Doing the Devil’s Work

February 7, 2015February 7, 2015 ~ faulknerhousebooks ~ Leave a comment

Bill Loehfelm. Doing the Devil’s Work. Sarah Crichton Books, 2015. 26.00. Stop by Faulkner House Books or call us to purchase your copy!

Bill Loehfelm’s newest novel, Doing the Devil’s Work, the third in the Maureen Coughlin series, is both thrilling and gritty, a story you will want to devour in one sitting, but which will stay with you for days afterward. Set in post-Katrina New Orleans, the book’s sense of place is created with hyper-realist precision. From an Audubon Park mansion to a Central City sidestreet to Coughlin’s own home in the Irish Channel, Loehfelm takes the reader on a tour of the city through the eyes of a cop who has recently moved here from Staten Island. Loehfelm includes a murder outside F&M’s, an interview at the Rose Nicaud, and a late night drinking at Ms. Mae’s, among other local markers. This book never lets you forget its setting, and locals and tourists alike will enjoy this gripping journey through what might be the closest thing to the real contemporary New Orleans ever portrayed in fiction.

In this installment of the series, Maureen has finished her police training and is finally a real New Orleans cop, but she is far from out of the woods. The department, and the city, is rife with corruption. They are understaffed, publicly disliked, and overworked, and these obstacles, as well as departmental politics and unwanted attention from the federal government after the 2013 consent decree, frustrate any neat solution to the murder mystery that begins with a dead body in an abandoned Central City home. Maureen finds herself torn between her instincts and a department that encourages her to stay out of it. And as an isolated murder quickly spirals into something much bigger, Maureen struggles to toe the line of police department ethics and politics while doing all she can to solve the crime.

Maureen herself is a character worth spending time with. She is both gutsy and empathetic, and her cop instincts are what drive this plot forward. Though she is no saint, Maureen is unphased by the social hierarchies of her newly adopted city, and her integrity is near unshakeable. As she says to her colleague, “The consent decree is going to change everything. That old-boy network stuff, that who-you-knew-in-high-school shit is going out the window.” Her New York attitude reflects the very real changes happening in a city that sometimes feels as if it being forcibly dragged into the twenty-first century, for better and for worse. And as a female protagonist, Maureen’s sharp tongue and tough attitude, not to mention her competence as a police officer, are nothing short of refreshing. Both her flaws and her virtues are realistic. Loehfelm is a master of characterization. He writes dialogue that is quick and witty, and from this dialogue spring dazzlingly realized characters.

From the police department, to the characters, to the city itself, this is a book in three dimensions: sparklingly real, never romanticized, never gratuitous. Doing the Devil’s Work is a highly satisfying read. My only regret is the wait for the sequel.

Calvino’s Cosmicomics

January 23, 2015February 7, 2015 ~ faulknerhousebooks ~ Leave a comment

Italo Calvino. The Complete Cosmicomics. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014. $24.00. Call (504) 524-2940 or visit us to purchase a copy!

This beautiful new edition of Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics brings together all of the Cosmicomics for the first time in one place, including a few stories that have never before been translated into English. If you have never read these stories before, you are in for a treat: Calvino’s vision of a primordial universe as playground for his protagonist Qfwfq is transportative. We follow Qfwfq and his friends from the Big Bang through to the creation of life on earth and evolution. One of the most beautiful stories is the first, “The Distance of the Moon,” in which Qfwfq remembers when the moon passed so close to earth that he and his companions would take a boat out to the sea and climb a ladder to its surface. He tells us,

On those nights the water was very calm, so silvery it looked like mercury,

and the fish in it, violet-coloured, unable to resist the Moon’s attraction,

rose to the surface, all of them, and so did the octopuses and the saffron

medusas. There was always a flight of tiny creatures–little crabs, squid, and

even some weeds, light and filmy, and coral plants–that broke from the

sea and ended up on the Moon, hanging down from that lime-white ceiling,

or else they stayed in midair, a phosphorescent swarm we had to drive off,

waving banana leaves at them.

Calvino’s prose is where poetry and science mingle, and these stories, collected for the first time in their entirety, tell not only of the creation of the universe, but of love and loss. These tales are richly imagined, and the stunning images of the early universe as envisioned by Calvino will stay with you for a long, long time.

The 2015 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Literary Competition!

January 11, 2015January 11, 2015 ~ faulknerhousebooks ~ Leave a comment

Enter the annual Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society literary contest, the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Competition! Cash prizes from $750-$7500, as well as publication, a gold medal, and free travel and accommodation to attend the 2015 Words & Music Festival in New Orleans! Categories include novel, short story, essay, novel in progress, novella, poetry, and short story by a high schooler. Don’t miss this fantastic opportunity! Postmarked entry form deadline is May 1, 2015. Complete details here. We can’t wait to read what you have for us this year!

Andy Young’s All Night It Is Morning

January 4, 2015 ~ faulknerhousebooks ~ Leave a comment

Andy Young. All Night It Is Morning. Diálogos Books, 2014. Call (504) 524-2940 or visit us to purchase a copy!

Faulkner House Books wishes you all a happy and healthy 2015. We are beginning the New Year with a review of local poet Andy Young’s new collection from Diálogos Books, All Night It Is Morning. If you haven’t yet committed to a new year’s resolution, reading more local writers and supporting your local literary community is a great way to kick off 2015. And Young’s book is a fantastic place to start.

All Night It Is Morning is a book rich with beauty and disaster. Young, who was born in West Virginia, has spent most of her adult life in New Orleans, and lived for two years in Cairo after marrying into an Egyptian family, weaves together narratives of Katrina, the Egyptian revolution, the BP oil spill, and mining disasters in a way that feels surprisingly seamless. The poems are organized not by topic or time period, but organically, so that poems from different places and times are juxtaposed throughout the book. The reader is immersed in what becomes a single narrative of the human experience. Young’s language is precise and careful, creating a kind of restrained lushness of landscape, in which no word is superfluous.

One of my favorite poems in this collection is a three-part poem titled Cleopatra. In it, Young details Cleopatra’s pregnancy, creating a stunning narrative of a woman whose womb holds, literally, the future of Egypt. It is an apt conceit for a modern Egypt transformed by a revolutionary younger generation. Young writes, in the voice of Cleopatra,

His empire is my body now.

Sovereign, he proclaims

me ill or well.

I bow to the triumvirate

of his metu,

sinew, flesh

to the advancing armies

of his blood.

And yet, as the reader knows, Ptolemy Philadephus will not fulfill this destiny. Cleopatra and Marc Antony will commit suicide and Octavian will conquer the empire, torturing the orphaned royal children by forcing them to walk through the streets in heavy chains. Even children are not spared the horrors of war. In As You Sleep, the Dead Multiply, Young juxtaposes the casualties of war with the innocence of a new baby:

Your infant face is still

like glass as the children

of Qana are wiped of their dust.

Young does not shy away from the brutality of revolution, but neither does she deny that it is essential. In Warning, she lists the inconveniences of revolution:

the revolution is not

good for personal hygiene

not good for sleep not good

for business the revolution is not

good for bill paying…

And so on. The poem ends, “Though poetry is fine,” reminding the reader that poetry is more than a quotidian pleasure; it is essential, and becomes even more essential in times of upheaval.

Her poems about Katrina illustrate this truth as well, that poetry is sometimes the only coherent way to respond to tragedy. Her poem Lower Nine is a dirge for the Lower Ninth Ward, for the lives and homes lost in the flooding. She writes,

the moon a smudge above the wreckage

here is the peace of the grave

….

oh lady of ruins, your head crushed to dust

where are the ones you have no eyes to see

where did they go, dragging their bags

across the bridge to find ground

where do they rest if they rest if they rest

and where would they be if they returned

the canal and its ships drift on, drift on

the canal and its ships drift on

Young looks to tragedy with a panoramic vision, seeing both the egrets, “white as bone,” and the “store lifted onto a truck.” The commerce of the canal goes on even in the face of horror, of death, of loss, but poetry immortalizes that which has been washed away.

In this book, Young gives beautiful insight into what it means to love and be a part of places that are beset by environmental and human tragedy. And for her, inevitably, tragedy is bound up with a kind of triumph: the poet’s voice rises from the ashes, the community rebuilds, the lives of the dead are celebrated, the people fight for freedom, the landscape, once broken, heals. But our responsibility to work for a better world always remains. The stakes are unavoidably high: as she writes in Deepwater Horizon, the second of her Oil Sonnets series,

The earth will not die, though it

might shrug off a continent,

convert and re-form us: fossil and dross.

In this beautiful collection, Young reminds us that we do not deserve the world if we are not willing to fight for it.

Louise Glück’s Faithful and Virtuous Night

December 16, 2014December 17, 2014 ~ faulknerhousebooks ~ Leave a comment

Louise Glück. Faithful and Virtuous Night. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014. $23.00. Call (504) 524-2940 or visit us to purchase a copy!

Louise Glück’s most recent collection of poetry, A Faithful and Virtuous Night, received the 2014 National Book Award for Poetry, and what a well-deserved win it was. Glück’s most famous work comes from early collections; The Garden, one of her most anthologized poems, crystallizes much of what she is known for: her abject portrayal of nature, death, myth, and ornament. This collection is a true departure from her previous collections, continuing the evolution begun in 2009’s A Village Life, and Glück does not disappoint in her metamorphosis. Glück is an essential poet in that she never dwells on what has been successful in the past. She is always pushing her work to new places, always changing in new and stunning ways.

A Faithful and Virtuous Night is set in England, many of the poems rendered (we learn about halfway through the book) in the voice of a male painter. Many of these poems are meditations on the past: the eponymous poem, for example, outlines a birthday in the speaker’s childhood. On this day the speaker reads a book, My First Reader, about a child and a dog, and an ordinary moment becomes suffused with awe:

I turned the pages.

When I was finished

I resumed turning, so the story took on a circular shape,

like the zodiac. It made me dizzy. The yellow ball

seemed promiscuous, equally

at home in the child’s hand and the dog’s mouth—

Time in these poems is at times an illusion, at times the only constant in a shifting world. In the collection’s first poem, Parable, a group of people spends their lives arguing about how to take a journey. At the end of the poem, despite never having made physical progress, a member of the group observes

…ah, behold how we have aged, traveling

from day to night only, neither forward nor sideward, and this seemed

in a strange way miraculous.

The passing of day into night appears again and again throughout the collection, reminding the reader both of the insistence of time and of its illusory nature. Still though we may be, we move always through time.

The tone of this collection is distant, clear, even wise. This is the work of an experienced poet, a reflection on the meaning of aging as an artist. Silence is a recurring motif. In the prose poem Forbidden Music, for example, a flautist has a dream of silence:

…there came a passage that was called the forbidden music because it could not, the composer specified, be played. And still it must exist and be passed over, an interval at the discretion of the conductor. But tonight, the conductor decides, it must be played—he has a hunger to make his name. The flautist wakes with a start.

Here the greedy conductor misunderstands what this poet knows: that silence, too, is a part of art; that the purity of silence can never wholly be replaced by poetry, no matter how transcendent. These are quiet poems, and they leave ample space for reflection in the spaces between.

Though much of Glück’s previous work was concerned with endings—death, divorce—this book feels circular. As soon as I finished it, I felt I could begin reading anew from the first page. Appropriately, the title poem ends on these lines:

I think here I will leave you. It has come to seem

there is no perfect ending.

Indeed, there are infinite endings.

Or perhaps, once one begins,

there are only endings.

This is a book of questions, of contemplation. Reading these poems, time seems to slow. Ending and beginning, day and night, blur into the unified whole that is poetry. Reality becomes dream, the ordinary becomes miraculous. In both resisting and cherishing the silence that plagues always the poet, Glück perseveres in her creation, embarking on a journey that is richly rewarding for any reader.

Denise Levertov’s Uncompromising Moral Vision

December 10, 2014December 10, 2014 ~ faulknerhousebooks ~ Leave a comment

Denise Levertov, The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov. New Directions, 2013. $49.95. Call (504)-524-2940 to order or visit us in Pirate’s Alley!

Though she died in 1997, it wasn’t until last year that we were finally graced with Denise Levertov’s complete collected works. This is a beautiful volume, stunning even before it is opened to reveal the life’s work of one of 20^th century America’s most important poets. The poems’ chronological arrangement allows us to observe the evolution of Levertov’s poetic voice over a period of more than 60 years.

If you are unfamiliar with Levertov’s less known works, this is the perfect opportunity to delve into her canon. She is a poet whose entire oeuvre demands reading and rereading. Poetry was her highest truth, as she writes in the poem A Cloak, from Relearning the Alphabet:

breathing in

my life

breathing out

poems.

Levertov’s poetry is characterized by her precision: reality sparkles under her guidance, coming into sharp focus to reveal beauty that we might otherwise have overlooked. Her early collections (The Double Image, Here and Now, Overland to the Islands) are pure lyric, concerned deeply with the perennial subjects of love and death, marriage and war. An early poem, 1940’s Listening to Distant Guns, foreshadows some of her major poetic concerns:

That low pulsation in the east is war:

No bell now breaks the evening’s silent dream.

The bloodless clarity of evening’s sky

Betrays no whisper of the battle scream.

Levertov approaches her topics with a realist’s eye for the background noise. She brings the war into focus here, for example, by dwelling on the places where war seems nonexistent, the negative spaces of the horror, and she brings into chilling relief the powerlessness of human suffering to touch every part of the world.

In Here and Now, Levertov brings her uncompromising vision to New Orleans’ own Jackson Square (home of Faulkner House Books!) She writes,

Bravo! the brave sunshine.

A triangle of green green contains

the sleek and various pigeons

the starving inventors and all

who sit on benches in the morning,

to sun tenacious hopes…

She focuses on the smaller details of the place: not the looming cathedral, but the hopes of the “starving” people who try to make a living in the square. And yet the sun is still bright, the pigeons still varied; though sorrow is an inextricable part of her poetic world, it does not color all it touches. And isn’t this the most unsettling thing of all, to know that though we suffer, the sun shines on?

In With Eyes at the Back of our Heads, we see a poetic shift in which Levertov becomes more concerned with the role of the poet in her society. The book begins with a translation of a Toltec codice entitled The Artist, in which the true creator is praised. And in the poem The Charge, she writes,

Returning

to all the unsaid

all the lost living untranslated

in any sense,

and the dead

unrecognized, celebrated

only in dreams that die by morning

is a mourning or ghostwalking only.

You must make, said music…

For Levertov, it becomes increasingly important that her poetic and political lives overlap and fuse. Art is a way for her to respond productively to the political upheaval of the 60’s and 70’s.

In 1971’s To Stay Alive, Levertov writes wrenchingly of the death of her sister and the war in Vietnam. These poems are darker than her early work, and rightly so. Her “political” poems demonstrate perhaps most clearly her humanity as well as her poetic abilities. In Life at War, she writes,

We are the humans, men who can make;

whose language imagines mercy,

lovingkindness we have believed one another

mirrored forms of a God we felt as good—

who do these acts, who convince ourselves

it is necessary; these acts are done

to our own flesh; burned human flesh

is smelling in Vietnam as I write.

She resists always the dehumanization of war, forcing her reader to recognize that though the sun still shines, we cannot escape the legacy of the suffering we enact upon one another. Humans are great artists; we are also murderers, and this is the cold truth of which she reminds us.

Her later work shifts again, to what Eavan Boland calls in her introduction to the collection “a fully realized moral vision.” Many of her poems from the 80’s onward, informed by her late conversion to Christianity, survey the beauty of their world and seek its goodness. These lines from the poem Salvation, from Sands of the Well, strike me as particularly transcendent:

this unhoped-for pardon will once more permit

the stream to offer itself at last

to the lake, the lake will accept it, take it

into itself,

the stream restored will become pure lake.

Levertov’s Collected Poems is a treasure chest waiting to be searched. Her poetic vision is always clear, striking, incisive. Whether she is writing about nature or war, marriage or death, she never wavers from her commitment to artistic excellence. She brings to mind the idea of the poet as prophet, as she was surely a voice of her time.

Louise Glück’s Collected Poems

December 5, 2014March 10, 2015 ~ faulknerhousebooks ~ Leave a comment

Louise Glück, Poems 1962-2012. Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2013. $40.00. Call (504) 524-2940 to order or visit us!

If you have encountered Louise Glück’s work only through the odd anthology, or if you haven’t yet had the chance to discover her, this beautiful volume is the perfect way to delve deep into the canon of one of America’s most important contemporary poets. Robert Boyers writes in The Nation that Glück “has found ways to engage with the world as it is without capitulating to its felt demand that she renounce any alternative sense of what is real.” Glück does not create her own mythology, but rather infuses the stark reality of her lived experience with myth, paradoxically increasing the precision of the realism in these poems. In 1996’s Meadowlands, for example, Glück uses the story of the Odyssey as observed by Penelope and Telemachus to create heightened resonance in poems about her own unraveling marriage. In Penelope’s Song, she writes,

He will be home soon;

it behooves you to be

generous. You have not been completely

perfect either; with your troublesome body

you have done things you shouldn’t

discuss in poems.

Glück inhabits the anger of Penelope, who has been raped in the absence of Odysseus. She calls upon herself to “be generous,” though tragedy and unfaithfulness have driven a wedge between herself and her beloved.

For her there is no shortcut to the truth; truth itself is tangled, unclear, complicated. In “Moonless Night,” Glück writes, “Such a mistake to want / clarity above all things.” Truth is in the bleakness of Vita Nova’s Aubade, the “room with a chair, a window. / A small window, filled with the pattern the light makes.” Yet truth also reveals itself, in a later Aubade from The Seven Ages, through the “Smell of the mock orange tree / Corridors of jasmine and lilies.” Glück confronts the complexity of beauty and sorrow through a careful assortment of objects. The flowers in her poetry, like the chairs, are unadorned.

You may know her most famous poem, The Garden, from 1980’s Descending Figure, which includes the lines:

The garden admires you.

For your sake it smears itself with green pigment,

the ecstatic reds of the roses,

so that you will come to it with your lovers.

Here, as elsewhere, Glück subverts the traditionally “feminine” style of ornamentation. She is anti-Romantic: in the process of ornamentation, her garden “smears” itself. In Glück’s work, nature is no pastoral comfort. It is a set of objects, and like the chair, or the window, it is tinged with the darkness that inhabits all aspects of the human condition. As she writes in Sunrise, from 2009’s A Village Life, “maybe that’s what nothing tastes like, thyme and rosemary.” The natural world is equated with the void that seems always at the edge of these poems. Beauty is not enough for Glück. In her poetry, she seeks something deeper, something harsher. And in this collection, spanning 50 years of her career, we watch as she deftly paints a world of darkness, a world of beauty.