boy with large eyes.
Gramps was a boxer in his younger days, semiprofessional.
He watched the Wednesday night fights on our TV.
In his last autumn he taught me to box.
He set up punching bags in his basement.
He taped newspapers to the windows. He named me Spike.
He got me to shadowbox next to the coal bin.
He kept me at it hard till it felt like forever.
When the time came, he arranged a bout
with Mike Donnelly from down the street.
Mike struck the top of my head at once and down I came.
He helped me up from the floor and went home.
I was eleven. I wasn’t fast or clever. This was the autumn
after the summer they fried the Rosenbergs.
Gramps walked me down to the corner to get the Free Press.
The photograph showed their bodies on the front page.
He tugged my hand and kept me from seeing it.
We mark these solitudes throughout our lives.
This is not simply about things as they are.
This is about donuts, profiteroles, and straw hats.
Things cannot be as they are in this country.

Wondrously Multicolored

Once in a while childhood memories of Saturday afternoons in Baton Rouge float to the surface and I think back to those strolls down Third Street after a showing of Old Yeller or Jailhouse Rock at the Paramount, that aimless drift that sometimes carried us to the open doors of Woolworth’s. A store long gone, its aisles and smells are still anchored in some part of my brain awaiting the next spur.

The spark this time was a poem stumbled upon in one of the three Garrison Keillor anthologies, Good Poems for Hard Times, a poem by Minnesota poet Mark Irwin. It comes from Irwin’s 1996 collection, Quick, Now, Always and is titled “Woolworth’s.”

By way of introduction to readers unfamiliar with the name, Woolworth’s was one of the original American five-and-dime stores and one of the largest retail chains in the world during the twentieth century. It was one of the first American stores to put merchandise out for shoppers to handle and select without the assistance of a sales clerk. From 1913 until 1930 the Woolworth Building in New York was the tallest building in the world.

WOOLWORTH’S

Everything stands wondrously multicolored

and at attention in the always Christmas air.

What scent lingers unrecognizably

between that popcorn, grilled cheese sandwiches,

malted milkballs, and parakeets? Maybe you came here

in winter to buy your daughter a hamster

and were detained by the bin

of Multicolored Thongs, four pair

for a dollar. Maybe you came here to buy

some envelopes, the light blue par avion ones

with airplanes, but caught yourself, lost,

daydreaming, saying it’s too late over the glassy

diorama of cakes and pies. Maybe you came here

to buy a lampshade, the fake crimped

kind, and suddenly you remember

your grandmother, dead

twenty years, floating through the old

house like a curtain. Maybe you’re retired,

on Social Security, and came here for the Roast

Turkey Dinner or the Liver and Onions,

or just to stare into a black circle

of coffee and to get warm. Or maybe

the big church down the street is closed

now during the day, and you’re homeless and poor,

or you’re rich, or it doesn’t matter what you are

with a little loose change jangling in your pocket,

begging to be spent, because you wandered in

and somewhere between the bin of animal crackers

and the little zoo in the back of the store

you lost something, and because you came here

not to forget, but to remember to live.

Currently teaching at the University of Southern California, Mark Irwin divides his time between California and Colorado. He has published six collections of poetry, the latest in 2008.

Nothing Happened

There are times when the end of a workday is long in coming. Saturday was one of those days and from early morning to late afternoon I was captive to a paint bucket and brush. Community spirit at the beach today. By this point I’ve seen enough green paint and flaking doors to last me awhile. But at least painting somewhere off by oneself allows time for the mind to wander and now and then to dwell on comfortable thoughts. Somewhere between the twenty-third and forty-sixth front door my mind turned to a poem by Barbara Crooker I happened upon earlier this week. It wasn’t the first occasion for me to come back to the poem, since the poet’s lines have been in and out of my thoughts off and on throughout the week. The first time was the day I read the poem to Jewel, my 94 year-old friend. When I read the poem and reached the last line, her immediate comment was, “Why, that’s beautiful!” My guess is that most would agree.

The poem comes from a 2001 collection by Barbara Crooker, “Ordinary Life” and is a plain narrative in unadorned language of the joy that can be found in the prosaic movements of an ordinary day. The poet uses words of daily expression to narrate the uneventful happenings in a day that passes unmarked by anything other than quiet joy and contentment.

Crooker’s book, Ordinary Life is currently unavailable through major booksellers, is out of print and likely hard to find, but the poem “Ordinary Life” is part of the Garrison Keillor compilation, Good Poems for Hard Times.

ORDINARY LIFE

This was a day when nothing happened,

the children went off to school
without a murmur, remembering
their books, lunches, gloves.
All morning, the baby and I built block stacks
in the squares of light on the floor.
And lunch blended into naptime,
I cleaned out kitchen cupboards,
one of those jobs that never gets done,
then sat in a circle of sunlight
and drank ginger tea,
watched the birds at the feeder
jostle over lunch's little scraps.
A pheasant strutted from the hedgerow,
preened and flashed his jeweled head.
Now a chicken roasts in the pan,
and the children return,
the murmur of their stories dappling the air.
I peel carrots and potatoes without paring my thumb.
We listen together for your wheels on the drive.
Grace before bread.
And at the table, actual conversation,
no bickering or pokes.
And then, the drift into homework.
The baby goes to his cars, drives them
along the sofa's ridges and hills.
Leaning by the counter, we steal a long slow kiss,
tasting of coffee and cream.
The chicken's diminished to skin & skeleton,
the moon to a comma, a sliver of white,
but this has been a day of grace
in the dead of winter,
the hard cold knuckle of the year,
a day that unwrapped itself
like an unexpected gift,
and the stars turn on,
order themselves
into the winter night.

Along Old Highways

Summer vacations were once upon a time colored by travel on two-lane highways that twisted and wound through pastoral farmland and small towns of backcountry America. Three and four lane interstate highways were still the stuff of dreams among civil engineers, and ‘getting there’ was a big part of family vacations. I remember those summer weeks, always too short, of driving with my mother, father and sisters to destinations like Pikes Peak, the grand and gloomy Mammoth Cave, Mt Vernon and Williamsburg, and oftentimes ending up at Gran’s house in Ocean View, Virginia.

We made our way to these places in the family car, a black 1948 Chevrolet, a car that memory tells me never felt crowded with two adults and three wiggly children. There were car games to fill the hours, most of them associated with passing scenery along those narrow roads bound by red clay and kudzu, with the occasional weathered country church. I remember one with its marquee in front bristling with black stick on letters warning in Old Testament fervor: ‘Don’t make me come down there—God.’

But our favorites on those road trips, and something that caught the attention of children and adults alike were the red and white signs spaced along the highway advertising Burma Shave.

Looking through the Garrison Keillor book of poems featured in these pages three days ago, Good Poems for Hard Times, I was delighted to come upon some of the old Burma Shave limericks from childhood days. In the flash of a moment the lines rose from a well of memory and for a minute or two the present faded and I was once again in the backseat of that 1948 Chevrolet, somewhere in the hinterlands of Kentucky.

Burma Shave signs appeared across most of the US between 1925 and 1963, more often along a monotonous stretch of rural road, placed in a staggered sequence easily readable from passing cars. Each series of signs was either five or six, always ending at the last sign with the words, “Burma Shave.” The men behind this advertising campaign probably never dreamed it would become one of the most memorable campaigns in US history. Burma Shave eventually became the number two selling shaving cream in the country, thanks to these hokey signs along country roads.

With the development of the interstate highway system and faster driving, roadside advertising entered the age of giant billboards set back at a distance from the roadway. In 1963 the Burma Shave signs came down, sales plummeted and the shaving cream finally discontinued in 1966. (It returned in 1994 but without the road signs.)

Below is a sampling of the old red and white signs familiar to many back in those old days.

THE QUEEN

OF HEARTS

NOW LOVES THE KNAVE

THE KING

RAN OUT OF

BURMA SHAVE

•••

IF YOU DRIVE

WHEN YOU’RE DRUNK

CARRY A COFFIN

IN YOUR TRUNK

BURMA SHAVE

•••

NO LADY LIKES TO DANCE

OR DINE

ACCOMPANIED BY

A PORCUPINE

BURMA SHAVE

•••

POOR SATAN, HE

WAS FORCED TO DWELL

IN THE ONLY PLACE WHERE

THEY DON’T SELL

BURMA SHAVE

•••

DOES YOUR HUSBAND MISBEHAVE

GRUNT AND GRUMBLE

RANT AND RAVE

SHOOT THE BRUTE SOME

BURMA SHAVE

•••

SLOWDOWN, PA

SAKES ALIVE

MA MISSED SIGNS

FOUR AND FIVE

BURMA SHAVE

•••

THE WHALE TOOK JONAH

DOWN THE HATCH

THEN COUGHED HIM UP

BECAUSE HE SCRATCHED

BURMA SHAVE

Three Poems

For reading purposes, this Sunday was designated a poetry day, giving me an opportunity to read some of another Garrison Keillor compilation. One or two times in the past, material for these pages has been gathered from the 2002 Keillor book, Good Poems, and recently I came upon a later collection of poems compiled by Keillor and published in 2005 as Good Poems for Hard Times. This anthology is much like the earlier book and offers another 185 poems that take giant strides toward making poetry accessible to everyone. Keillor’s idea is that poetry should not be a puzzle that the reader is obliged to solve. He says, ‘[Personal] voice and the heat of life can be found in poetry and nowhere else: poetry is about…mowing grass, putting luggage into the car, gratitude for food, the laughter of a little girl…’ These are things familiar to all of us, the common threads that when examined by the poet illuminate our collective experiences.

No commentary, no attempt at analysis or talk of ‘symbolism.’ In fact, there probably isn’t any of that in the following three poems from Good Poems for Hard Times.

UNHARVESTED • BY ROBERT FROST

A scent of ripeness from over a wall.
And come to leave the routine road
And look for what had made me stall,
There sure enough was an apple tree
That had eased itself of its summer load,
And of all but its trivial foliage free,
Now breathed as light as a lady’s fan.
For there had been an apple fall
As complete as the apple had given man.
The ground was one circle of solid red.

May something go always unharvested!
May much stay out of our stated plan,
Apples or something forgotten and left,
So smelling their sweetness would be no theft.

THE ALTAR • BY CHARLES SIMIC

The plastic statue of the virgin

On top of a bedroom dresser

with a blackened mirror

From a bad-dreaming grooming salon.

Two pebbles from the grave of a rock star,

A small, grinning windup monkey,

A bronze Egyptian coin

And a red movie-ticket stub.

A splotch of sunlight on the framed

Communion photograph of a boy

With the eyes of someone

Who will drown in a lake real soon.

An altar dignifying the god of chance.

What is beautiful, it cautions,

Is found accidentally and not sought after.

What is beautiful is easily lost.

CARNATION MILK • ANONYMOUS

Carnation Milk is the best in the land;

Here I sit with a can in my hand—

No tits to pull, no hay to pitch,

You just punch a hole in the son of a bitch.

November Peaches

Here are three poems I especially like, the work of what anyone would describe as a very diverse trio of poets, but at the same time poetry that touches upon the human experience in the deepest sense. The poems speak so clearly for themselves, I would feel uncomfortable commenting upon any of the three in a pretense of interpretation or analysis. Most might agree that the written lines say it all.

Li-Young Lee is an American poet, though he was born in Jakarta of Chinese parents. He has published four collections of poetry, the most recent in 2008. The poem below comes from his 1986 collection, Rose.

“FROM BLOSSOMS” by Li-Young Lee

From blossoms comes

this brown paper bag of peaches

we bought from the boy

at the bend in the road where we turned toward

signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,

from sweet fellowship in the bins,

comes nectar at the roadside, succulent

peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,

comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,

to carry within us an orchard, to eat

not only the skin, but the shade,

not only the sugar, but the days, to hold

the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into

the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live

as if death were nowhere

in the background; from joy

to joy to joy, from wing to wing,

from blossom to blossom to

impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

Edna St Vincent Millay is a name already familiar to many lovers of poetry, and was the first woman to receive a Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Her life and her love affairs were often fodder for scandal, and her poetry unlike anything being written by either men or women of her day. The sonnet below is from The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems (1923). It can also be found here.

“SONNET XLIII” by Edna St Vincent Millay

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,

I have forgotten, and what arms have lain

Under my head till morning; but the rain

Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh

Upon the glass and listen for reply,

And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain

For unremembered lads that not again

Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,

Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,

Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:

I cannot say what loves have come and gone,

I only know that summer sang in me

A little while, that in me sings no more.

Wendell Berry has published fiction, non-fiction, essays and poetry in volumes too numerous to mention. He was born in Kentucky in 1934. The poem below comes from his 1985 collection, The Collected Poems.

“THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS” by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

For those readers who would like to have these poems in one volume, I recommend what I believe is an excellent collection of poems selected and compiled by Garrison Keillor and called simply, Good Poems.