October's reads and buys

Oh, hi. Oh, hell, more like it. I went home, I came back, things got a bit busy. Here's a little update on some of my readings & buyings since my last dispatch:

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
I was about a hundred pages from the end of Jonathan Franzen's new novel, Freedom (which has been reviewed pretty exhaustively all over the place, so I won't get into it here), when I left for Vancouver and couldn't quite rationalize lugging it along. So I left it in Halifax and bought a very beat-up copy of The Adventures..., which includes the first twelve Holmes stories, from the airport bookstore during my stopover in Toronto. Although I'm sure I appear anything but, I always feel oddly streamlined when I travel alone, and mysteries with aloof, intrepid sleuths seem to fit my mood while skulking around airports. Although the tight turnaround of each case is pretty satisfying, I'm keen now to check out Holmes in novel length.

Stranger Wycott's Place by John Schreiber
I found this in one of my dad's little piles of papers during my visit home. It was published a couple of years ago in New Star Books' Transmontanus series, which consists mainly of short, oddball books on various aspects of BC history and culture. This one is in the Don McKay vein of creative non-fiction, combining archival research with long tromps around the grasslands in the Cariboo region, a little north of where my parents live. There are some frustrating lapses into bland, non-specific niceties about place and connectedness that seemed more borrowed than really lived, but when he's out walking or immersed in the trail of patchy family records, piecing together Wycott's story, Schreiber's writing is quite sharp. He's also provided a good basic Cariboo reading list at the back, which I plan to revisit soonish.

Lost River by James Tate
The September issue of Poetry included an essay by Tony Hoagland recommending Tate as a poet "trafficking in disorientation" but with a strong narrative bent, and so he was on my list when I went to Powell's in Portland, Oregon. Well, actually, first I told myself I wouldn't start in the poetry section because that was where I got stuck for most of my first visit there last summer. Three hours later I realized I done the very same thing. Lost River is a Quarternote chapbook from Sarabande Books in Louisville, Kentucky. I like chapbooks and there aren't that many publishers doing them, so I picked this over the full-length collections nearby. Tate's sensibilities had me from the start. Here are the first few lines from a poem called "Making the Best of the Holidays":

Justine called on Christmas day to say she
was thinking of killing herself. I said, "We're
in the middle of opening presents, Justine...


Before I left Powell's I did squeeze in a quick jog through the North American history section, where I found a very cool letterpress book that will have its own post sometime soon(er than later).

The Anthologist

Whew. What a week. Three book launches, Word on the Street, some recuperative vegging to follow, and now where was I? The Anthologist. Briefly: everything I'd hoped a novel about poetry would be. Paul Chowder is narrator, tour guide, largely washed-up but oddly inspiring New England poet mired in the challenge of writing an introduction to an anthology of rhyming poetry. The book is a fascinating defense of formal poetry and a very apt portrait of a poet writing today. It was an indulgent read for me, full of discussion of poetics and trappings of writing life. And so funny, too, all of which is a tall order.

My copy was borrowed from a friend who teaches a first-year university poetry course and it was fun to try to guess what she might be planning to teach from each of the pages she'd folded over. What she could have taught: meter, a basic who's-who of American poets, how to blast through a bout of writer's block. It's all there.

Because I am feeling rather lazy tonight, in lieu of any more of my less-than-inspired thoughts on the matter, I offer instead this great nine-minute recording of Nicholson Baker talking about the process of writing the book:



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On Wednesday I head home to BC for an extra-long Thanksgiving and then down to Portland, Oregon. I hope to stop off at some bookstores in my travels. First, the very new Sitka Books & Art in Vancouver, just opened last month by one of the former owners of Duthie's Books which finally, sadly closed its last store earlier this year. Also Powell's City of Books in Portland where I will likely while away most of a day. Can't wait.

One fall launch and one Giller long list

A couple of bits of local-ish book news:

First, Allan Donaldson's new novel, The Case Against Owen Williams, will be launching at Westminster Books in Fredericton this Thursday night at 7:00pm. The book's been getting some good reviews, so if you're in the neighbourhood I hope you'll come hear Allan read. He'll also be in Halifax next month. The full book description can be found here, on the Nimbus site.

Second, I was thrilled today to see a book I worked on last year, Scotsburn, NS, author Johanna Skibsrud's debut novel, The Sentimentalists, on this year's Giller Prize long list. It's great both to see Johanna's (amazing) book on there and to see some small presses in the mix (including Gaspereau, Coach House and Biblioasis). The full list is here.

In other news I borrowed Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist (remember book club?) from a friend and roared through it in a couple of sittings this weekend. I'll be back with more to say on that very soon.

Elizabeth Bishop

Work has been occupying all my desk-sitting, typing inclinations for the last little while here, so I thought I'd share a bit of what I've been up to 9 to 5. One of the books I've been editing recently is a short biography of Elizabeth Bishop by Sandra Barry, scheduled for release next spring. Bishop has generally been understood to be an American poet. She was born and died there, served a term as Poet Laureate, and won the Pulitzer Prize. But her mother's family were from Nova Scotia and she spent formative years here, and many of her poems draw on that time. So there's been a growing movement to have her better recognized as a Nova Scotian--hence the book.

When I first started reading Sandra's manuscript, I realized how much I liked Bishop's poetry, and at the same time how little of it I'd actually read. So I've decided to do what Bishop herself advised doing with poets one likes, and read all her published work. I've started not at the beginning, but with what was handiest, the one collection I already own, her last, called Geography III. It contains a few of her best-known poems, including "The Moose" and "In the Waiting Room." I think what I like most about Bishop's work, probably what a lot of people like about it, is the thinking out loud she does toward figuring out her own sense of being, of being a person separate from others, and toward formulating the best descriptions of things. There is some conversational fumbling that happens right on the page, and in the process she manages an intimacy without getting gossipy. Even if you're not a poetry reader, I recommend checking out her work. You might be surprised.

The publication of the biography coincides with the celebrations planned for Bishop's centenary. If you're already a Bishop fan or if you want to know more, the Bishop Society of Nova Scotia has set up a frequently updated blog, with all sorts of interesting reading--musings from some of the artists who have stayed at the Elizabeth Bishop House in Great Village, NS, and posts by Sandra and other Society members about Bishop's life and work, with a focus on her Nova Scotia connection: elizabethbishopcentenary.blogspot.com

The Klondike Quest

Toward the end of a Value Village trip a couple of months ago I found a copy of The Klondike Quest, and although the dust jacket and binding were both a bit beaten up, it's a nice collection of photos to have around, so I decided to grab it. The text is by Pierre Berton and the design by Frank Newfeld (former art director and VP at McClelland & Stewart, Alligator Pie illustrator extraordinaire and more recently author of a memoir, Drawing on Type, also on my to-read list). Barbara Sears did the photo research and although I don't know anything else about her, photo research is task I have recently discovered I loathe and it must have been a monster job for this book, so she gets special mention here. I haven't read it all the way through, but it's in my bedside stack and I like paging through the photos when I'm between books or too tired for a proper before-bed read.

The town where I grew up was on the Gold Rush Trail and I was kind of weary of the subject by the time I moved away for university. Or weary, at least, of the various efforts to resuscitate its allure for the tourist market. Efforts which included planting gold-painted boulders and plywood cancan dancers on the town's outskirts. You get the idea. I've more or less made peace with the tackiness but it took me a long while to regain any appetite for books or movies to do with that era. However, in addition to The Klondike Quest, I have also lately begun watching the HBO show Deadwood, which aired a few years ago. Along with the period costumes and grit, which are their own draw I suppose, the show has exceptional dialogue. A far cry from the script used in the reenactments (oh yes, there were those too) put on every summer in our fair village. Printing enthusiasts will also appreciate the scenes that take place in the shop of the town's newspaper publisher and job printer A. W. Merrick (one of the handful of characters based on real people, in case you feel like diving down that rabbit hole).

So things have been right pioneering around here lately. But it's still hot and I do intend to get back to the remainder of the summer book club list before the season's out. Just you wait.

Narrating

The other day I came across an essay by American poet Tony Hoagland, called "Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment." It originally appeared in a 2006 issue of Poetry magazine, and is available on their website. Well worth reading if you're interested in some of the current debate about what might characterize (at least a part of) the current poetic era.

I've been mulling the question of narrative in poetry for a good while now, both in relation to my own work and in my reading of other poets. My own work tends to fall really naturally into a "Once upon a time" kind of lilt, and in the face of a lot of the more associative, less "I" driven work being published lately, I've often felt compelled to rethink my inclinations. Do I write this way because it comes naturally or because I'm too lazy or not a strong enough poet to jog myself out of it? The conclusion I've come to is that at this point, anyway, this is the position from which the work I'm happiest with comes, and that if the things I find myself interested in writing about present themselves as stories then my job is to try to shape the strongest narratives I can, rather than try to bash them into ghazal-like series of sideways glances. (Both the ghazals and the glances being entirely respectable modes, but decidedly not mine.)

Noah Richler's beach reads

Speaking (as I was last post) about books and place, I've been following the Globe and Mail's "My Books, My Place" series for the last several weeks. Some are more interesting takes on the pairing than others. Lisa Moore's this weekend was a goody, I thought. And last weekend I was delighted to see Fredericton author Allan Donaldson's first novel Maclean (2005) perched on a dozing Noah Richler's chest as one of his beach reads. You can find the article here. This spring I had the pleasure of working with Allan on his new novel, a literary mystery called The Case Against Owen Williams, which is at the printer now and will launch next month. Full book description can be found here.