TSS/Sunday Book Coveting: Poetry Books

It has been a while I did a Sunday book coveting post. Here are a few poetry books I covet. If you know any contemporary poet and like to recommend his/her book, I welcome it. Anyone offering me to review their poetry books, are also welcome.

1) Incivilities by Barbara Claire Freeman

From author's website:

In her first collection, Barbara Claire Freeman links lyric subjectivity to an exploration of crucial moments in U.S. history. There are meditations on the Declaration of Independence, institution of slavery, Gold Rush, Lewis and Clark Expedition, Civil War, Great Depression, terrorist attacks of 9/11, as well as on our contemporary economic and cultural lives. These formally inventive poems braid the personal and the political. They offer no compromise, no synthesis, but they do offer hope as they invite critical reflection of "authorized history" and trace the efforts of historical subjects to make and remake their lives. Incivilities is committed to the past and to the present, envisioning a poetry that might function both as a ritualistic act of imagining and as a talisman against forgetting.

2) Toxic Flora by Kimiko Hahn

Publishers Weekly

These sharp, gut-punching lyrics quote from and/or borrow the diction of science writing in order to investigate more personal issues, including the traumas of girlhood, adolescence, and family in general, as well as the intricacies of love…. In what may be Hahn's best book to date.


3) Seedlip and Sweet Apple: Poems by by Arra Lynn Ross

Product Description

Broadly and inclusively spiritual, this remarkable debut captures the ineffable experience of ecstatic vision, activating the progression from literal reality to heightened perception. Simultaneously, this journey delves into the manifold issues of gender and religion, public image, and charismatic leadership, as well as the line between cult and commune and the tenuous bond between faith and behavior. Written in an impressive cornucopia of forms — including iambic quatrains, free verse, and prose poems — Seedlip and Sweet Apple honors a complex figure startlingly relevant to contemporary life, pointing to a revolutionary way to work at living — and to live in working — that promises simplicity, peace, and joy.

Sunday Book Coveting/The Sunday Salon

It has been a long time I did a book coveting post. I thought why not do one for today's Sunday Salon post?

Book coveting is another way of adding on to our wish lists. I keep adding to my wish list from book bloggers recommendations. Yet, we need to look around. I am usually trying to find good contemporary poets. Not very easy to find. Crime fiction follows a close second. Here I go, coveting one of each:

New Collected Poems by Eavan Boland

If Yeats and Sylvia Plath had a love child, she would be Eavan Boland. Often hailed as a foremost contemporary Irish poet, she is a major world poet, as this rich collection of more than 40 years’ work attests. Like Yeats, in whose shadow all Irish poets mature, she employs a sonorous yet earthy English, often in traditional forms and heavy iambics, though more recently in free verse. Like Yeats, too, she writes of myth as well as her life, bonding ancient and modern, archetype and autobiography. Like Plath, from her earliest poems, she has made women’s lives her primary subject. Unlike Plath, she has a sturdy marriage—the subject of some of her most moving recent work. (In the eloquent “Against Love Poetry,” Boland describes a marriage that can’t be contained in tradition: “Love poetry cannot do justice to this . . . I did not find my womanhood in the servitude of custom” but in “the contradictions of a daily love.”) This book includes examples of Boland’s early, formalistic work and all of nine later volumes. Having the early, deeply Irish “War Horse” and “Famine Road” between the same covers with the resonant “Journey,” which visits the Hades of a woman’s life before modern medicine, makes this book invaluable.

The Lost Child by John Hart

Thirteen year-old Johnny Merrimon had the perfect life: a warm home and loving parents; a twin sister, Alyssa, with whom he shared an irreplaceable bond. He knew nothing of loss, until the day Alyssa vanished from the side of a lonely street. Now, a year later, Johnny finds himself isolated and alone, failed by the people he’d been taught since birth to trust. No one else believes that Alyssa is still alive, but Johnny is certain that she is---confident in a way that he can never fully explain.

Determined to find his sister, Johnny risks everything to explore the dark side of his hometown. It is a desperate, terrifying search, but Johnny is not as alone as he might think. Detective Clyde Hunt has never stopped looking for Alyssa either, and he has a soft spot for Johnny. He watches over the boy and tries to keep him safe, but when Johnny uncovers a dangerous lead and vows to follow it, Hunt has no choice but to intervene.

Then a second child goes missing . . .

TSS: Sunday Book Coveting----Poetry book

POEMS 1959-2009 by Frederick Seidel

Quoting from The New York Times:

"Frederick Seidel has spent the last half-century being that darkest and strangest sort of poet. He is, it’s widely agreed, one of poetry’s few truly scary characters. This is a reputation of which he’s plainly aware and by which he’s obviously amused, at least to judge from the nervy title of his 2006 book, “Ooga-Booga.” This perception also colors the praise his collections typically receive — to pick one example from many, Calvin Bedient admiringly describes him as “the most frightening American poet ever,” which is a bit like calling someone “history’s most bloodthirsty clockmaker.” What is it about Seidel that bothers and excites everyone so much?

The simplest answer is that he’s an exhilarating and unsettling writer who is very good at saying things that can seem rather bad. When a Seidel poem begins, “The most beautiful power in the world has buttocks,” it’s hard to know whether to applaud or shake your head.

Here is “That Fall”:

The body on the bed is made of china,
Shiny china vagina and pubic hair.
The glassy smoothness of a woman’s body!
I stand outside the open door and stare.

I watch the shark glide by . . . it comes and goes —
Must constantly keep moving or it will drown.
The mouth slit in the formless fetal nose
Gives it that empty look — it looks unborn;

It comes into the room up to the bed
Just like a dog. The smell of burning leaves,
Rose bittersweetness rising from the red,
Is what I see. I must be twelve. That fall.

It seems inadequate to call this a poem of adolescent male sexual desire, although that’s exactly what it is."

TSS: Sunday Book Coveting

The first three books are taken from http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/books+tone/reviews

The Spare Room by Helen Garner

Writer Helen has a spare room, and her old friend, bohemian single woman Nicola, has cancer and comes to stay to undergo treatment at a deeply suspect alternative healing centre. But there is nothing simple about what follows. For Helen could not have predicted how difficult she finds the three weeks as Nicola's full-time carer, "afraid of her weakness, afraid of her will", overwhelmed by anger at Nicola's belief in her quack doctors and complete denial that "death is at the end of this". It is a complex examination of the limits of friendship and of the problems of remaining a single woman into middle age. For Nicola "had taught herself to live alone", and now, dying, has no one to turn to but old acquaintances. This is a superbly clever novel, in which death looms large, while the narrative and the narrator exist in a vital present: cancer is a fact of life, not an ending.

The Gift of Joy by Ian Whates

Whates's first collection gathers 18 tales spanning the genres from fantasy to soft science fiction, ghost story to space opera. The variety is only one of the pleasures on offer; others are the fully rounded, if not always likable, characters, and Whates's knack for taking stories in unexpected directions. A good example is "The Gift of Joy", which starts quietly enough with a conventional client-prostitute pick-up scenario, but rapidly becomes something more alarming. In "One Night in London", Kyle is a cyber-augmented courier faced with a stark choice that might alter Britain's political destiny, and what could have been mere action-noir becomes an effective study of character. This may not be cutting-edge SF, but it is satisfying, well observed and entertaining.

Pandora in the Congo by Albert Sanchez Pinol

Albert Sánchez Piñol's second novel sees him take the traditional Victorian adventure story, in this case a Jules Verne-esque romp, and interpret it through the prism of post-colonialism. The book begins in light-hearted vein as the narrator, Thomas Thomson, finds himself becoming a junior ghostwriter for a pulp storyteller, but soon moves into more disturbing territory when Thomson is approached to write the tale of Marcus Garvey, a young servant compelled to go on a dangerous journey into the Congo. Free of the sometimes stilted quality that dogs translated novels, this is simultaneously a gripping yarn and a genre-bending re-examination of the fiction of a bygone age.

The next two from http://www.nytimes.com/pages/books/index.html

Sag Harbour by Colson Whitehead

“Sag Harbor,” is a coming-of-age story about the Colsonesque 15-year-old Benji, who wishes people would just call him Ben. He’s a Smiths-loving, Brooks Brothers-wearing son of moneyed blacks who summer in Long Island and recognize the characters on “The Cosby Show” as kindred spirits. “According to the world we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses. A paradox to the outside, but it never occurred to us that there was anything strange about it. It was simply who we were,” Whitehead writes. “What you call paradox, I call myself.” For Benji’s family, confident of progress, the black national anthem is “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now.”

Endpoint and Other Poems by John Updike

“Endpoint: And Other Poems,” consists entirely of poems Updike wrote in the last years of his life. It is a serious book indeed. The subject is his approaching death, and it turns out that he started treating it as a special poetic subject several years back. The “Endpoint” poems, written at the rate of roughly one a year since 2002, deal with no other theme, and the “Other” poems are plainly collected and grouped so as to reinforce the same theme from all directions, especially the direction of the past.

The lawn’s begun to green. Beyond the Bay —
where I have watched, these twenty years, dim ships
ply the horizon, feeding oil to Boston,
and blinking lights descend, night after night,
to land unseen at Logan — low land implies
a sprawl of other lives, beneath torn clouds.

In his early verse, Updike could be boastful about his sexual prowess. Here, at the 11th hour, he is more regretful about his overmastering, though obviously masterful, early lust.

I drank up women’s tears and spat them out
as 10-point Janson, Roman and ital.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Poetry books are so hard to find. Can someone direct me to some poetry book review sites?

Sunday Book Coveting

Last Sunday I was busy reading for the read-a-thon. (I am yet to post the reviews and have not read anything other than random poetry the whole of the week). This Sunday I am back at the Sunday Book Coveting post. The following books are coveted after reading about them in the New York Times online.

1) LAISH By Aharon Appelfeld:

Aharon Appelfeld’s latest novel, “Laish,” is a story of pilgrimage, then, and, as in all pilgrimages, what matters most is reaching the goal, sustaining faith through the travails of the journey. The stopping ­places, the pauses, the tests of faith, the perils to be overcome, count for very little, so long as they are survived; they are merely stages on the road to salvation.

2) WHAT GOES ON : Selected and New Poems, 1995-2009 By Stephen Dunn.
A typical Dunn poem opens up a basic human trouble — a body souring with age, a marriage souring with regret, a believer souring with doubt — meditates on it with equal parts seriousness and good humor, and finally offers not quite consolation but acceptance, a sense of having gained some measure of dignity simply by looking life in the eye.

3) SESTETS By Charles Wright.

Wright’s poems don’t bear down toward conclusions, they expand and evanesce as if in a valiant, impossible effort to comprehend and demonstrate Wittgenstein’s dictum that “the world is all that is the case.” Wright’s new collection of short poems is less a book unto itself than the next installment in a continuous poem he’s been writing for 40-odd years.

4) THE POSSESSION OF MR. CAVE By Matt Haig

In “The Possession of Mr. Cave,” Matt Haig takes on the unspeakable terrors. In fact he stacks the deck with them: the narrator’s mother dead by suicide, his wife dead at the hands of a burglar and — in the chilling, riveting, heartbreaking scene that opens the novel — his son, Reuben, dead by a stupid attempt to curry favor with bullying peers. What’s left? And how to find a reason to continue living in the face of grief? These are the initial questions that face Terence Cave, a man who restores antiques but cannot preserve the well-being of those he loves most.

What’s left, it turns out, is Reuben’s 15-year-old twin sister, Bryony. So Terence, fearful and bereft, dedicates himself to his daughter’s well-being. Yet the question of what constitutes a 15-year-old’s well-being and what a father’s protection entails, or should entail, is at the heart of this complex novel.

5) HOW IT ENDED, New and Collected Stories By Jay McInerney

“How It Ended: New and Collected Stories” assembles much of the short fiction Jay McInerney has written over the course of a career now approaching three decades’ duration. The better part of “Model Behavior: A Novel and Stories” is included, along with the story that grew into his Salinger­ian first novel, “Bright Lights, Big City,” as well as “Smoke,” which introduced Russell and Corrine Calloway, the Manhattan couple-with-­everything whose marital vicissitudes animate McInerney’s two most ambitious novels, “Brightness Falls” and its sequel, “The Good Life.” Short stories “often turned out to be warm-up exercises,” McInerney confides in a preface. “There’s psychological as well as practical value in using one as a sketch for a novel; the idea of undertaking a narrative of three or four hundred pages, which might consume years of your life, is pretty daunting.”

Sunday Book Coveting

This poetry book is the only one book, I covet on this sunday. I checked and nothing else interested me in the New York Times.

SLAMMING OPEN THE DOOR by Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno

From Amazon:

Of all the losses we may be asked to bear, the murder of one’s child must be the most terrible. These poems evoke that keenly, seeking justice but transcending judgment as they grieve loss, celebrate love, and find healing.

From "True Confessions":

Don't pity me:
I was too lazy to walk
up the stairs
to tuck her in at night. When I brushed her hair
I pulled hard
on purpose. And always
the sharp,
plaintive edge
on the rim
of the spoon
of my giving...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/books/review/Kirby-t.html

Sunday Book Coveting

Thanks to Guardian, I covet the following books this Sunday. Posted the snippets from the same source.

What I talk about when I talk about running by Haruki Murakami

When Haruki Murakami starts to talk about running, he could end up talking about almost anything: girls' ponytails, Rolling Stones albums, the clouds in Hawaii; all the novelist's quirks are here in compact form. But mostly this memoir is simply about running itself - Murakami completes at least one marathon every year - and about writing. "Most of what I know about writing fiction," he says, "I learned by running every day." True to form, the book's physique and pace are a long-distance runner's, light and whippety, seldom slowing to anything less than a breezy, pop-existentialist jog: "On cold days, I think about how cold it is. And about heat on the hot days ... but really, I don't think much of anything worth mentioning."

Human Love by Andrei Makine

In a prison hut on the Angola-Zaire border lies a man, almost a corpse. It's the beginning of Angola's long civil war and this is Elias Almeida, Angolan orphan and Soviet agent. Human Love is his story: a tale of hopes and betrayals in a region of Africa torn apart by competing cold war ideologies. It's also a love story, in which the human - and humane - love of the title struggles to overcome the crushing revolutionary zeal of impersonal powers. Makine's writing plays on striking images and uncomfortable contrasts. Africa here is a vast elephant, carved up by hunters; fat African conference delegates represent starving people. Lauded in France, Makine ought to be far better known in this country: Human Love offers a dark, delicate introduction to his work.

The Stepmother's Diary by Fay Weldon

Weldon's 28th novel is a humorous dissection of female relations and the perils of adopting a new family in a second marriage. Sappho is married to Gavin, who enjoys a suspiciously over-intimate relationship with his daughter Isobel. To make this female competition all the more stifling, above the marital bed hangs a portrait of Gavin's late wife Isolde. Watching over this Freudian labyrinth is Sappho's mother Emily, a "widowed, sexually active psychoanalyst" to whom Sappho has entrusted her diary to keep it from Isobel. These days, Weldon suggests, it's not the wicked stepmothers you have to watch out for, it's the evil stepdaughters, who "change from little darlings into Winehouse monsters almost overnight".

Sunday Book Coveting

The Cradle by Patrick Somerville

Early one summer morning, Matthew Bishop kisses his still-sleeping wife Marissa, gets dressed and eases his truck through Milwaukee, bound for the highway. His wife, pregnant with their first child, has asked him to find the antique cradle taken years before by her mother Caroline when she abandoned Marissa, never to contact her daughter again. Soon to be a mother herself, Marissa now dreams of nothing else but bringing her baby home to the cradle she herself slept in. His wife does not know-does not want to know-where her mother lives, but Matt has an address for Caroline's sister near by and with any luck, he will be home in time for dinner.

Only as Matt tries to track down his wife's mother, he discovers that Caroline, upon leaving Marissa, has led a life increasingly plagued by impulse and irrationality, a mysterious life that grows more inexplicable with each new lead Matt gains, and door he enters. As hours turn into days and Caroline's trail takes Matt from Wisconsin to Minnesota, Illinois, and beyond in search of the cradle, Matt makes a discovery that will forever change Marissa's life, and faces a decision that will challenge everything he has ever known.

Book of Clouds by Chloe Aridjis

Tatiana, the narrator, is one of five children whose parents run a Jewish deli in Mexico City. For several years now, this woman in her 20s has been living in Berlin, having minimal contact with her family, getting by on low-paying jobs and seeing almost no one. Her Sundays are a wasteland of loneliness during which she takes long walks through the city; her weekdays, when she is not freezing in her unheated apartment, are spent transcribing the never-to-be-published notes of an elderly German-Jewish historian.


Both these books are coveted courtesy of the http://www.nytimes.com/pages/books/index.html

Sunday Book Coveting

“Books are a narcotic” Franz Kafka

The Vagrants by Yiyun Li

During the Cultural Revolution countless unspeakable acts went down in the otherwise unremarkable industrial town of Muddy River. Lovers betrayed lovers, children denounced their parents, and neighbors became sworn enemies. A few years later, the townspeople have convened at the public stadium to witness the execution of Gu Shan. A Red Guard leader in her youth, she has received the death penalty for her counterrevolutionary writings and unrepentant attitude. In Yiyun Li's startling debut novel, The Vagrants, we are introduced to Gu's parents, neighbors, and a handful of Muddy River's social outcasts whose lives have been irrevocably affected by her life and death. Yiyun Li's unblinking and unpredictable fictional narrative demonstrates how corruption and cruelty, fear, and moral ambiguity at the level of the individual reflect the dehumanization of an entire society.


Pictures at an Exhibition By Sara Houghteling

Set in a Paris darkened by World War II, Sara Houghteling's sweeping and sensuous debut novel tells the story of a son's quest to recover his family's lost masterpieces, looted by the Nazis during the occupation.




Dream House by Valerie Laken

It is a riveting debut novel that tells the story of a domestic drama that will forever change the lives of two families. One terrible night. One outraged act. What price will people pay to hold their homes and dreams together?

Beautiful Children by Charles Bock

A wide-ranging portrait of an almost mythically depraved Las Vegas, this sweeping debut takes in everything from the bland misery of suburban Nevada to the exploitative Vegas sex industry. At the nexus of this Dickensian universe is Newell Ewing, a hyperactive 12-year-old boy with a comic-book obsession. One Saturday night, Newell disappears after going out with his socially awkward, considerably older friend. Orbiting around that central mystery are a web of sufferers: Newell's distraught parents, clinging onto a fraught but tender marriage; a growth-stunted comic book illustrator; a stripper who sacrifices bodily integrity for success; and a gang of street kids. Into their varying Vegas tableaux, Bock stuffs an overwhelming amount of evocative detail and brutally revealing dialogue.

Passing Strange by Martha A Sandweiss

Clarence King is a hero of nineteenth century western history; a brilliant scientist and witty conversationalist, best-selling author and architect of the great surveys that mapped the West after the Civil War. Secretary of State John Hay named King “the best and brightest of his generation.” But King hid a secret from his Gilded Age cohorts and prominent family in Newport: for thirteen years he lived a double life—as the celebrated white explorer, geologist and writer Clarence King and as a black Pullman porter and steel worker named James Todd. The fair blue-eyed son of a wealthy China trader passed across the color line, revealing his secret to his black common- law wife, Ada Copeland, only on his deathbed.

All these books are coveted courtesy of the http://www.nytimes.com/pages/books/index.html

Sunday Book Coveting

Most of us know Dewey doing those book coveting posts. Today I thought I too will will do it, although I might not be as regular as she was. This week I will take up books I found interesting and added to my TBR list from The New York Times, where I read the reviews online on a regular basis.

EVERY MAN DIES ALONE by Hans Fallada

This novel takes place in wartime Berlin. Early in 1941, half a year after the French capitulation to Germany, a Gestapo inspector named Escherich stands in his office on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, contemplating a map of the city into which he has stuck 44 red-flagged pins. Each marks a spot where a different inflammatory postcard has been found — “Hetzkarten” that denounce Hitler, hand-written in heavy, clumsy print. The first card reads: “Mother! The Führer has murdered my son. Mother! The Führer will murder your sons too, he will not stop till he has brought sorrow to every home in the world.”

THE BOOK OF NIGHT WOMEN by Marlon James

At the center of “The Book of Night Women” is a black-skinned, green-eyed slave woman, barely out of childhood, who struggles to transcend the violence into which she is born, a violence that begins with her first breath as a “baby wash in crimson and squealing like it just depart heaven to come to hell.” Orphaned when her mother dies giving birth to her, Lilith more or less raises herself in the hell of the Montpelier Estate, a closed and brutal society all its own, where nothing is as it seems and nearly everyone has secrets to conceal.

HONEYMOON IN TEHRAN: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran by Azadeh Moaveni

For Moaveni, born and raised in California, Iran is both an intimate and a stranger, a familiar motherland and an alienating theocracy that requires permits for musical instruments and prohibits coed wedding receptions. Yet it isn’t only the contradictions of a child of exiles sorting out her identity crisis that makes this book worthwhile. It’s the seductive contradictions of the motherland itself.

A MAD DESIRE TO DANCE by Elie Wiesel

The protagonist, Doriel Waldman, is a Jewish New Yorker in his early 60s who believes he has gone mad. Born in Poland just before World War II, Doriel hid with his father, sister and brother while his mother, blond and the holder of a counterfeit Aryan identity card, fought for the resistance. Unlike his siblings, who were captured and killed, Doriel survived the war, as did his parents, though they died in a car crash soon after the liberation of the concentration camps. An aunt and uncle raised Doriel in America, but he demands to be called an orphan and never allows himself to be loved. “As far as I can read people’s gazes,” Doriel explains, “they see me as mad. And I’ve always felt I was. Mad about my parents first, then about God, study, truth, beauty and impossible love.”

THE HOUSEKEEPER AND THE PROFESSOR by Yoko Ogawa

“The Housekeeper and the Professor” tells of the adventures, such as they are, of the remarkable virtual family formed by the professor’s new cook and cleaner, the single mother of a 10-year-old boy whom the professor calls Root because his flat head reminds him of the mathematical sign for a square root. Nobody except Root really has a name. Every morning the housekeeper, who narrates the story, has to introduce herself and her son to the professor all over again. He, in turn, as he does whenever he is stuck or flustered or has extended his 80-minute window, is likely to ask her shoe size or her telephone number. He always has something amazing to say about whatever number comes up.