Category Archives: Book Reviews

May 28, 2013 · 9:53 pm

Poem of the Week: The Neighborhood of Make-Believe by Thomas Lux

It is elsewhere, elsewhere, the neighborhood you seek.
The neighborhood you long for,
where the gentle trolley –ding, ding– passes
through, where the adults are kind
and, better, sane,
that neighborhood is gone, no, never
existed, though it should have
and had a chance once
in the hearts of women, men (farmers dreamed
this place, and teachers, book writers, oh thousands
of workers, mothers prayed for it, hunchbacks,
nurses, blind men, maybe most of all soldiers,
even a few generals, millions
through the millennia…), some of whom,
despite anvils on their chests,
despite taking blow after blow across shoulders and necks,
despite derision and scorn,
some of whom still, still
stand up everyday against ditches swollen with blood,
against ignorance, still dreaming,
full-fledged adults, still fighting,
trying to build a door to that place,
trying to pry open the ugly,
bullet-pocked, and swollen gate
to the other side,
the neighborhood of make-believe.

Thanks to Alison Mcghee for her generous curation of these beautiful poems!
–
For more information on Thomas Lux, please click here:http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/thomas-lux
–
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

 

Leave a comment

Filed under Book Reviews, Poem of the Week

Tagged as , , , ,

May 3, 2013 · 3:48 pm

Poem of the Week: Hope by Czeslaw Milosz

 

Hope is with you when you believe
the earth is not a dream but living flesh,
that sight, touch, and hearing do not lie,
that all things you have ever seen here
are like a garden looked at from a gate.

 

You cannot enter. But you’re sure it’s there.
Could we but look more clearly and wisely
we might discover somewhere in the garden
a strange new flower and an unnamed star.

 

Some people say we should not trust our eyes,
that there is nothing, just a seeming.
These are the ones who have no hope.
They think that the moment we turn away,
the world, behind our backs, ceases to exist,
as if snatched up by the hands of thieves.

 

 

 

A big thanks to Alison McGhee for her generous curation of these beautiful poems.

For more information on Mr. Milosz, please click here.

 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?fref=ts

 

Twitter: @alisonmcghee

 

Leave a comment

Filed under Poem of the Week

Tagged as , , ,

April 22, 2013 · 1:28 am

Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote – Book Review

There is something wistful about this novel. It makes me feel like Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s  is a place I’ve been to before. It reminds me of a time in life when parties happened at all hours, when people came and went,  where the normal rules of life were thrown out the window and where intense relationships happen and then quickly disappear leaving that mysterious  footprint of “whatever happened to…?”,  knowing that that person irrevocably changed the DNA of your own life, making it seem much grayer, so much less, without them.

That is the feeling I got when I read Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Of course, Audrey Hepburn brought Holly Golightly to life in a light, glamourous insouciant version that the world fell in love with. The real Holly, Truman Capote’s Holly, is  in fact much darker, a much more layered person. When she and her brother are orphaned at a young age and she marries at 14 she runs away from this life and the person she is. She is a young,  beautiful girl who reinvents herself as a highly sought after social escort who lives life as if each moment were a holiday. Holiday Golightly – Traveling is what’s written on her business cards.

The story is told from the point of view of “Fred”, a struggling young writer, who gets to know Holly when she moves into an apartment in his old brownstone in New York during the second world war. He first meets her when she appears on his fire escape but long before that,  he heard the music, the parties and the voices of an endless stream of middle-aged men who came and went from her flat.

Over the course of the year and half that he knows her, Fred, a name that she gives him because he reminds her of her brother, is pulled into the slipstream of Holly Golightly, who entertains Hollywood directors, wealthy gentleman she dines with nightly and who dreams of marrying rich. Her solace, when she seeks it, is at Tiffany’s which offers an almost realized form of the life she longs for.

Her invented self is so large that the distance between it and reality is far enough that you fear that she’ll never find that centre that everyone needs to understand where they belong. “It could go on forever.” she says “Not knowing what’s yours until you’ve  thrown it away.” There are only a few moments in the book where the rawness and vulnerability of her true self is momentarily revealed and it grabs your heart in the same way as when you see a wounded animal.

I had wanted to read this because I have recently seen “Capote” and I became intrigued with Truman Capote, the man who had written In Cold Blood, a genre breaking book of the 60’s. In spite of the outward lightness of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Capote ably traverses the darker shades of the human experience and I quite liked it.

5 Comments

Filed under Book Reviews

Tagged as , , , ,

April 13, 2013 · 6:15 pm

Poem of the Week: Wedding Cake by Naomi Shihab Nye

 

Once on a plane
a woman asked me to hold her baby
and disappeared.
I figured it was safe,
our being on a plane and all.
How far could she go?
She returned one hour later,
having changed her clothes
and washed her hair.
I didn’t recognize her.
By this time the baby
and I had examined
each other’s necks.
We had cried a little.
I had a silver bracelet
and a watch.
Gold studs glittered
in the baby’s ears.
She wore a tiny white dress
leafed with layers
like a wedding cake.
I did not want
to give her back.
The baby’s curls coiled tightly
against her scalp,
another alphabet.
I read new new new.
My mother gets tired.
I’ll chew your hand.
The baby left my skirt crumpled,
my lap aching.
Now I’m her secret guardian,
the little nub of dream
that rises slightly
but won’t come clear.
As she grows,
as she feels ill at ease,
I’ll bob my knee.
What will she forget?
Whom will she marry?
He’d better check with me.
I’ll say once she flew
dressed like a cake
between two doilies of cloud.
She could slip the card into a pocket,
pull it out.
Already she knew the small finger
was funnier than the whole arm.

 

 

A big thanks to Alison McGhee for generously curating these beautiful poems.

 

For more information on Naomi Shihab Nye, please click here:http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/174
–
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

 

2 Comments

Filed under Poem of the Week

Tagged as , , , ,

April 12, 2013 · 12:01 am

Ding a Dong Doo Where Are You? Michelle Sauve and Bill Lyons

DADD_website_mockup2_image_copyI have a childhood friend called Michelle Sauve. Her mother was best friends with my mother. Our moms lived in Holland together and somehow ended up living about 10 km from each other in Canada for the rest of their lives. I got to know Michelle a bit better when my mom got sick because both she and her mom were very supportive of her and our family during that time. Over the course of the next few years Michelle and I swapped emails, shared stories and talked about our grief at losing our much loved parents. One of life’s great surprises is when she told me she had always wanted to be a children’s illustrator. Anyways, she had met a gentleman in the care home where she worked and they devised an excellent plan to collaborate together on this story. And here it is. Proceeds from the sale of the book go to Multiple Sclerosis and Alzheimers Societies. It’s great to see dreams come true,

Check out Ding a Dong Doo Where Are You?

seniors home.

Leave a comment

Filed under Book Reviews, Random Musing

Tagged as , , ,

March 31, 2013 · 3:48 pm

Poem of the Week, by Mary Oliver (via Alison McGhee)

 

Excerpt from Work
4.

All day I have been pining for the past.
That’s when the big dog, Luke, breathed at my side.
Then she dashed away then she returned
in and out of the swales, in and out of the creeks,
her dark eyes snapping.
Then she broke, slowly,
in the rising arc of a fever.

And now she’s nothing
except for mornings when I take a handful of words
and throw them into the air
so that she dashes up again out of the darkness,

like this–
this is the world.

For more information on Mary Oliver, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/mary-oliver

Leave a comment

Filed under Poem of the Week

Tagged as , ,

March 29, 2013 · 8:17 pm

The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides (a book review sort of)

When I was away in Europe these past three weeks, I read The Virgin Suicides, the only book I probably could have managed to read other than “How to Learn Italian Real Fast”.  I had seen the movie a number of years ago and liked it but reading the book reminded me how much more of  a book reader I am, than a movie lover. Don’t get me wrong. I love movies but because I am more a word person than an image person, I have a deeper love and excitement when I read great books. Reading the book after seeing the movie made me realize that movies can do justice in so many ways, but by necessity they have to leave out so many of the words. And when I read The Virgin Suicides on this trip I was reminded of this.

The opening paragraph let’s us know immediately what will transpire in the book:

“On the morning the last Lisbon daughter too her turn at suicide – it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese – the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.”

And from here Jeffrey Eugenides takes the reader on a walk down memory lane to an American family suburb of the 70s where middle-age men who had once loved and known the 5 Lisbon girls in their youth, tell the story of their undoing through the lens of memory and interviews.

The book reminded me of Laurie and Ian, two students I knew in high school. I didn’t  know them well but I knew Laurie well enough that when she came to our grad dinner and told me about her troubles at  home because her parents were divorcing, I offered that she stay at my house because my mother had gone to Europe for the summer. She said she would take my number and let me know. A week or so later a friend of Laurie’s called to say that she and Ian had commit suicide. A double suicide. In her parents garage.

Like the Lisbon girls, in this weirdly beautiful, tragic tale, nobody could quite figure out why Laurie and Ian did it. But in this book you can piece together a family, a neighbourhood, a time, and pieces of the girls lives through people who knew them, but you never really get to know the girls themselves.

That great mystery of death, made even stranger when death is chosen, only leaves you with this strange memory. Snapshots of conversations transport you as memory serves, to  a another time, that inexplicably still feels like right next door, so familiar, so still right now. I thought it was a beautiful way to tell the story.

4 Comments

Filed under Book Reviews

Tagged as , , , , , ,

February 1, 2013 · 3:15 am

Poem of the Week: Viola D’Amore by Moya Cannon (via Alison McGhee)

 

Sometimes, love does die,
but sometimes, a stream on porous rock,
it slips down into the inner dark of a hill,
joins with other hidden streams
to travel blind as the white fish that live in it.
It forsakes one underground streambed
for the cave that runs under it.
Unseen, it informs the hill
and, like the hidden streams of the viola d’amore,
makes the hill reverberate,
so that people who wander there
wonder why the hill sings,
wonder why they find wells.

For more information on Moya Cannon, please click here: http://www.californiapoetics.org/interviews/3818/an-interview-with-moya-cannon
–
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

Thanks to Alison for her generous curation of these beautiful poems.

Leave a comment

Filed under Poem of the Week

Tagged as , , ,

January 20, 2013 · 4:39 pm

Poem of the Week: Dark Charms by Dorianne Laux via Alison McGhee

Eventually the future shows up everywhere:
those burly summers and unslept nights in deep
lines and dark splotches, thinning skin.
Here’s the corner store grown to a condo,
the bike reduced to one spinning wheel,
the ghost of a dog that used to be, her trail
no longer trodden, just a dip in the weeds.
The clear water we drank as thirsty children
still runs through our veins. Stars we saw then
we still see now, only fewer, dimmer, less often.
The old tunes play and continue to move us
in spite of our learning, the wraith of romance,
lost innocence, literature, the death of the poets.
We continue to speak, if only in whispers,
to something inside us that longs to be named.
We name it the past and drag it behind us,
bag like a lung filled with shadow and song,
dreams of running, the keys to lost names.

A big thanks to Alison McGhee for curating these beautiful poems.

For more information on Dorianne Laux, please click here: http://doriannelaux.com/

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

Leave a comment

Filed under Poem of the Week

Tagged as , , ,

January 5, 2013 · 5:53 pm

A Visit From the Goon Squad – by Jennifer Egan (book commentary)

A Visit From the Goon SquadA Visit From the Goon Squad reminds me of abstract art. You don’t get it at first and then finally when you think you’re starting to get it you realize you probably have to read the whole book again just so you could pull apart it’s narrative structure – nevermind character development, plot and what it does to your heart.

The book essentially follows the lives of Bennie and Sasha. Bennie was a once famous music producer and Sasha is his assistant. The backdrop is  the music industry which spans Bennie’s early punk days in California as a teenager to him as a sixty year old man struggling against the changes in a collapsing and every changing industry. Sasha is his longtime troubled kleptomaniac assistant.

How we get to the story of these two characters and sometimes broken lives is told by telling the stories of select other people who’s lives intersect with Bennie and Sasha. Does that make sense? There is no continuous narrative arc which truthfully I found a little strange at first because I just wanted the goods on Bennie and Sasha and each chapter seemed to be about someone else – but then slowly the tableau becomes apparent and you can see the trajectory of two lives lost and then found again (or not but that’s just life) including those of the people around them.

When I think about it – the structure Egan creates is a closer approximation to life in some ways. For example, I have my own life story (which appears as random memories to me and only as a narrative with select details if I or someone else chooses to tell it) and the people who know me have their stories about me including the life changing intersections we all share with each other. That’s how this book works I think.

In the end you have your ‘ah hah’ moment when all the disparate dots come together. Also, Egan frequently drops bread crumbs along the way by unexpectedly telling the reader what happens to a character 20 to 30 years down the road and there’s something very satisfying in that.

Two things that stand out in my mind are this. There is a line in the book when one of the secondary characters recognizes that a single moment in her life has transitioned her from childhood/teenage years to adulthood and that was worth the cost of the book itself. That was a beautiful and difficult moment that I have been left pondering since. What is the single moment that takes a person from one being one thing to another? That transitions you from one life to another, from being one kind of person to another?

Item two relates to what I have just written –  I think that many of the characters in this book are forced away or travel away from their innocence Jocelyn/Sasha/Rob/Drew/Bennie/Rebecca/Lou/S – they travel away from potential, possibility, happiness, neat happy endings . Then  over the course of the years you witness those  small but momentous decisions or life experiences that bring the characters to that next place in their lives. Of course, real life works this way too. It was an interesting book.

1 Comment

Filed under Book Reviews

Tagged as , , , , ,