On the last day of June . . . a poem by Milton Acorn:

Poem in June

A breeze wipes creases off my forehead
and my trees lean into summer,
putting on for dresses,
day-weave,
ray-weave, sap's green nakedness.

Hushtime of the singers;
wing-time, worm-time
for the squab with its crooked neck and purse-wide beak.
(On wave-blown alfalfa, a hawk-shadow's coasting.)

As a sail fills and bounds with its business of wind,
my trees lean into summer.

I first came across this novel when I was an undergrad. It was an introduction to lit course and the reading list was divided up into thematic sections. Sexing the Cherry was in one of those sections and it inspired a great deal of discussion. There were students who were shocked and appalled. Students who were charmed, but disturbed. Students who didn't know what to think. What I like about this novel is its obvious lack of intimidation when it comes to the 'big' questions of love, time, reality, and meaning. How Jeanette Winterson manages the disparate voices of Dog-Woman and Jordan, the shifts in time and perspective, the revealing 'take' on 17th century politics and religion, is nothing short of brilliant.

A non-linear narrative, fairy-tale inclusions, questions of theology and physics, as well as gardening . . . I really can't think of any other adjective that will do as well as 'brilliant' to describe this tale.

Dog-Woman is a huge individual who reeks of things unimaginable. She discovers the seemingly abandoned Jordan in the Thames and raises him as her own. Along with a pack of dogs. She is a Royalist, a believer in a non-Puritan God, and a murderess who never seems to find love, being rather oversized and overlooked. Dog-Woman is a fascinating character. Following along on her adventures was indescribably diverting and often disturbing (especially the events surrounding the hypocrisy of the Roundheads).

I also found the reinterpreted fairy tales (The Twelve Dancing Princesses, Rapunzel, The Frog Prince) interesting. Gender expectations are challenged, and the twelve princesses have a very different version of their tale to tell. The differences are humourous, sometimes shocking, fantastical (as is the narrative itself), but revealing. Society (historical and contemporary) is under examination here. And it's worth thinking about.

A few excerpts . . . from Jordan (the theorist, as opposed to Dog-Woman's more action-oriented approach to life):

Did my childhood happen? I must believe it did, but I don't have any proof. My Mother says it did, but she is a fantasist, a liar and a murderer, though none of that would stop me loving her. I remember things, but I too am a fantasist and a liar, though I have not killed anyone yet.

There are others whom I could ask, but I would not count their word in a court of law. Can I count it in a more serious matter? I will have to assume that I had a childhood, but I cannot assume to have had the one I remember.

Everyone remembers things which never happened. And it is common knowledge that people often forget things which did. Either we are all fantasists and liars or the past has nothing definite in it. I have heard people say we are shaped by our childhood. But which one?

And this (also Jordan):

The self is not contained in any moment or any place, but it is only in the intersection of moment and place that the self might, for a moment, be seen vanishing through a door, which disappears at once.

"My own conviction is that the poetry is far the deepest in us and that the prose is only broken-down poetry; and likewise that to this our lives correspond. . . . As you will hear some people read poetry so that no mortal could tell it was poetry, so do some people read their own lives and those of others." -- George MacDonald from George MacDonald: An Anthology by C.S. Lewis.

Listening To: birdsong and shushing leaves.

Currently Reading: Having just finished Woolf's To the Lighthouse (glorious! wonderful! virtual perfection!), it seems only fitting that I should immediately begin rereading Helen Humphreys' The Lost Garden (see previous post on same).

An excerpt:
"One's first experience of love is either love received or love denied, and against that experience all our future desires and expectations are measured."

Recently Watched and Found Fascinating: Fellini's La Strada (1954). Heartbreakingly sad story gorgeously filmed. I was completely caught up in the life and unrequited loves of Gelsomina. I'm still thinking about whether or not her seemingly foolish love was vindicated in the end. So moving. No wonder it won an Oscar for best foreign language film.

Just About To: venture forth outdoors into a gentle, sun-filled afternoon and fill it with the sounds of . . . mowing.

Reading To the Lighthouse again . . .

Suddenly Mr. Ramsay raised his head as he passed and looked straight at her with his distraught wild gaze which was yet so penetrating, as if he saw you, for one second, for the first time, for ever; and she pretended to drink out of her empty coffee cup so as to escape him -- to escape his demand on her, to put aside a moment longer that imperious need. And he shook his head at her, and strode on ('Alone' she heard him say, 'Perished' she heard him say) and like everything else this strange morning the words became symbols, wrote themselves all over the grey-green walls. If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things.

Reading about Lily Piper and her exquisitely expressed evolution of self was such a pleasure! What a great character.

Joan Thomas's (deservedly) lauded novel Reading by Lightning (published by Goose Lane Editions) follows a young Canadian girl growing up in the pre-WWII years who is required to travel from her family's small farm in Manitoba to the erstwhile home of her father in Northern England. While not ordinarily a fan of bildungsroman novels in general (it's rather tricky working out a believable character under the weight of all those growing-up years), I found this one not only believable but effortless in the reading. Definitely engaging.

Written largely in first person (there is one integral perspective shift later in the book), Lily's childhood is revealed slowly, but with an eye to relevant detail. We are introduced to the conservative religious backdrop against which Lily will define herself, but we aren't ask to dwell on the theology. Everything is filtered through the wonderfully drawn Lily and her understanding and impressions of the disparate worlds she is forced to inhabit.

The first world, of dry prairie and thundering threats about the end of the world, is a charged world for Lily. She is forced to find her way around the 'spells' that plague her father and the seeming disinterest of her mother in anything outside of Lily's soul. Inquisitive, Lily attempts to make sense of her world through constructed narrative. She tells herself the story of her parents, their friend Joe Pye. She begins to invent a context for herself (not unlike her immigrant parents).

The second world, her father's England, the 'old' world with all that tangible history just laying about for the picking, is the world of her maturing, her love. She hopes to be able to leave the apocalypse behind, but it seems to dog her steps. As she takes care of her grandmother or stays on with her aunt and cousins, Lily opens herself up to a wider world. And the transition is believably charted, filled with interesting characters. None more so than Lily herself. And when she returns to the prairies, bringing that open world with her, what complications of responsibility and identity ensue. Fascinating stuff.

And such delicious prose! An excerpt (from Lily's time in England):

Instead of answering she launched into the refrain. For the oak and the ash and the bonny ivy tree . . . And while she sent the words out over the Edge in her raw, melancholy voice, we followed the wandering brow of the hill away from the town. It had been a cloudy day, and soon the sky was dark above us, and the lights of Oldham just a pool twinkling distantly below, the stars fallen into the valley, the constellations of the street lights disintegrating. Off somewhere on the dark slopes sheep bells clanged. The moor was full of movement and shadows, a darkness made up of things, not the absence of things that made up the bare darkness of the prairies. My dad would know this. He must have walked like this when he was young, with stout or cider singing in his head, not exactly here maybe, but on paths very like it through rough gorse. A north country lad.

It's June 17! Why is that exciting? Because in between taking advantage of another sun-filled day I'm participating in the online launch party for Trudy Morgan-Cole's new novel By the Rivers of Brooklyn.* Participating involves buying the book (at least one copy, but why stop at one?) and sending off good wishes to a good writer (for more info, though, and a contest go here to her book site). I've been waiting weeks . . . off to order some copies!

*Side note: Online launch parties have the added advantage of imagination augmentation. I can fill in the distance with details that would be impossible in real life . . . like the gorgeous (Audrey-Hepburn-like) dress I'd wear to celebrate, all shimmer on black. And I'd raise a glass of whatever non-alcoholic beverage I most desired (being a teetotaller and all) and offer my best wishes and congratulations to Ms. Morgan-Cole without any of that silly awkwardness or reserve I might feel in 'real' life. So here's to online launch parties! And great books!

Thinking about forests (beauty and danger)and tangled lives as I come to the end of Byatt's The Children's Book. Tragic, frequently disturbing, but shot through with gold and silver. I love this book and its attention to things large and small, the decorative intellect, the fragility of the self, the fairy tale reality. There is so much that one could talk about when it comes to this novel, really, and I have no idea where to begin except to say that it is worth the reading. Following the interior and exterior lives of Olive Wellwood, her friends, and their children is to embark on a serious journey through late nineteenth century/early twentieth century thought/society/politics/sexuality.

The cast of characters is rather large, but characterization does not suffer. Nor does the story as a whole. There are complex family secrets, hidden lives, untold stories. There are stories told when they shouldn't be, stories that won't stop telling, stories that stop when they shouldn't. Is it about story? Or about living? And what's the difference? We're all living our stories every day unless, like Tom (Olive's son), someone else is doing it for us.

What a thought-filled, thought-provoking layer of narratives is this novel. What a feast for the mind!


A few more excerpts (this one is about museums and shifting values):

The interior still resembled a warehouse, or a public hospital. Prosper Cain had been present when the then Director, Arthur Banks Skinner, had been harshly and suddenly demoted in a public meeting, called to announce a new Director, Cecil Harcourt Smith. Skinner was aesthetic. The new regime was orderly and utilitarian . . . Objects in the museum were displayed by the succession of materials: glass with glass, steel with steel, cloth with cloth, like with like, so that the craftsman might study the development of his skill, and the historian the changes over time. Claude Phillips wrote that the soul had gone, that beauty had vanished.

And this (regarding psychoanalysis and why Gabriel Goldwasser, who 'was training to be a psychoanalyst,' stopped training):

He smiled, mildly. 'My parents were - are - psychoanalysts. In Vienna. They sent me to the Burgholzli in Switzerland, to talk to Herr Dr. Jung. They thought it was an essential part of living, to be psychoanalysed. I earned my bread there, as I do here, helping. I was telling my dreams to Dr Jung and also to Dr Otto Gross who was telling his dreams to Dr Jung and hearing Dr Jung's dreams in return. They were angels wrestling, you must understand.' He paused.

'I dreamed the wrong dreams.'

'Wrong in what way?'

'I think they were - timid dreams, is that a word?'

'It is a good word.'

'Quiet dreams, like a cow dreaming of grass, or a squirrel of nuts. They were judged as inadequate dreams. And by listening to my silly dreams, bit by bit, those two changed my dreams. I dreamed I was stepping down stone tunnels to hidden caves, full of dragons and lions and snakes. I dreamed of the seven-branched candle - which I also did in my timid dreams, I am a Jew, the candle to me means a meal with my family - though my family had been dreamed into flesh-eating monsters and petrified women to please those two.'

'You are making me laugh, but it isn't funny.'

'No man has a right to dictate another man's inner life - the furniture inside his skull. They made me into someone else. An acolyte - you say acolyte? - good - of a new ancient religion. We were all dreaming the same dreams, because they were the dreams that excited Herr Jung and Herr Gross.

'They invented me, do you see?'

'I do.'

'They had made me into a - into an unpleasant sculpture, or painting. I was trapped in my artificial dreams, and couldn't get out.'

And there are so many ways of being trapped in artificial dreams.

While the Inkslinger household woke to grey skies and rain-soaked plants, the sun has come out with a vengeance and is beckoning me gardenwards. Writing, reviewing, reading . . . the sun cares not for these things.

However, in between various yard-related duties (in this case, mowing the lawn), I'm finishing up Byatt's The Children's Book. Other than a momentary muddle about dates in the last third of the narrative, I'm finding this to be one of my favourite Byatt works. The plot, as it unfolds (wonderfully paced with disturbing, subtle shifts and stabs of light and shadow), reveals much -- or causes the reader to ponder quite a bit -- about writing, parenting, children, readers in general (and particular). Reality and story intermingle for these children -- Byatt, at one point, uses an image of two houses, one seen and one unseen, that are inexorably interwoven -- and each must make a decision (or series of decisions, of course) about his/her relationship to his/her own particular story. And that's just the most obvious part of the narrative. Glorious! Dark, though. Oh so dark in places.

And, as always in a Byatt novel or story, there are the bits of historical or contemporary detail that just draw one in, ever in and on to want to discover more and more. With every Byatt novel there are writers or artists mentioned one wants to track down, and, in this case, I'm interested in learning more about pottery, German fairy tales, and puppetry. So much fun!

Have I mentioned I think Byatt is one of the best novelists writing today? It bears repeating.

An excerpt (Olive Wellwood is talking to her friend August Steyning about the books she writes for her children, starting with the one about her son Tom):

'It's an interminable story. I'm telling it for Tom. Each of my children,' she said, in the charming voice with which she had spoken to Miss Catchpole [interviewer], 'has his or her own story, in his or her own notebook. They were bedtime stories, but now the children are older - or some of them are - they're a kind of game. I don't know why I keep that going. Sometimes it feels a little silly. You know what you have said, about stories under the hills, of old things and inhuman things, and magic that used to run through everything and has now shrunk to odd little patches of magic woods and hummocks? Toby Youlgreave [another friend] talks a great deal about the Brothers Grimm and their belief that fairytales were the old religion - the old inner life - of the German people? Well, I sometimes feel, stories are the inner life of this house. A kind of spinning of energy. I am this spinning fairy in the attic, I am Mother Goose quacking away what sounds like comforting chatter but is really - is really what holds it all together.' She gave a little laugh, and said 'Well, it makes money, it does hold it all together.'

This conversation sticks with one as the narrative progresses. It is accurate, for Olive, but partial, and carries implications. Fascinating story!

Confession: I'm a sucker for certain poems of a Victorian persuasion that involve quests and deceptions and the general chaos resulting from men and women at cross purposes (or worse). I wrote my undergrad thesis on Tennyson's The Lady of Shalott (and still love the topic), E.B.B.'s Aurora Leigh remains a solid favourite, and I have a soft spot for Isabella Valancy Crawford poems.

What Crawford did, though, was add a little twist from time to time to the typically sentimental, even maudlin, depths in which Victorian poesy found itself from time to time (not the aforementioned, of course :).

I've been reading this one, lately. A little didactic, familiar themes, but still, somehow, I think she manages something worth going back to . . . there is an interesting commingling of natural and mythical imagery.

True and False by Isabella Valancy Crawford

Oh! spring was in his shining eyes
And summer in his happy soul;
He bounded o'er the misty rise
And saw the purple ocean roll.

With stars above and stars below,
The lovely eve was fair as noon;
He saw above him richly glow
The white shores of the sailing moon,

Her vales of jet, her pearly peaks,
The lustre on her shining sands;
Leaped eager roses to his cheeks, --
He cried, "I seek her silver strands!"

There rose a siren where the foam
Of ocean sparkled most with stars:
She combed gold locks with golden comb;
She floated past the murmuring bars.

She sang so loud, so silvery clear,
The trees in far woods seemed to stir,
And seaward lean; from lake and mere
Rushed eager rivers down to her.

She swept in mist of far blown hair,
Star-white, from glittering steep to steep;
She loved his gay and dauntless air --
Rose loftier from the purple deep,

Till, whiter than white coral rocks,
She glimmered high against the moon.
And oh, she loved his raven locks!
And oh, she sang him to his doom!

"O boy, why dost thou upward turn
The crystal of thy youthful eyes?
The true moon in the sea doth burn;
Far 'neath my silver feet she lies.

"Look down, look down, and thou shalt see
A fairer moon and mellower stars;
A shadow pale and wan is she
That floats o'er heaven's azure bars.

"Look down, look down -- the true moon lies
Deep in mid-ocean's fairest part;
Nor let that wan shade on the skies
Draw all the tides of thy young heart.

"O let mine arms thy neck entwine!
O boy, come down to me, to me!
I'll bring thee where the moon doth shine,
The round moon in the silver sea."

He heard the song, he felt the spell,
He saw her white hand beckon on,
Believed the tale she sang so well,
Beheld the moon that falsely shone.

The true moon wheeled her silver isle
Serene in heaven's blue mystery;
He sank in those white arms of guile
To seek the false moon in the sea.

I'm not really the kind of person who responds well to interruptions while I'm working.* Once interrupted, it's almost impossible for me to get back into the head space I was in before being pulled out. That's why I loved this bit in The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt (which I'm happily consuming at a self-controlled, savouring pace . . . for now):

"She could not think of what to write next. And at that precise moment - a relief, and a terror to writers - she heard the wheels of the station-fly on the gravel. Humphry was back."

I love how it captures the dual problem of an interruption for a writer . . . as the obvious halting of what one was thinking of/the creative flow/whathaveyou as well as it serving as an excuse to leave whatever stall one might have been in the middle of.

So far, I'm marvelling in the details of pottery and Olive Wellwood's fairy-filled imagination. As usual, Byatt is bringing all sorts of subtle shifts, depth of knowledge, and period accuracy to bear.



* Interruptions at the Inkslinger house often come as felines (this particular interruption, below, is Hatchepsut, undoubted pharoah of the place):

What a good mimic Georgette Heyer was. And I don't mean mimic as a pejorative, not in this case. Her ability to ape a certain style of speech and even behaviour for her characters is just so acute. I've finished reading Simon the Coldheart by Heyer (yay for Sourcebooks and their lovely reprints of Heyer novels) and I could only marvel at the readability of her use of 'period language.' Usually that kind of thing is so off-putting in a contemporary (or even last century) attempt. But the use of 'ye' and 'thou' and 'lad' did nothing to detract from the sheer fun of this tale. There was a playfulness about it that contributed a flavourful backdrop to the tale: a romp through medieval England and France on the coattails of Prince Henry/Henry V via fictional Simon Beauvallet, the cold heart himself.

Simon, the illegitimate son of the nobleman Malvallet, works his way up through the ranks of the nobility through determination, honour, and skill at arms. Making friends with former enemies, earning the respect of his men, fighting alongside the future king, Simon earns a reputation for justice and stubbornness/dependability. Known for his gentleness with children, he is equally well-known for his disinterest in women (i.e. has a warm, but as yet untouched, heart). Until he comes up against an 'Amazon' in France, the Lady Margaret of Belremy. The inevitable occurs, of course, but the tone throughout makes this such a fun read. And, really, who doesn't like a ripping tale with knights and battles and sieges?

About loss and leaving. That's what I'd answer if you asked me what this book of poems is about. And so much more: questions asked of God, memory as landscape, sex, language. Biblical allusions are mined. These are metaphysical, intellectual poems and yet they are tangible, sensory-filled, awash in dailiness.

Evidently not resting on her laurels, Anne Compton's Asking Questions Indoors and Out is a brilliant collection that experiments with the shape of the poem on the page yet still delivers rich, rewarding poems that fill the senses. No stone unturned, no thought overlooked. Metaphor, line, diction, nothing is out of place. And how the line is used! This is, after all, a lingering, thoughtful journey off the Island, as it were, and the long-lined poems seem to reflect that. Ponderous without being dull or dragging the reader down. This is a collection that notices much and delivers more.

Just take a look at these lines from "The Waiting Well"

"Belief's the absence of rope - / call it commonsense - but don't call for it halfway down. It'll be on a level you're not."

Or this one from "Poetry and Belief"

"Like poems, we're refugees from another century."

Sometimes epigrammatic, consistently intellectually rigorous (though without being pedantic), this book is by far my favourite of Compton's Island trilogy. The first two collections (Opening the Island and Processional) each won the Atlantic Poetry Prize and the latter garnered a Governor General's Award. And I loved them both, but I think this one may be even better.

The landscape of time and memory, relationships and loss, materialize as if conjured down to the paper before you. But it doesn't look like any country you've been to before, for all its familiarity of feeling. And that contradiction is fascinating. Add to that Compton's skill with language and metaphor and you have a book of poems worth reading and rereading.