Juvenile Nonfiction

I’ve not read any of Roth’s classic works: the Zuckerman books, American Pastoral. I’ve only read Everyman, The plot against America, and now this, and I’d say the title and its concern encapsulates my feelings about Roth and his writing: he is a deeply angry man, incredulous at much he sees around him. He looks back in anger. Indignation follows the tragic career of a young co-ed at Winesburg College in Ohio during the Korean War, a Jewish Butcher’s Son who can make no sense of the traditionalism of White Christian America and is hard pressed to deal with the many stereotypes he finds there. He runs there from a suddenly overbearing father, and falls in love with a troubled, beautiful young woman, but cannot infer from her many cues that she’s been sexually abused. Everyone he meets there makes him angry. He jumps to wrong conclusion after wrong conclusion until he is expelled, drafted, and destroyed in the War. Roth seems to be dealing with the currently-fashionable anger over our ‘rights,’ and the bluster it spawns, and saying that we need to be careful what we get indignant about, since “banal, incidental… choices achieve the most disproportionate results.” I’m still curious about Roth’s earlier, well-regarded works, but I don’t anticipate that reading them will be pleasant.

Ryan is the former Poet Laureate of the United States, and this book anthologizes the best of her small, sure, surprising poems from the past decade. She writes poems about leftovers, lacunae, empty spaces. Lost places. Limits—limited quantities, limited measurements, limited abilities—are all over these poems, as if she’s trying to describe what nothingness looks like, feels like. For instance:

Silence

Silence is not snow.
It cannot grow
deeper. A thousand years
of it are thinner
than paper. So
we must have it
all wrong
when we feel trapped
like mastodons.

You can see that the concern with limits is reflected in her spare style, her rationed syllables. Everything is stripped down to its essence, resulting in the surprising punch of the final lines, over and over, in each poem. Her sly humor comes out in this way, here and there, especially in the interior rhymes. Sometimes she approaches cleverness, but more often she tips over into the profound revelation, giving insight into something the reader has never spoken but always known. The terseness and sharp focus of her poems gives her voice authority: the poems come off like proverbs, or koans. This is enhanced by her refusal to use the first person, except in the rarest of instances.

These are wildly accessible and fantastic poems, so consistently revealing that they approach the spiritual. Her unique dedication to her form, and the quality and development of her themes, truly earn her work the designation: masterful.

Ordered this pretty much as soon as it was announced. A good, concise, readable, concise, short introduction to the elements of and thought behind HTML5. Did I say concise? It’s not really a liability, though– I think it’s clear that browsers aren’t there yet, and so Keith’s describing what will be rather than what is, and hence doesn’t have pages and pages of existing practical knowledge to relate. Really, just the spec and the new stuff, but it’s all very encouraging, and a good way to begin getting your head around what’s coming.

Though I was unmoved by the narrow Wild at heart, my friend Tim highly recommended this book, so I agreed to read it. Eldredge advances the argument that the life of Jesus actually sanctifies your heart, and so the belief that your heart is desperately wicked is a lie; and in fact, a chief aim of spiritual warfare is to recapture your heart from this lie so that you can experience life to the full. To this end, Eldredge recommends Four Streams, one of which is spiritual warfare and the others of which he details unremarkably. I felt like the central premise of the book was valuable- that we could do with a look at our self-loathing and begin to ask whether this is how God sees us. And Eldredge does a good job describing the ways in which our view of things plays into the Enemy’s schemes to keep us and those around us in bondage. Much of the “self-help” aspect of the book, though, I could do without. The verdict? Encouraging, not necessarily essential.

After having so enjoyed Hirsch’s How to read a poem, I was curious to read his own efforts. Wild Gratitude shares a title with his meditation on Kit Smart’s ode to his cat Jeoffrey, which poem was featured in his book of appreciation as well. The collection swings between poems of this kind, poems of appreciation for grace and beauty in the natural world, and poems of striking anger, despair and fatalism. Most of them are formal, and you can appreciate the hours he must have spent conforming them to strict meter. They also skew longer than many I’ve read recently, and so the read is more challenging, though I welcomed the exercise. Hirsch is deft with image, and with plain-speak, elevating the everyday with his poetry, though often in the service of a dark view of the world. Slipped in the pages of this used-book-store-copy was a clipping from what looks to be The New Yorker, the last lines of which are a good example of the skill – and tenor – of the rest of the book:

Let five o’clock come
with its bandages of light.

A life buoy in bruised waters.
The first broken plank of morning.

Juvenile Nonfiction is Joshua Neds-Fox’s blog v.3, internetted lovingly to you from Detroit, Michigan.

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