Faulkner Society And Louisiana State Museum To Host Multi-Author Reception

August 2, 2015November 10, 2019 ~ faulknerhousebooks ~ Leave a comment

The Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society is proud to announce that four of the Gold Medal winners selected in the William Faulkner – William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition have had their new novels published. The Society will join hands with the Louisiana State Museum to honor Frederick Barton, author of In the Wake of the Flagship; Moira Crone, author of The Ice Garden, Jennifer Steil, author of The Ambassador’s Wife, and J. Ryan Stradal, author of Kitchens of the Great Midwest.

The event will take place Sunday, August 9, 2015, from 2:30 to 4:30 p. m. at The Cabildo, the historic venue where the Louisiana Purchase was signed, located on Jackson Square.

All of their new novels are receiving exceptional reviews and are wonderful choices for your summer reading. All of the authors are interesting speakers and have had diverse and interesting careers. Each author will discuss his or her new work, read briefly from the work, and take questions from the audience. There will be opportunities to socialize before and after the program, which will start at 3:00 p. m. Their books will be available for purchase and signing. To reserve your books in advance, please call Faulkner House Books with credit card information at (504) 524-2940.

We hope you will joint us as we lift a glass to our exciting array of competition winners.
The event, which will feature complimentary refreshments, is free and open to the
public. We ask that you RSVP to faulkhouse@aol.com so that we can be prepared with food and drink.

Background on each of the authors and their work follows.

For additional information, Contact:
Rosemary James, faulkhouse@aol.com

AUTHOR BIOS

Frederick Barton won the Faulkner Society’s Gold Medal for Best Novel for his fourth novel, A House Divided, which examined the contemporary American soul with uncommon insight. Barton’s new novel, In the Wake of the Flagship, is a blistering satire chronicling one man’s battle against bureaucracy and corruption. Basketball coach Richard Janus has found himself interim rector of Urban University, a woefully underfunded public college in Choctaw, Alkansea. After Hurricane Hosea devastates the city, Janus must go to war with the unscrupulous heads of Alkansea’s flagship university, facing down massive layoffs and rabid football fans. The absurdity of the American experience is on full display here as Metacom, the legendary Indian sachem, narrates Janus’s struggle, recounting academic intrigue and hypocrisy with searing humor. Pulitzer Prize winnerRichard Ford says of the book: “Barton has a lot of important human business on his mind in this exceptional novel: race, history, the South, hurricanes, laughter, love, and much more. In the Wake of the Flagship is wonderfully inventive, and addictive to read.“ In addition to his achievements as a fiction writer, which include publication of numerous short stories, Barton is an award-winning essayist, journalist, and film critic Barton founded the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans where he served as Director for many years. He continues to teach in the program and lives in New Orleans, LA.

Moira Crone, who is winner of the Faulkner Society’s Gold Medals for both Novella and Short Story, has published three novels and three books of stories, including What Gets Into Us. Her work appears in Oxford American,Triquarterly, Habitus, and New Orleans Review. Her stories have been selected forNew Stories From The South, five times. In 2009 she received the Robert Penn Warren Award for Fiction from the Southern Fellowship of Writers for her body of work. Moira Crone is a fable maker with a musical ear, a plentitude of nerve, and an epic heart for her beleaguered, if often witty, characters. Her previous novel, The Not Yet, is a foray into the not too distant future and what the social structure of New Orleans might easily become, as well as a warning of what lies ahead for New Orleans if the issues, of global warming, rising sea levels, and coastal erosion are not addressed head-on now. It was published in 2012 by Lavender Ink. Her new novel, The Ice Garden, was first a novella by the same name. It was this work which captured the Society’s Gold Medal for Best Novella. Ms. Crone later expanded it to novel length and it was released by Carolina Wren Press recently. Among the creators and also long time director of the MFA program at LSU, Ms. Crone, also an accomplished painter, lives in New Orleans with her husband, bestselling poet and non-fiction writer Rodger Kamenetz.

Jennifer Steil, an award-winning American writer, journalist, and actor was first runner-up for the Faulkner Society’s Gold Medal for Best Novel in Progress in 2012 for her work Chiaroscuro and then won the Gold Medal for the Best Novel in 2013 for the completed work, which has just been published by Doubleday under the new title, The Ambassador’s Wife. A harrowing story from a real-life diplomat’s wife of the kidnapping of the wife of an ambassador in an Arab country. Ms. Steil also is author of The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, An American Woman’s Adventures in the Oldest City on Earth. Published by Broadway Books/Random House), it is a memoir of her experiences as editor of the Yemen Observer newspaper in Sana’a. The book received accolades in The New York Times, Newsweek, and the Sydney Morning Herald. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune chose it as one of their best travel books of 2010, and Elle magazine awarded it their Readers’ Prize. It has been published in the US, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Turkey, and Poland. Theatre was her first love. She has a bachelor’s degree in theatre from Oberlin College and worked for four years as a professional actor in Seattle, becoming increasingly frustrated with the limited roles available to women and the dearth of female voices in the theatre world at large. She began dedicating more time to her writing, eventually completing an MFA in fiction at Sarah Lawrence College and a second master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Since 1997, she has worked as a reporter, writer, and editor for newspapers and magazines in the U.S. and abroad. Recent work includes a long piece on Yemen in the World Policy Journal, a Yemen piece for the German paper Die Welt, and several London stories for the Washington Times. After spending four years in Yemen and two years in London, she has relocated to La Paz, Bolivia, where she is lives with her husband, a diplomat, and young daughter.

J. Ryan Stradal won the 2014 Gold Medal for Best Novel for his highly entertaining debut novel, Kitchens of the Great Midwest. The story is about a definitive Midwestern dinner, with each chapter telling the stories behind the ingredients—and the folks that hunted, grew, gathered, or stole them—as they find their way to a once-in-a-lifetime five-course meal. Similar to Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge in structure, every chapter, including the final dinner itself, is tied together by the rise to infamy of a young chef named Margaret Thorvald. The orphaned daughter of a Swedish cook and a sommelier, Margaret becomes the mysterious chef behind the most exclusive pop-up supper club in the world, an object of romantic affection, and an elusive celebrity that one character spends nearly a decade trying to meet.

The novel was acquired last year, put on the fast track, and has just been released by Viking. Stradal’s writing has appeared in Hobart, The Rattling Wall, The Rumpus, Joyland, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other places. He’s the editor of the 2014 California Prose Directory anthology, associate editor atTrop Magazine, and co-fiction editor at The Nervous Breakdown. A native of Minnesota, he’s lived in Los Angeles for 16 years, but still misses “pine trees, freshwater fish, shamelessly heavy food, and Midwesterners, the nicest people in the world.”

Hannah Sanghee-Park’s The Same-Different

July 27, 2015 ~ faulknerhousebooks ~ Leave a comment

The Same-Different. Hannah Sanghee Park. LSU Press, 2015. 16.00.

The first full length collection by poet Hannah Sanghee-Park, winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, is a book that forces the reader toward truth through language. Park pushes at linguistic boundaries in order to wring fresh meaning out of her words. In the first section, “The Same-Different,” the poems are built almost entirely on wordplay. For example, “And A Lie” begins,

I’ll take the untrue,

the tried and true, the ruing

and the ruining. And you?

Here we see Park’s ability to find truth in language based not only on meaning, but on sound, that most basic quality of speaking and writing. These are definitely poems to read aloud, to fully appreciate the use Park has made of rhyme, alliteration, and pun. These poems are almost Medieval in their dependence on aurality, but Park also manages to make the alliteration and rhyme distinctly modern.

These are poems about language and truth, but they are also poems about love and loss. The reliance on form belies a collection of work that is deeply sad, mourning the loss of a lover. In section II, “A Mutability,” the poems become more outright in their emotional content. In “The Deer Woman in December,” Park writes,

Your touch was all it took. Nothing to do

but now move on. No use aching over

something there that never did begin.

This second section, made up on sonnets based on myth, is my favorite in the book. This is the kind of thing poetry is for: timeless forms and themes made new, much like suffering is made new each time it is experienced. Park makes fairy tale of loss in poems like “The Fox-Bead in May,” which ends,

And every day they kissed to swap the bead

and for a month he waned and wans,

and when he learned the truth about her tongue,

he downed the bead: her true form a nine-tailed

fox who could have turned human, had he kissed on.

The final section of the book, “Fear,” is made up of one long poem titled “Preface to Fear/False Spring.” This is the most confessional section in the book. The wordplay is still prevalent, but here the speaker’s pain is not clouded by it, but rather brought into sharper relief. Park writes,

I amuse you for only so long.

So long–

To fear the past’s grasp on the future.

Everything must and will come to its end.

This is a book that is both linguistically stunning and emotionally wrenching. Park brings out the best in what poetry has to offer, delving into the mysterious truths of language while also reminding us of the painful truths of being human.

Tom Cooper’s The Marauders

June 24, 2015 ~ faulknerhousebooks ~ Leave a comment

The Marauders. Tom Cooper. Crown, 2015. 26.00. Call us or visit us to buy a copy!

In his debut novel, local author Tom Cooper delves into the heart of the Bayou in the aftermath of the BP oil spill. This story follows Lindquist, a one-armed oxycontin-addicted shrimper searching for Jean LaFitte’s treasure in the thick and swampy backwoods of Louisiana’s Barataria region. Along the way, he becomes involved with a cast of characters converging on the Bayou from New Orleans to New York in a time of national emergency, when Louisianans are left to fend for themselves in the wake of an environmental crisis.

Cooper is quick to paint a realistic portrait of the cruelties that humans are capable of inflicting on one another for money. The characters in this book are all deeply flawed, forced to make bad decisions out of poverty and physical suffering. Desperation, Cooper shows, can drive a man to do just about anything. Cosgrove, for example, finds himself involved in a drug stealing operation with a man he meets while doing community service in New Orleans–community service that consists of sprucing up a dying woman’s home so it will be worth money when the city reclaims it, and stealing her valuables from the attic while they’re at it. The novel begins with two murderous twins, the Toup brothers, debating whether or not to murder Lindquist for his innocent forays into the swamp, where the Toups grow hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of marijuana. The teenage Wes Trench meets Lindquist after he leaves his father’s shrimping boat, in a fight brought on by the tensions of the oil spill, which has left the residents of the Barataria destitute, depending for their livelihoods on a shrimp trade that has dried up. Wes’s mother drowned during Katrina, when his father insisted against her will that they stay in the Bayou to weather the storm. Grimes grew up in the Barataria and hated every minute of it, leaving for New York as soon as he could. He is back in his hometome representing BP, getting desperate fisherman to sign gag orders in exchange for $10,000.00. And Lindquist is broke, divorced, with an estranged daughter who works as a stripper and visits him only for money, depending on pain medicine to get him through the physical agony of a lifetime of backbreaking work on shrimp boats, for hardly any money.

Cooper manages to take this cast of characters and weave them into a complex and vivid portrayal of life in the modern Barataria. The setting is one of the most compelling parts of the book: for many readers, the swamps are a distant dream. In the city it is easy to forget that there are wild places just a half an hour away, where alligators grow larger than men and poisonous snakes slip through the brackish tides. But after the oil spill, none of this is left untouched: this book is suffused with the scent of crude oil rising from the bayou, fish belly-up in the water, pelicans soaked in petroleum. The characters are quirky, often funny, lovable in their own messed-up ways, but reading about the state of the swamp is truly heartbreaking, and gives this story its weight.

Although this is in many ways a book about the Barataria after the oil spill, Cooper never lets us forget that we are in Louisiana, where a kind of magic, at least in the fictional world, might always have its small victories over the grating of reality. All the seemingly fantastical elements of Louisiana lore come to life in this story, from killer alligators to voodoo curses to Jean LaFitte’s long-lost treasure. And this is the crux of the tale: Louisiana is a place that cannot be defeated, even in the face of years of tragedy. The swamps hold something magical, something terrifying and intangible that refuses to break, even under the weight of crude oil, poverty, and flood waters.

The 2015 Faulkner-Wisdom Competition

April 2, 2015 ~ faulknerhousebooks ~ Leave a comment

There is still over a month left to submit your creative work to the 2015 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Competition, sponsored by the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society! We accept work in categories from Novel-in-Progress to Poetry, Essay to Short Story, Novella to Nonfiction Book, and more! Prizes include money, gold medals, and publication in the Double Dealer. We are so excited to read your work. Read the guidelines and details here, and send us your best!

Maxine Kumin: And Short the Season

February 24, 2015March 10, 2015 ~ faulknerhousebooks ~ Leave a comment

Maxine Kumin. And Short the Season. WW Norton & Co, 2014. 24.95. Call or visit us to purchase.

Maxine Kumin’s death, a year ago this month, was a loss felt deeply by the poetry community. Her final book, And Short the Season, was published the year she died, and is a beautiful meditation on the close of a life.

In this final collection, Kumin explores nature, death, loss, and what it means to live as a poet. Her stunning formal abilities are on full display as well: the music of her meter and rhyme is subtle, yet almost perfect throughout. Kumin maintains her sensibilities as a New England poet, painting the outdoors with the eye of a naturalist. The first poem in the collection is one of my favorites, beginning

And short the season, first rubythroat

in the fading lilacs, alyssum in bloom,

a honeybee bumbling in the bleeding heart

on my gelding’s grave while beetles swarm

him underground.

Kumin’s choice of natural detail is powerful: she suggests creeping mortality even before we come to the gelding’s grave, using the rubythroat and the bleeding heart to call to mind the violence inherent even beneath the serenity of nature. The season is short, the lilacs dying already, the life of the horse long since ended. This is Kumin’s gift throughout the collection: the quiet, yet steady, focus on the ephemerality of our own world. We see it especially in the final section of the book, in poems like “Going Down” and “Just Deserts.” Here it is the violence not of nature alone, but which humans have inflicted on the natural world, that haunts her:

Despite outcries of purest angst

dikes won’t save the playing field

so blow a kiss to this drowned world.

The gods have spoken: yield.

These final poems are some of the starkest in the collection. Here is a poet who visualizes herself not only on the brink of her own death, but on the brink of the collapse of the earth as she knows it through climate change. Kumin puts into words the sneaking fear felt by all who have seen our fragile worlds come crashing down in wind or flood.

Woven into the natural world of the book is also, of course, a very human element. Kumin reminds us of her rightful place in the canon, writing about poets from Sexton to Ginsberg to Williams. I especially love the series “Sonnets Uncorseted,” in which she writes about what it was like to be a woman poet of her generation. She nods to forebears from Margaret Cavendish to Virginia Woolf to Emily Dickinson, and writes fondly of her friendship with Anne Sexton. Describing the male poets of her generation, Kumin says

…if a poem

of ours seemed worthy they said, you write like a man.

When asked what woman poet they read, with one

voice they declaimed, Emily Dickinson.

Saintly Emily safely dead, modern

women poets dismissed as immature,

their poems pink with the glisten of female organs.

Much has changed since then: Kumin revels in the ambitious female writers of today, the MFA programs and small presses that give an alternative outlet to poets whose voices veer from the traditional. For woman poets today, Kumin’s blessing is something to hold onto.

And of course, And Short the Season is Kumin’s last book. Thus it is tinged with the sorrow of the dying, with the profound loss felt by the reader upon coming to the last page. There will be no more, the poet seems to say. Her short final poem is a sort of goodbye:

Allow Me

Sudden and quiet, surrounded by friends

–John Milton’s way–

But who gets to choose this ordered end

Trim and untattered, loved ones at hand?

–Allow me that day.

Kumin bids her reader adieu; she is off to join the ranks of the other historically great poets: Milton, Dickinson, her friend Anne Sexton. We are lucky to have had this last book. It is a masterfully realized goodbye from one of our most important poets.

M.O. Walsh’s My Sunshine Away

February 13, 2015February 13, 2015 ~ faulknerhousebooks ~ Leave a comment

My Sunshine Away. M.O. Walsh. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2015. 26.95. Come by and pick up a copy or call us to order!

This week marked the highly anticipated release of the debut novel by M.O. Walsh, My Sunshine Away, praised by Southern literary royalty the likes of Kathryn Stockett and Anne Rice. Walsh’s prose moves the story along at a pace that finds the perfect compromise between meditative and page-turner. Set in Baton Rouge in the early 90’s, the book is narrated by an unnamed man recalling his childhood, beginning with the year his neighbor, the 15-year-old Lindy Simpson, was raped on their usually quiet Southern street. The rape is still unsolved, and the narrator confesses to us early on that he is a suspect. This is, in some ways, a deeply unsettling story: we are immersed in the consciousness of a narrator who may or may not be a rapist, and whose lovesick actions toward Lindy are often unconscionable.

My Sunshine Away seems to plunge us into a normal childhood in the South, on Piney Creek Road, where neighborhood kids spent their days “tearing around in go-karts, coloring chalk figures on [their] driveways, or chasing snakes down into storm gutters.” But a dark current runs beneath the narrative. This is a street shaken to its core by the sexual assault of a teenage girl, Lindy Simpson. The insularity of the story is emphasized by the fact that the rape takes place right outside Lindy’s house, across the street from the narrator’s own home. Piney Creek is quietly, constantly under siege from the kinds of tragedies that are inescapable on any street, as well as the kinds of tragedies that make us question what is normal in human nature. The rape is just the publicly tangible manifestation of a world in which adult men take pictures of their teenage neighbors and drug their children, where the narrator spies on Lindy from an oak tree and draws her head onto pornographic images.

The darkness of the novel is tempered by the fact that it is also a kind of love story. My favorite thing about this book is Walsh’s ability to so fully crystallize what it means to be young and in love. Speaking of Lindy, our narrator says, “There’s this girl. And when I look at her, I don’t know what to do.” And on technology: “There were no cell phones. No private text messages. It was simply one on one conversation and, if it was any good at all, you had to whisper.” This is the kind of evocative power found on every page. Even if you didn’t grow up in the South, you will find remnants of your own high school experiences in the Spanish moss and mosquitoes of Piney Creek Road. And you will find yourself nostalgic for summer in Baton Rouge, even if you have never been: “And so the soul of this place lives in the parties that grow here, not just Mardi Gras, no, but rather the kind that start with a simple phone call to a neighbor, a friend. And after the heat is discussed and your troubles shared you say man it’d be nice to see you, your kids, your smile. And from this grows a spread several tables long, covered in newspaper, with long rows of crawfish spilled steaming from aluminum pots…” One can’t help but feel that South Louisiana is more than a backdrop to this story: it is almost a living character, loved by the narrator with the same passion he feels for Lindy.

This story is as much about Lindy as it is about the narrator. Lindy is objectified by almost everyone she encounters, reminding the reader of what it is like to grow up as a young girl in a world that becomes increasingly unsafe the more she begins to look like a woman. Lindy is never, however, objectified by the author. She is a real girl, experiencing a trauma that is not understood by the narrator, but that is deeply understood by the author. Walsh never gives us the narrator’s name, reminding us that the real protagonist is, in a way, Lindy. However, the namelessness of the narrator also fits him into the time-honored tradition of the every man, and this is what makes the book truly chilling. Does every man really enact such violence on the women around him? The narrator concludes, in the final pages of the book, what we have wanted him to recognize all along: “That’s why I am so lucky to have Julie around now, and to have had my mother and Rachel around for so long, to make me realize that life is not always about me and the unloading of my conscience. The story of Lindy’s rape, for instance. It is about Lindy. And that is all.” As he grows from a boy into a man, the narrator realizes that there is a world of women around him, women with secrets, women whose parallel existence in the world is shockingly different from his own. He realizes, for instance, that Lindy was probably not the only girl to be raped that year in Baton Rouge. That women bear scars that they don’t tell men about.

It is this nuanced understanding of what it means to be a man that makes My Sunshine Away so special. It is unsettling to read what presents itself as a mystery about a rape, but the solution to the mystery is, appropriately, unsatisfying in a way that a true crime novel’s ending never is. There is nothing glamorous, nothing outrageous about rape. We aren’t reading to find out who did it. Men commit these atrocities against women every day. This isn’t a mystery so much as it is the story of a man who comes to recognize his own complicity in a culture that is dangerous to women. It is a story about becoming a better man, and recognizing that some narratives will always remain secret.

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.

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.

Faulkner House Books

A sanctuary for fine literature

literature