Spring list

I've been too busy of late to write anything substantial but not, happily, too busy to read. These three books have very little in common other than the fact that they were published either this year or last, and that I liked them enough to buy a copy. I've reached a point where adding to my library isn't always advisable, if only in terms of shelf space, and so I've been trying to rely on the public library system for run-of-the-mill reading matter (electronic books not being to my taste). These books are exceptions.

Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk is a beautifully written book about training a goshawk named Mabel, about coping with grief, and also about the writer T. H. White, who is best known for his Arthurian fiction but who also composed an account of his own ill-fated attempt to raise a similar hawk. Macdonald's book has been a surprise bestseller both in her native UK, where it was released last year by Jonathan Cape, and now in the US, where it is published by Grove Press, and it has won several awards. For once, all the attention is amply justified; Macdonald is a fine writer, able to deftly capture both her hawk's flights around the English countryside and her own emotional turmoil. Inevitably, there is a movie deal, but although H is for Hawk might make a fine film, nothing, I suspect, can substitute for the pleasures and integrity of Macdonald's prose.

Terhi Ekebom's Logbook, on the other hand, has almost no prose at all. It's a tiny illustrated chapbook published in Latvia (though what text there is is in English). Grief is also the subject here, although the details are as mysterious as the atmosphere. Two women — it's hard to say if they are adolescents or adults — inhabit a house in the middle of the sea where they tend to a bedridden male figure who is menaced by an expanding darkness. Their only temporary defense against its spread are the light-releasing spheres of a marine plant that float up to the surface. Logbook is available from kuš! komiksi for $6 including postage worldwide.

Finally, for some time I've been following Tom Miller's excellent blog Daytonian in Manhattan, which is dedicated to the architecture and histories of Manhattan buildings and monuments, but I've had to admit to some frustration because there was simply too much of interest there to comfortably digest online. Fortunately, a selection of entries has been published in a reader-friendly and nicely illustrated compact format by Universe (Rizzoli) in the US and Pimpernel Press in the UK. Though the book includes a few internationally renowned buildings (the Flatiron Building, St. Patrick's Cathedral), most of the structures it covers, like the Village's Pepperpot Inn and the melancholy General Slocum Memorial Fountain, are easily overlooked, and Miller's enthusiastic dedication to their stories is admirable. Let's hope there will be sequels to come.

Some rocks

for Michael Leddy

Top: Ogdred Weary (Edward Gorey), The Dancing Rock (bound with Dogear Wryde, The Floating Elephant), The Fantod Press, 1993. Shown: cover and sample page. Purchased at the Gotham Book Mart. Bottom: Peter Blegvad, Stones in My Passway, The London Institute of 'Pataphysics, 2002. Shown: cover, title page, and sample page.

Found in translation (Mark Strand)

Who cares if old age comes, what is old age?
Your shoulders are holding up the world
and it's lighter than a child's hand.
Wars, famine, family fights inside buildings
prove only that life goes on
and nobody will ever be free.
Some (the delicate ones) judging the spectacle cruel
will prefer to die.
A time comes when death doesn't help.
A time comes when life is an order.
Just life, without any escapes.

Carlos Drummond de Andrade, lines from "Your Shoulders Hold Up the World." Translation by Mark Strand, from Souvenir of the Ancient World, Antaeus Editions 1976.


We shall drink from the traitor's skull,
we shall wear his teeth as a necklace,
of his bones we shall make flutes,
of his skin we shall make a drum;
later, we'll dance.

"War Song." Translation by Mark Strand, from 18 Poems from the Quechua, Halty Ferguson 1971.


You must look for them
under the drop of wax that buries a word in a book
or the name at the end of a letter
that lies gathering dust.
Look for them
near a lost bottlecap,
near a shoe gone astray in the snow,
near a razorblade left at the edge of a cliff.

Rafael Alberti, lines from "The Dead Angels." Translation by Mark Strand, from The Owl's Insomnia, Atheneum 1973.

The contents of the three books above, with some corrections and additions, were later collected in the omnibus edition below.


Looking for Poetry: Poems by Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Rafael Alberti / Songs from the Quechua, Alfred A. Knopf 2002.