Pictures and words: A Walk With Me (Frostic, 1958)

    Gwen Frostic. A Walk With Me. (1958) Frostic was a Michigan artist and author, best known for her linocut prints. She set up a successful printing business, selling her prints and greeting cards, stationery and gift items based on her artwork. See more on Wikipedia.
     This book is an example of her work. Printed on deckle-edge paper in earth colours, it’s a mix of text and pictures. I like the images, Frostic has an excellent eye for shape, texture and composition. The images of leaves, landscapes, animals, etc are not only accurate but evocative. Her art is semi-abstract but accurate depiction of natural beauty.
     The texts are not up to the standard of the picturers. She uses a lot of ellipses... to make the reader pause... and take thought... and perhaps... recreate Frostic’s experience... of walking among trees... and shrubs... and flowers... noticing the little things... like mushrooms... and frogs... thus achieving insights... into the mystery... and spiritual meaning... of the natural world.
     An interesting book. Beautifully printed, it’s an example of the book as art or craft object. **

Footnote: This copy was given "With all good wishes to our "Other Bishop - in the north country - Faithfully, Anna May Johns, Midland Mich."

Christopher Smart Loves His Cat Jeoffry

 Martin Leman. Christopher Smart: My Cat Jeoffry (1992) One of the pleasures of a course in 18th century literature was discovering Christopher Smart’s poem about his cat Jeoffry. It’s a hymn, listing all the ways in which Jeoffry shows us the glory and love of the Creator. Smart rejoices in his cat, and anyone who likes cats will share his joy. But Smart’s poem celebrates any and all of God’s creatures, and the joy of loving connection between us. Martin Leman has made a lovely little book illustrating the poem. Recommended. ****

One of many links to the poem: https://interestingliterature.com/2020/08/christopher-smart-my-cat-jeoffry-analysis/

Rilke's Duino Elegies.

Rainer Maria Rilke. Duino Elegies (Translated by C. F. MacIntyre, 1961) Rilke worked on the Elegies for decades. In German, it’s his skill in using German syntax to compress meaning, to generate subtly variable rhythms, rhyme, and echo. MacIntyre has attempted to give us an English version of Rilke’s syntax and sound play, and for the most part succeeds.
     The book prints German and English on facing pages, so comparison is easy. Rilke ruminates; his declamations pretend to public speech. Hence the label, Elegies.

     A random sample (from the Sixth Elegy):
Wunderlich nah ist der Held doch den jugendlich Toten. Dauern
ficht ihn nicht an. Sein Aufgang ist Dasein; beständig
nimmt er sich fort und tritt ins veränderte Sternbild
seiner steten Gefahr.
 

     MacIntyre’s translation:
Strangely near is the hero to those who died young.
Permanence does not tempt him. His rise is Being.
Steadfastly he goes onward and enters the changed constellation
of his perpetual danger.
 

     My translation:
Curiously close is the hero to the youthfully dead. Persistence
 does not affect him. His rise pure existence; forever
he takes himself off and steps into the altered star sign
of his perpetual peril.
 

    Rilke is difficult, inexhaustible. He repays repeated reading. I’m glad to have MacIntyre’s translation, not least for his giving us a sense of Rilke’s sound. Its play against my own understandings increases both insight and pleasure. The introduction is a good overview of the poems with some glimpses of Rilke's life. Recommended. ***

The Empire Builders (Stead): data towards insight into ancestral foibles

R. J. C. Stead. The Empire Builders (1908) Stead’s verses remind me of Kipling in their jingoism and Service in their rhymes and rhythm. They range from sentimentally heroic tales of pioneering homesteaders to abstract paeans on Man, Mother, Empire etc. Stead liked adjectives and Latinate diction, which I suppose he believed made his commonplace prejudices sound not only poetic but thoughtful and weighty. They must have seemed so to his readers in 1908, when he published this book, and which reached its fourth edition (this copy) by 1910.
     An online search reveals many editions in many different formats and price levels. Stead’s verses appealed to a large audience. They don’t appeal to me, except as awful examples of empire-worship in the Edwardian era. And of the wrong-headed belief that anything that rhymes must be poetry.
     A curiosity, data towards a better insight into the foibles of our ancestors, and thereby also a warning that much of what we consider to be proper sentiments will certainly appear wrongheaded to our descendants. *

Footnote: Stead wrote jingoistic novels as well. He worked for the CPR's immigration department, producing "reams of rose-hued prose extolling the clean, healthy vigour of life in the open spaces—spaces opened courtesy of the CPR and available at good prices. On his own time, he writes in the same vein...". The posters were also "rose-hued".  

Grimes experiments with poetry (Send Bygraves!)

 

 

Martha Grimes. Send Bygraves (1989) A tour de force: a series of poems that tell the story of a murder and the involvement of Bygraves, an elusive detective. Each segment experiments with a different verse form. The result is a series of sketches or set pieces that together provide a handful of way-stations on the road from suspicion to moderate certainty. I started reading this some years ago, and couldn’t get past the first few pages. This time I managed to persevere to the end. What kept me reading wasn’t the story, but curiosity about how Grimes would fit her tale to each set of poetical conventions and restraints. Her experiments are generally successful. I still don’t know exactly what the story was about, or how Bygraves did or did not solve the puzzle. I did suss that Bygraves is called but never answers.            
     A nicely made book, with an illustrated hardcover, interesting illustrations (which may elucidate the tale, but I’d have to re-read to figure out whether and how), and deckle-edged pages of excellent paper. A gift item suitable for Grimes fans, I suppose. Not a keeper. **

Pain in Poems: Spike Milligan's Open Heart Surgey

 

Spike Milligan. Open Heart Surgery. (1979) A book published to cash in on the spike in Goon Show popularity in the 1970s/80s. A few of the verses are worth reading twice. Most are diary entries, of interest only to Spike and those who care about him. I like the Goon Show, and love Milligan’s off-kilter squint at the world. But these verses don’t do it for me. Reading them, I feel like a voyeur. The decorations by Laura Milligan relate to the companion verses in their expressions of similar hurts. *1/2

Learning to See in the Dark (poems by Lorraine Janzen)

 

 

 Lorraine Janzen. Learning to see in the dark (2003) Janzen was teaching at Nipissing University when she published this book of poems. She is now professor emerita at Ryerson, and has earned a reputation as a pioneer in studying the relationship between text and image in illustrated books.
These poems are readable, and collectively show us a persona that’s sensitive to her world, and not quite sure how to reconcile the light and the dark. The title suggests a method, but there’s no guarantee it will work. As poems, they show a nice talent. Her ability to make something with words isn’t always as strong as her ability to imagine something worth making.
Nevertheless, here are some random lines that made me read twice:

Shuffling the leaves of past and present
I see footsteps everywhere
shadows so deep
you could disappear forever.
...
There’s a ghost
in my mother’s typewriter

It eats the endings of her words
...
There’s a hole in my heart
where you passed through

I’ve kept the bullet
wrapped in burlap

In the spring
I’ll plant it in my garden.

Most of Janzen’s verse is discursive, it’s rhetoric written line-wise to guide the voice into its meaning. You discover a mind alert to memory and meaning, even if not always sure of its insights. A good read for anyone who likes poetry, and certainly, I think, a souvenir for anyone who knows her personally. **½

Three Elegies by Rilke

     Rainer Maria Rilke. Requiem (1909) Three of Rilke’s elegies, for Paula Modersohn-Becker, Wolf Graf von Kalckreuth, and an unnamed boy, the last in the boy’s own voice.
     I’ve always liked Rilke. He uses an almost purely Germanic lexicon, and the simplest German syntax to create dense lines of poetry. He avoids poetic diction, and turns the vernacular to his purposes. Few poets in any language can match his ear for the music of vowels, or for subtle variations in rhythm. Repetition enlarges the meanings of words, extends our grasp of his intent, focuses the imagination:

So hab ich mich dem Allen aufgedrängt.
Und war doch Alles ohne mich zufrieden
und wurde trauriger mit mir behängt.
Nun bin ich plötzlich ab-geschieden.

[So have I urged myself onto the All.
Though All had been content without me
and became sadder when with me adorned.
Now sudden have I disengaged me here.]

      So speaks the boy, after relating his discovery, his naming, of the world.
      Written in 1908, published 1909 by the Insel Verlag, which set itself the task of printing and reprinting the best available classic and contemporary literature. I’m glad I found this little book in my father’s library. ****

 

A haiku

Haiku
Words float on the air
like smoke and dry leaves.
Memory fails me.

Also posted on the Poems page.

Love and Loss: the Rhythm of Life.

     Lauren Carter. Following Sea (2019) Lauren is a friend. Don’t think that makes this review any easier.
     I read this sequence of poems almost at one sitting. It’s a page turner, unusual for a poetry collection. Several things kept me reading: the story of some of Lauren’s ancestors pieced together from the fragments revealed in the poems; Lauren’s grief for her childlessness, which surfaces partway through; Lauren’s skill with the sound of language, there’s much alliteration and internal rhyming, and a loose, wave-like rhythm.
     The setting for most of these poems is Manitoulin Island. Lauren’s evocation of that place and its history impressed me.
     I recommend this book. ***

Roy Daniells: The Chequered Shade

     Roy Daniells. The Chequered Shade (1963) I recently read three of Daniells poems at a public event. They were well received.
     Every time I reread Daniells’ poems, I like them better. They are beautifully crafted. Daniells does sonnets especially well. His language is plain or not, varying with his subjects and themes. Most are narratives, sometimes of an encounter with a place, sometimes a riff on ancient tales. His responses are sometimes explicit comments, sometimes implicit in the language.
     The book has three sections. “Where the Great Caesar Came”, a travelogue in verse. “The Immemorial Stones”, biblical stories and themes. “The Map Nailed Up”, a manifesto and confession of his poetic practice and his own life.
     I’ll quote “Noah 2", which I think shows how Daniells takes his subject seriously. This Noah is no mere mythic-symbolic semi-abstraction, he’s a real man in the real world. The poem epitomises Daniells method of translating well-worn myth and cliched history into felt reality. I suspect that the poem mirrors Daniells' own experience with resistance to visionary projects.

They gathered round and told him not to do it.
They formed a committee and tried to take control.
They cancelled his building permit and they stole
His plans. I sometimes wonder he got through it.
He told them wrath was coming, they would rue it.
He begged them to believe the tides would roll,
He ooffered them passage to his destined goal,
A new world. They were finished and he knew it.
All to no end.
                       And then the rain began.
A splatter at first that barely wet the soil,
Then showers, quick rivulets lacing the town,
Then deluge universal. The old man
Arthritic from his years of scorn and toil
Leaned from his admiral’s walk and watched them drown.

The book is out of print. Secondhand copies may be found online. ****

A Bird of Rare Plumage (George Johnston: The Cruising Auk)

      George Johnston. The Cruising Auk (1959) Johnston is I think a much underrated poet. He writes light verse, intended to amuse, but he’s a melancholy clown, more attuned than most of us to the absurdities of human life, and acutely aware of the thin membrane that prevents the tears of despair from infecting the tears of laughter. Water is a frequent image in his poems, poems like stones skipped over the surface, which sink into the darkness at the end of their journeys.
     A couple of samples:

War on the Periphery

Around the battlements go by
Soldier men against the sky,
Violent lovers, husbands, sons,
Guarding my peaceful life with guns

My pleasures, how discreet they are!
A little booze, a little car,
Two little children and a wife
Living a small suburban life.

My little children eat my heart;
At seven o’clock we kiss and part,
At seven o’clock we meet again;
They eat my heart and grow to men.

I watch their tenderness with fear
While on the battlements I hear
The violent, obedient ones
Guarding my family with guns.

(See also a short note on Johnston posted on 2017-08-17)

In It
....
The world is a pond and I’m in it,
In it up to my neck;
Important people are in it too,
It’s deeper than this, if we only knew;
Under we go, any minute –
A swirl, some bubbles, a fleck. . . .

I’ve reread these poems several times. Many years ago, when poetry readings were in fashion, we attended a reading. Johnston was a diffident reader, he seemed surprised that anyone would take his verses seriously. But he was one of the few poets who could read his poems well. Wikipedia has a short entry.  ****

George Johnston, underrated.

In 1959, George Johnston published a collection of poems titled The Cruising Auk. It went through five impression by 1964, when I bought our copy after hearing Johnston read his poems. He was charming and diffident, and so were his poems. They have been underrated, I think. The last 5 lines of “War on the Periphery” may show why. He’s watching his children grow up:


They eat my heart and grow to men.

I watch their tenderness with fear
While on the battlements I hear
The violent, obedient ones
Guarding my peaceful life with guns.

Wikipedia has a good article about him. The book is out of print. If you find one, buy it, and cherish it. See also my longer review posted 2017-10-23.

Grieving: a poem about loss

     Joan Finnigan. In the brown cottage on Loughborough Lake (1970) A long poem or suite of poems, interspersed with photographs, expressing Finnigan’s grief on the death of her husband. It tells of the first summer spent on the lake without him. The book is more of a meditative essay, the kind that invites the reader to recall emotion rather than imagine experience. A few lines here and there pierce the heart:
     The summer turned to crabapples
 
    And the wild plums chimed on the trees
    along the stone-pile fences

    The lake chilled

    and we shortened our swims

     The book is misclassified as non-fiction on one website about Finnigan. ***

Canadian Satire: Barbed Lyres, 1990

     Barbed Lyres: Canadian Venomous Verse (1990) Foreword by Margaret Atwood. This Magazine asked readers ro write satirical verses, and this book is one of the results. The verses in it for the most part express annoyance rather than venom, but the standard of both content and form is high. An example relevant to the current US Presidential election:
     Of Brian and Ronnie and Free Trade
     How wonderful his breath must smell
     From his bid to be famous
     He sold our nation straight to hell
     And kissed old Ronnie’s anus
              (S. Piatkowski, Ottawa)
     Found in the Sault Ste Marie library’s book sale for $1. A keeper. ****

Star Over Bethlehem (1965)

     Agatha Christie. Star Over Bethlehem (1965) The mystery novels contain hints that Christie was a believer, especially her brief comments on guilt, innocence, and just punishment. This collection of stories and poems gives us a fuller impression of her beliefs.
      In I a Mrs Grierson knows that her dislike of people compromises her good works, done from moral conviction. She wishes that she could like the people she helps. A stranger on a water taxi wears a seamless robe. Tempted, she touches it, the touch transforms the way she sees and feels about her fellow humans. In the Cool of the Evening tells of an autistic boy who meets a stranger in his garden. With the stranger, he invents names for the odd animals that result from a nearby radioactive spill. His mother, embarrassed by him, doesn’t recognise his gift, and wishes he were normal.
     The last story, Promoted to the Highest, is a fantasy in which fourteen saints, depicted in an ancient fresco in a country church, petition to be allowed to return to Earth to continue their work. Dying for their faith wasn’t enough; they need to live it. Their request is granted. The recipients of their miraculous powers are rather disreputable. Christie shows her suspicion of mere respectability here as much as in her mysteries.
     I think this slight book should be more widely known. Christie strings clues and misinterpretations together just as she does in her mysteries. The stories  achieve their purposes. They’re parables, relying on outline of plot and character in order to prompt the us to think about puzzles that are difficult to pose any other way, and whose solution will always be provisional. Philosophers may be satisfied with abstractions. The rest of us want concrete experience. Christie delivers. These pieces remind me of C. S. Lewis. ***

Gordon Snell & Aislin. Yes! Even More Canadians (2000)

     Gordon Snell & Aislin. Yes! Even More Canadians (2000) Snell writes the verse, Aislin does the portraits, the result is a mildly amusing collection.  I nibbled at it over a couple of days, recommended for anyone who wants a painless intro the list of the good, great and scoundrels of our history. But this is a “gift book”, the kind of confection put together for Christmas and birthdays. What do you give to the one  who, you know well enough to give gift, but not well enough? This is book is safe, it’s educational, patriotic, amusing, and doesn’t give offense to anyone. It’s nicely made, too. **

Hans Naumann. Die Minnesinger in Bildern (nd, but ca. 1935)

     Hans Naumann. Die Minnesinger in Bildern (nd, but ca. 1935) One of the Insel Verlag series , the book reproduces a number of medieval paintings of German courtly love poets, made some time after the height of the fashion. The colour printing is state of the art for the 1930s, and quite attractive, although time and oxygen have darkened the pages. The Geleitwort (guide-word, i.e., introduction) by Naumann is interesting in its obvious reflection of Nazi ideology. There is no mention whatsoever of the origin of courtly love in the Provence. The whole phenomenon is presented as a strictly German expression of the culture of the noble knight, which itself is also presented with no reference to sources outside Germany. Germany at the time of the Minnesinger did not exist, but was a mess of princelings and kings quarrelling with each other over little patches of land for which there was no documented ownership, but this fact is simply passed over. Interesting example of how ideology distorts historical writing. *** for the pictures, * for the text. (2005)

Edward R, Paramore. The Ballad of Yukon Jake (1921)

     Edward R, Paramore. The Ballad of Yukon Jake (1921) A satire on R W Service’s poetry, using his limericky verse form to tell a sad tale. Yukon Jake is a bad boy, seducing pure virgins every chance he gets, and running off to the Yukon to escape his just punishment (which presumably would be marriage to Ruth, The Girl He Betrayed.) Ruth goes to the Yukon to bring the word of repentance, but she’s shipwrecked, lands in Jake’s bed again, and ends the poem as a colleague of the Lady that’s known as Lou (who isn’t mentioned as such, and her friend Megrew’s name is carefully spelled to prevent charges of plagiarism.) A mildly amusing bagatelle, which may have given some of its readers an agreeable frisson of vicarious sin when it first appeared. This was a second reading of the verse; just as enjoyable as the first. ** (2004)

E. V. Rieu. The Flattered Flying Fish (1962)

     E. V. Rieu. The Flattered Flying Fish (1962) Rieu is better known as a classical scholar and for his translations of the New Testament. These verses show him to have an ironic sensibility and a mildly satiric eye. Again, no memorable images or lines, but a pleasant and often funny read all the same. The illustrations by E H Shephard are more interesting than the verse. ** (2004)