The Symphony

Moby-Dick
by Herman Melville, 1851

The end of Moby-Dick is ordained from the very start, for the narrator who says “Call me Ishmael” is in fact the only survivor of the ship and the voyage he tries to describe and understand. Up to this point (The Symphony is chapter 132), the book’s narrator has been in no hurry to arrive at the climactic events he must inevitably describe. In fact, he has perfected a number of dodges to slow his progress while not quite entirely breaking the momentum of his telling. But he knows that once he has described Ahab’s refusal to help the Rachel’s captain – this captain pleads Ahab’s help: his son is part of the crew of a missing whaleboat, and Ahab says, “I will not do it.” – once these events are told, Ishmael knows there is little of the story left.

At this point, Ahab eats only two meals a day and he has quit shaving. His beard “darkly grew all gnarled, as unearthed roots of trees blown over.” His life has now become “one watch on deck” as he scans the ocean for any sign of the white whale, the same whale whose pursuit he knows (from his brief encounter with the whale ship Delight) has most recently resulted in the deaths of an entire crew of one whale boat (“you sail upon their tomb,” as the Delight’s captain has said). None of this deters Ahab in the least.

Part of Ishmael’s effort all along has been to try to come to grips with this captain, this man whose commitment gripped his crew (including Ishmael himself) almost without question, leading to their deaths. If Ishmael saw Ahab as merely crazy, his task would be simpler. But Ahab is not merely crazy, and so before the rush of the book’s last action, Ishmael (or, if you prefer, Melville) makes one last effort to capture Ahab’s complexities. This cannot be done simply by repeating what little the young sailor must have seen or heard; it must be done by the older narrator who has already become accustomed to filling in gaps in the story and imagining conversations he could not possibly have witnessed. This last effort to picture Ahab must be done in the one sure fashion Ishmael (or Melville) knows – by drawing contrasts. Inevitably, this means casting Ahab in conversation with his first mate, Starbuck.

The Symphony chapter presents a lull in the action. The weather is fine, the air “transparently soft,” the sun “giving this gentle air to this bold and rolling sea.” The world of this chapter reveals itself as an uncommon unity of the masculine and the feminine – a wholeness. Such wholeness, calm, and peace reaches even Ahab: “That glad, happy air, that winsome sky, did at last stoke and caress him.” As readers, we see the effect before we hear Ahab say a word. What Ahab does is weep – one tear, “nor did the Pacific contain such wealth as that one wee drop.”

Starbuck sees this and draws closer to his captain, though he does not speak. Ahab turns to him and says “Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and mild looking sky.”

Thus begins the Ishmael narrator’s last effort to make sense of Ahab. As Starbuck and Ahab talk, we learn that Ahab is 58 years old and that just prior to the Pequod’s departure, he married. In fact, as Ahab says it, I “sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow—wife? wife?—rather a widow with her husband alive!” What follows is perhaps as indicative of Melville's deep questioning as any passage he wrote.

Throughout this book, part of the drama has turned on Ishmael’s effort (by no means straight-line) to tell his story – literally, to make sense. In this light, the Symphony chapter represents an astonishing and deeply eloquent culmination. Its last 200 words embody Ishmael’s (or Melville’s) last unanswered questions about Ahab and his actions. “But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the aim smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow…” Soon enough, the Pequod will go down with all hands except one. He will drift on a coffin converted to a lifebuoy. He will be picked up later by the Rachel. And he will then face two obvious and inevitable questions: “who are you?” and “what happened?”

The book Moby Dick is the best answer he can make. He will start it by saying, “Call me Ishmael.”

On For All I Know
by Erik Muller
67 pages, privately printed
Eugene, Oregon, 2008

Consider "For all I know, ..." just as phrase.

Sometimes we use it to introduce an assertion we're unsure of, as in "For all I know, she'll win the lottery." As a phrase, it points to how unlikely something might be. It's also a phrasing that takes its speaker off the hook, a way of saying 'I don't really know what I'm talking about here, so don't take this too seriously.'

But there is at least one more way to hear this phrase, namely as a quite serious act of dedication, one that might be paraphrased as 'on behalf of all I know' or 'in praise of all I know.' This possible confusion of meanings arising out of just a four-word phrase demonstrates the challenge of any writer and most particularly the challenge of any poet: the aim is to make clear, to speak accurately, but the language at hand is often generic ('book' you say, which one?). The phrase 'for all I know' is open to multiple interpretations. Erik Muller titles his latest book For All I Know. Titles call attention to themselves; that's their job. Muller knows the multiple meanings in his title, and he wants them all.

The book's first set opens with poems addressing the ambiguous (or is it unambiguous) topic of two-by-two human company. One could say "marriage," regardless of the political usages which so heavily freighted that term, and Muller's poems do so. Their impulse is celebratory and evident first in dedications: "for Eve and Nigel, married 8-15-97," for example. While the impulse in such poems is clear, the speaker knows that finding the accurate (and adequate) descriptive words "for Naomi and Phil, married 20 years" is not immediately obvious. Here's the opening stanza of "What They Say":

Stone opposite stone.
Poplars intertwined
at root, crowns nodding
with each green shift of wind.
Swales of camas spires
sparking blue volts.
You can know what
they say (if they say).

Each of the sentences in this opening stanza represents an opening gambit, an effort to describe a marriage. They at once start over and build on each other. But it's those camas spires that come closest (so the poem suggests) to standing in for the relationships a marriage both establishes and requires:

Turned up high
jets of camas
say to you: Blue
replenishes, multiplies.
Mark the spare flame
kindling the jay's tail,
chicory, certain
rare eyes.

At its best, a marriage makes an ecology lively and in bloom, so this poem knows. (And it finds room for a rhyme: multiplies / eyes).

For All I Know is a book of loves, affections, observations arising out of a deeply felt connection to the landscape and history of the American West. Sometimes this connection finds expression in images like those camas spires. In such moments, the landscape and the personal conspire. They make their own sort of marriage.

Muller's poems consistently reflect an interest in this sense of place knowledge -- how to make a place for oneself and one's loved ones, but also of how to know, be, and act inside a knowledge of particular locales. All this intrigues Muller, and his poems often note it. "But the Wind" starts by referring to one of the West's great railroad empire builders, James Hill, whose rail tracks still stitch together wide expanses. In this poem, high winds have forced the trains to stop in sheltered areas rather than risk being literally blown off the tracks. As might be expected, passengers fret a little. However, one of them, clearly an Indian, simply pops one of the passenger car doors, jumps to the ground, and heads off overland. The poem's speaker watches this man as he walks, his figure ever smaller "as if / being dissolved in space." The rails will eventually deliver their passengers -- they show one way home. And this one passenger, more deeply native, clearly knows another.

For better or worse, contemporary poets are inheritors of a style and tradition and set of assumptions that tend to value the prosy rather than the poetic, the offhand rather than the studied or rhetorical, the modest rather than the ambitious, the authentic rather than the artifice. These are false binaries, yet they carry some power. At their worst, such default values make for a smaller poetry -- short in length and slight in content. Such poetry can too readily assume that the larger whole is evident in the smallest grain. But a book itself can counter such drift. In a book's length and ordering, larger relationships form and larger implications emerge. For All I Know features two lengthy sequences, and it is divided into four sections. But it succeeds as a book because over its 67 pages it makes and sustains a coherency of interests and style. This is most surely not the only way to make order in a book of poems, but it is one way, and Muller makes it work effectively. The poems make a larger whole. For All I Know betrays its title only in that the sound of sense so evident here could not possibly be finished with the impulse to inquire.

(Note: Author Erik Muller is also the editor of Traprock Books, dedicated to the publication of work by Oregon writers. Traprock Books, 1330 E. 25th Ave., Eugene, OR 97403. )

"Speak from within."
On Eternal Enemies
by Adam Zagajewski
translated by Clare Cavanagh
ISBN 0374216347
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008, $24


Reading always happens in the midst of other things: it's vacation time, or it's 8:30, dishes done, no concert to go to or listen to, no rented movie at hand, tomorrow's work can wait, and thus among many books one suggests itself. Because reading can so often work this way, it carries with it an element of travel: we leave one where and when -- we go into a book.

To enter Adam Zagajewski's collection of poems, Eternal Enemies, is to engage a traveler's voice, a voice mostly washed clean of foolishness, advertising, self promotion, deception, and idle chatter. This traveler has returned "years later" to a nameless "gray and lovely city," returned a changed person: "I am no longer the student / of philosophy, poetry, and curiosity, / I'm not the young poet who wrote / too many lines." This is self definition by negation: it describes what is no longer the case as a way to point towards what is. And these lines, coming in the collection's first poem ("Star") become the collection's introduction.

Negation depends on duality: not A but B. And the opposite of negation is comparison: A is like (and unlike) B. In both cases, the point is to bring two things into the same frame so that they may inform each other, as in the last lines of "Enroute," which bring these two things into juxtaposition: "The world's materiality at dawn -- / and the soul's fraility." Materiality and the soul -- these are, perhaps, the eternal enemies of this collection's title. And they are most certainly the twin foci of many of these poems, particularly when one factors in the workings of time. Here is the entirety of "Music in the Car":

Music heard with you
at home or in the car
or even while strolling
didn't always sound as pristine
as piano tuners might wish --
it was sometimes mixed with voices
full of fear and pain,
and then that music
was more than music,
it was our living
and our dying.

Any satisfying reading of Eternal Enemies depends on a reader's willingness to attend to this voice and allow its evident seriousness. But it's not all seriousness, for Zagajewski is also quite capable of a wry humor (as in "The Diction Teacher Retires from the Theater School"). Still, we have to be willing to go to this place. And American readers will recognize that it is not an essentially American place, but rather a Polish one. Zagajewski stands in the company of Milosz and Szymborska (to name but two). His place is Poland and exile from it and return to it. As a place at once literal, historical, and literary, it includes Auschwitz, Stolarska Street, Karmelica Street, Long Street (in a "proud Renaissance town"). It includes Urzednicza and Krzysztofory streets, and "what killing is, and smiling / and what wars are, seen or unseen, just or not, / and what it means to be a Jew, a German, or / a Pole, or maybe just human."

These poems speak often of a restlessness that seems at once physical and metaphysical:

Let me see, I ask.
Let me persist, I say.
A cold rain falls at night.
In the streets and avenues of my city
quiet darkness is hard at work.
Poetry searches for radiance.

In a famously lengthy and deeply fascinating work on the morality of fiction, Wayne Booth argues that good literature is a friend to us; good literature is in all ways good company. Odd as it might sound, Adam Zagajewski's Eternal Enemies celebrates friendships of various sorts. Zagajewski even celebrates friendships he recognizes are impossible: friendship with "A passerby with proud eyes / whom you'll never know," friendship with "The old man sipping coffee / in St.-Lazare, who reminds you of someone," even "friendship with yourself / --since after all you don't know who you are."

(A final note: poems in translation always raise the questions of translation. Here I can say only that Clare Cavanagh's English seems absolutely in sync with a Polish I do not know.)

Stonehenge Redux

The Great Wall of China meanders up hill and down dale; composed of many sections, it reportedly runs nearly 4000 miles. The Great Pyramid at Giza covers thirteen acres at its base, rises roughly 450 feet, and is some 5000 years old. Stonehenge, parts of it, are as old as the Great Pyramid, older than the Great Wall. I have seen Egypt and China only in pictures and on television -- two media that by their nature reduce the large to manageable size: a 4 x 6 photograph, a 29 inch screen. But I have visited Stonehenge half a dozen times, and it still eludes me. The stones are books without text.

Stonehenge rises out of the Salisbury plain just past the intersection of two well-traveled roads, the A 303 and the A 360. In fact, the A 360, which is the road to the car park and the English Heritage shop at the entrance to the Stonehenge site, cuts across the Avenue, a lengthy, shallow, ancient excavation marking the line of the sun's light at sunrise in midsummer. Mercifully, the shop is set below ground (thus making it invisible from Stonehenge itself). You pass by the shop, through a tunnel under the A 360, and surface on the walk to the stone circle itself.

What one's first impression might be in the summer, with friendly winds, blue skies, and a car park choked with coaches, I don't know. I have visited only in the winter, the last time in a rain so wind-driven it was possible to turn one's back to it and keep your front entirely dry. I've seen Stonehenge without feeling crowded. Each time, the utter massive quiet of the place has asserted itself.

The stones are tall, wide, grey, heavy, at once natural and unnatural (the lintels are clearly squared). They are huge, but not so huge. Unlike a skyscraper or a cathedral, they retain just enough of human scale to make you seriously consider calories and energy. You think about how they got there, how long it must have taken to work them into the shapes you see, how they were positioned -- lintels on uprights -- and by whom. You wonder what idea could have unified so many individuals that they would go to such obvious trouble with no machinery, no electrical or gasoline power, possessed only of their brains and the combined strength of many arms, backs, and legs. The largest stones weigh 25 tons (ie 50,000 pounds -- think about that next time you get on a scale). They were transported, no one quite knows how, some twenty miles. Smaller bluestones, weighing in at only 4 tons, were maneuvered, somehow, over 200 miles from South Wales. Half of them are fallen down now, half of them aren't.

What you do at Stonehenge is walk around it, looking at it from every angle. Small ropes and beige gravel indicate the path you're to take, and you never get closer than perhaps 25 or 30 feet. Though you do not get to walk among the stones or touch them, you also see them without distraction. You walk, look, pause. Then you walk, look, pause. What you see is plain as stone can be. Yet it is not explained.

Stonehenge makes out of a wide and indiscriminate landscape a human place. It is as much an act as a thing. It asserts human presence on that plain, under that sky. This is an assertion of impossibly ancient origins, and it renders odd the commonplace sounds of cars on the road or fighter jets in training (a military base is nearby). Somehow, though, the sheep grazing seem perfectly at home. Then grey skies lower, rain starts falling, the wind freshens and your hands seek the warmth of pockets. But the enormity of Stonehenge, as act and as idea, remains deeply moving and profoundly elusive. It cannot be held except in brief inklings and partial understandings that feel more like wordless revelation than anything else. There's little frame of reference for this, and few words to explain it.

It's interesting to watch the reactions of others. Stonehenge slows the steps of those who approach it. Groups quiet and splinter off in ones and twos. You look, move on a bit, and stop again, all the while absorbed in an effort to take in such a place, to consider what implications it asserts, to recover your breath. The path circles the stones entirely, passing the Heel Stone, wich is oddly sandwiched between path, enclosing fence, and the A 360. From a distance, one stone in the circle seems to have a face on it, though this is likely just an oddity of lichen or rainwater. As for the stones themselves, they register nothing at all. A crow alights on one of them, then flies away with the wind. Stonehenge is question and answer together, but the text is mystery.

Eventually the January weather wins -- we are bodies, not stones, and it's cold. But the stones' hold works on you. They are solid and imposing remnants of time out of mind. It takes conscious effort to turn your back on this place. So you linger. You take many pictures even in bad light. Then, finally, you walk back through the tunnel and into the shop, where no mug or cap or postcard will do justice to whatever it is that has just happened to you.

A version of this essay first appeared in Detours, published by the International Programs Office, Linfield College.

A Short Ramble on Books / Authors / Anthologies
Discussed below:
100 Favourite Scottish Poems
Edited by Stewart Conn
Published by Luath Press & The Scottish Poetry Library, 2006
ISBN 978-1-9-0522261-2

The books we hold in our hands, open, peruse, and read were (most of them) manufactured by machines. They arrived in our hands via bookstores or from on-line sellers. But whether purchased from AbeBooks online, or Powells (in Portland, Oregon) or The Poetry Bookstore, or, for that matter, from Murder and Mayhem (both the latter in that marvelous town of books, Hay-on-Wye, in Wales), we tend to forget that the actual contents were arranged, considered, revised, and at last determined for good or for ill by someone -- often someone called "the author." Criticism late in the last century quite interestingly called into question the degree to which authors ought to -- or might significantly make -- any difference to readers. Authors, even famous ones like Ms. Rowling, are generally remote from readers. Many authors we read are dead. In any case, authors tend not to want to make much comment ('read the book,' they say). And when they do make comment, can readers trust it? After all, whose relationship to a book is more complicated or fraught?

Yet in general, authors do (or did) exist, and most of the time they can be named. Shakespeare is one author often suspect. Despite the recent industry in speculative biographies, we know both very little and quite a lot about his life and character. He may not have been Shakespeare, so we hear from the Oxfordians who champion Edward de Vere as a liklier bet. And Mark Twain, who's smart on so many things, said famously that Shakespeare wasn't the author of his own plays, but someone else with his name was. We do know Shakespeare's plays were not published in his lifetime. When we read the First Folio (1623), are we reading what he wished us to read? Maybe.

So yes, authorship can be a vexed question. Yet we can agree that the great majority of books are assembled by single authors: Kate Walbert, Marie Howe, Peter Lovesey, Sylvia Plath, to name but four. Yet even here, murk exists. Sylvia Plath's Collected Poems (I can see it on my shelf) is not the assembly of her own deliberations; it was published after her death. But Lovesey's mystery novels are surely his own work, presented as he wishes them, as are Walbert's novels and Marie Howe's books of poems.

* * *

This long preamble suggests three observations.

The first is that whenever possible it is enlightening to read individual books rather than anthologies or compendiums or even collected poems. Individual books are, by definition, individual works. They represent and reflect one artistic effort an author has made. (A collected poems jumbles these efforts inside a single cover -- a convenience to publishers, but perhaps not to readers.) Better yet is to purchase an individual book printed in the author's lifetime. This way, you see what the author might well have held in her (or his) own actual hand. Thus, one of the books I own and most value is a late printing of Yeats's The Tower. It features the same artful green cover (by Sturge Moore) as the first American edition that surely Yeats knew. And this year I've purchased a copy of Dylan Thomas's Deaths and Entrances ("Fern Hill" is its last poem), Thomas's last book published in his lifetime. The publisher is J.M. Dent & Sons, London; it's a thin little book, bound in orange cloth in a plain, similarly colored dust jacket, Third Impression, 1949. It looks as though it's printed from scraps from other projects; few of the pages are exactly the same size. And the book itself is only four and a half inches wide, five and three quarters tall.

The second observation is this: anthologies tend to confound the question of authorship. Whether the anthology is a Palgrave Treasury, an onionskin tome by W.W. Norton, or Dog Tales: Classic Tales about Smart Dogs, the contents (however duly identified by author) were assembled into a book by an editor. Do these individual pieces reflect their author's interests, predilictions, talents, and overall voice? Perhaps. One would need familiarity with an author's entire oeuvre to know for sure. Do these individual pieces reflect an editor's expertise, bias, and purpose? One assumes the answer here is yes.

Observation number three: anthologies can also be wonderful introductions. The anthology in my hand at the moment is titled 100 Favourite Scottish Poems, edited by Stewart Conn (Edinburgh's first official Poet Laureate) and published jointly by Luath Press Limited and the Scottish Poetry Library. A pleasure of an anthology (one you're not assigned to read but merely wish to) can arise in the recognition of familiar names. Seeing authors you recognize can go some distance towards confirming an editor's critical tastes. Here, seeing Alistair Reid's name in the table of contents bodes well. (Reid's book, Weathering, remains delightful.) Other names are readily known: Robert Burns, of course, and Walter Scott, Robert Lewis Stevenson, Muriel Spark, and the contemporary Kathleen Jamie. But who was Lady Nairne? Violet Jacob? Who was Alexander Gray?

Any way one considers it, a country is an invention of place and people -- and what those people value, claim, revile, and profess. Stewart Conn's editorial hand is a sure one here. If you would know the Scots, perhaps this anthology is as good a place as any to read (delightedly) and learn.

On The Outlander
a novel by Gil Adamson
Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers, 2007
329 p., $25.95

It may be that point-of-view becomes the novelist's most important technical decision. That, and timing -- that is, at what point in fictional time to start the actual narrative. Gil Adamson starts her narrative, set in 1903, with a description of men and dogs tracking a girl who scrambles "through ditchwater and bulrushes, desperate to erase her scent." The men are described as "wordless, exhausted from running with the dogs." Briefly, the girl lets herself stop running: "In the moonlight, her beautiful face was hollow as a mask, eyes like holes above the smooth cheeks." About her, we learn this much: "Nineteen years old and already a widow. Mary Boulton. Widowed by her own hand."

So starts a story of pursuit: men and dogs chasing a nineteen year old girl-widow-killer. Readers do not learn the story of the death of her husband for a very long time. What we do experience is the shifting point-of-view of the pursued (Mary Boulton) and the pursuing (the brothers of her late husband). Of these perspectives, Mary's is the one we live in more. She has no money, has no idea where she is going except away from what she has done, nor can she anticipate who she might meet or how they might react to her. But in these early pages the novel consistently refers to her as "the widow." And most of the time, we see her situation as desperate flight.

Along the way, readers learn a few things about her past, usually in an aside. For example, we learn she "had never known a mother." We learn that she's more likely a city person than a rural one, for "there had always been something about her that disturbed animals." But mostly the novel keeps us in the immediacy of her flight, the minute-by-minute desperation of what to do next and how to stay ahead of those she knows pursue her. Even in this desperation, we learn that "she must not think of babies. She must not think at all." Clearly, something bad has happened: she flees not just the men who pursue her; she is running from memory she cannot or will not face.

For a very long time now, The West (including the Canadian West, for this is a Canadian book by a Canadian writer) has been a place to flee into, a place to disappear, and disappearing is precisely Mary Boulton's aim. She never articulates this, she simply continues west, away from law and order and towards the nonjudgmental and nonjudicial landscape without people. And as Gil Adamson clearly knows, therein lies a paradox. The farther Mary goes, the more vulnerable and alone she becomes. In fact, without being befriended providentially, twice, by complete strangers who know the countryside and how to survive in it, this novel's story would have reached a speedier conclusion -- one with Mary dying of exposure and malnutrition.

The Outlander works so compellingly because Gil Adamson's imagination puts readers into Mary Boulton's situation, mind and body. When she becomes soaked to the skin, shivering and delirious, Adamson makes readers experience precisely these conditions. It becomes impossible not to want this main character to survive. That, and we also know that her survival will be the only way we might ever learn what happened to initiate Mary's terrified effort to get away. The Outlander must sooner or later come to grips with that initiating action, and when it does, readers must decide their own judgment of Mary Boulton. That this becomes a difficult, complex decision attests to the depth of character Adamson gives Mary Boulton. And when, near the end of this book, Mary finally looks at herself in a mirror, readers gain a deeper understanding of how difficult it may be for us to know ourselves.

On Peter Sears' Luge
a chapbook of poems, Cloudbank Books, 2008
P.O. Box 610, Corvallis, OR 97339
www.cloudbankbooks.com


Short books like this one (14 pages) don't tax one's patience too much, even though yes, this is poetry, not prose, and yes, 14 pages = fourteen poems to hold in your head, if Google hasn't made us all too stupid to still be able to do this.

No, the difficult thing about Luge isn't that it's made of poems but rather that the speaker in these poems knows he's going to die. He knows this not abstractly, not in the surface way that we invoke in the old joke "well, no one gets out alive." This speaker knows it in a cellular way; his normal incredulity has mostly given way to a state of actually believing it, and this fact has engaged his imagination. Such knowledge -- call it deep knowledge -- may arrive anytime; there's no particular schedule here. But once it does arrive, it offers only two possible responses: run away fast, or change, take the ride. Hence, this small book's title: Luge.

Of course, it's the imagination's ride, as much as the body's, and this means that memory -- or imagination, for at this point they amount to the same thing -- ranges far and brings back the oddest intensities. Thus, in "You Weren't There," the poem's speaker invokes a moment in confrontation with his father, a moment when his father is so angered that "If I had taken one step into the room / I probably would have stepped on /an invisible downed power line / and electrocuted both of us." The excess of this is half funny, in a wry sort of way, and half terrifying. Which is the point. The very next poem presents this speaker at the age of 16, "his feet, his main feature, / are Smithsonian." It concludes by identifying this poor youth's "most trying habit," which is "to stand in front of you / and appear to be about to say something and not." This is also the same speaker whose third-grade imagination could get so caught up with the fantasy of being a World War II fighter pilot that "if I got shot down and crashed and burned up, // it wasn't clear if I could shift back to being just / a third grader -- or if I'd be gone..."

The poems in Luge do not suffer from the habit of promising but not delivering. Quite the contrary. But these poems do pose a consistent challenge: they juxtapose one persona with another (and sometimes with yet another). "The Guy Opposite Me in the Chemo Ward," a guy who's seeing purple trees because of the hallucinatory effects of treatment, this "guy" may be another patient. Or he may be the speaker himself hallucinating a new persona in order to keep insanity at bay.

These poems take us to the place from which they speak. As a reader, you pay attention here even if the experience seems so non-consumer oriented. What's beautiful can be so intense that the intensity becomes painful. Time goes by too fast.

What the poems make and assert most crucially is a pace at which experience -- the world's words -- arrive. At this pace, at the pace of a poem, aspects of experience are possible that may not be possible otherwise. What aspects of experience? Regret, nostalgia, fact-telling, surprises of memory, specificities of perception that amount to beauty. Even a nice long hot tub followed by a "Late Nap" and that sleep wherein "nobody comes after me, I don't / have to go anywhere, and I am immortal." Yes, it can feel like that sometimes too.

“This is the division of virtues through their centers”

On Emma Howells' Slim Night of Recognition
Poems, Eastern Washington University Press, 2007


The critic Roland Barthes is famous, or infamous if you choose, for a number of declarations having to do with authors, with their works, and with how readers read. In “The Death of the Author,” he argues that “writing is the destruction of every voice … the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.” Later in the same essay, Barthes says “it is language which speaks, not the author.” Barthes’ point has something to do with language itself, with how it at once gestures towards something and yet falsifies it: “apple” is not and will never be the fruit itself.

Yet it is quite possible to visit Westminster Abbey, take with you a page of the Prologue of Canterbury Tales, and read it while standing at Chaucer’s grave. You can do something similar at Wordsworth’s tomb in Grasmere or Emily Dickinson's in Amherst. And if you have written a book yourself, you know something of the odd but very definitely present relationship between your self and the object you may pick up off the table, hold in your hand, and open and read.

Such observations come to mind when holding Emma Howell’s new book, Slim Night of Recognition. Her picture graces the book’s back cover, and next to it is a brief biography that reads in part “She spent a year studying in Spain and six months in Brazil, where she died at the age of twenty. This book is her first collection.” These two sentences together serve to stun you for a moment with their implications: twenty is too young for anyone, especially any writer, to die; this book is her first collection, which means she was most unusually talented to have produced work that qualifies as more than mere juvenilia; this is her first collection and we shall have no others. Of such recognitions, the last must be the hardest, the slipperiest to grasp.

So what voice do we hear in Emma Howells’ poems? It is, first, a voice beguiled by consonants and vowels, by the rhythms a sentence can make and repeat. Even before clear narrative or definite summarizable content, this sense of language comes through. You can hear it particularly here in the r’s of dresser, supper, father, letter:

The hands that surrounded me made bird
shapes and catcalls
purring me closer.
I arranged dolls on the dresser
and asked for a pumpkin supper
and wrote my father a letter ...

What others look for when they first begin to read a new book of poems, I’m not sure. Maybe it varies from reader to reader and from book to book. I listen first for a voice I can hear and want to hear, and only then for what it does with words, form, content, import. The language in Slim Night of Recognition embodies such a voice – such a set of voices:

“luminescent drops arc above the wind’s dips and joints”,

“Lay yourself down like a half-moon, / let the vagabond night take you.”

“Our coast was invented by wanderers / and bringers of ice and magnets, / the rightful owners of our opposite poles.”

“We come in, opening / and closing our mouths like wings. / Swallows, we fly away, / lie down between breast bones / and the heart made night.”

And then there is this opening to the poem “Just This:”

All I know I have said into an emptiness
to test the depth of it.
And all I have been allowed to keep
has echoed back to me by some divine
miracle of physics…

Emma Howell’s book is just out from Eastern Washington University Press. I know where it sits on my desk. I feel no compelling hurry to know it fully; the promises of discovery sometimes displace gluttony or greed. This much may be affirmed: when I’ve opened it, it has more than generously repaid my attention, slowed the clock. Since it gives the only Emma Howell poems we shall have, I choose, for now, to read it slowly, often.

“Think, think, thinky, think”

On Richard Ford’s The Lay of the Land

Discussed below:

The Lay of the Land, by Richard Ford, Knopf, 2006

Richard Ford may be the contemporary true inheritor of Henry James. Ford’s hero-voice -protagonist, Frank Bascombe, fills this novel nearly to overbrimming, and as a narrator, Bascombe cannot help but connect dots – as many as possible. Despite multiple digressions and a jump forward in the final chapter, The Lay of the Land mostly covers a short time span centering around Thanksgiving in the year 2000 in Bascombe’s part of the world, the "mid-line Jersey shore." Bascombe sells real estate for a living, which in some vaguely perverse way might explain why he’s interested in attending any building implosion that might be scheduled nearby. Bascombe also knows almost everyone, some by name, some merely by what their address says about them, and some because they have at some point or other become part of his personal life. Here’s an example of Bascombe’s thinking. The occasion is a meeting with an elderly guy, Wade, with whom he frequently views building implosions and whose daughter Frank once pursued:

“For these weeks, traveling to the odd implosion here, another there, a cup of chowder or a piece of icebox pie in a Greek diner, I’ve all but expunged from my thoughts the truth that Wade is father to Vicki (now Ricki), my long-gone dream of a lifetime from when I, as a divorced man, wrote for a glossy New York sports magazine, horsed around with women, suffered dreaminess both night and day and had yet to list my first house.” (p. 317)

If this isn’t quite Jamesian in sentence structure, it nevertheless begins to suggest the almost baroque quality of Frank Bascombe’s narration. Reading along, you either warm to this and come to relish it, or you don’t.

Bascombe is nothing if not candid (whether he’s entirely reliable as a narrator is another matter--but then, who is?). He’s divorced from Ann. He’s married a woman named Sally. But Sally’s first husband, who came home deeply troubled from Viet Nam, simply walked out of the house one day and never returned. After several years, she had him declared legally dead. And several years after that, Sally met Frank and they later married. However, by Thanksgiving time in the year 2000, Sally’s first husband (legally dead) has returned from the island of Mull, in Scotland, where he has been living since walking out decades earlier. And Sally, in trying to reconcile and understand her responses to this series of events, has left Frank in New Jersey and moved – temporarily or permanently Frank does not know – to Mull.

In addition, Frank has prostate cancer, for which he’s received treatment in the form of radioactive BBs carefully and precisely implanted. One of Frank’s and Ann’s children, Ralph, died while still a boy (part of the reason for their later divorce). His surviving two children are, by Thanksgiving in 2000, adults: Clarissa, bisexual, has rallied to Frank’s side once the cancer was diagnosed. Paul, who was diagnosed in gradeschool as "unsystematically oppositional, " writes greeting card verse in Kansas but is due to visit, with his significant other, at Thanksgiving. If this all sounds sort of messy and faintly over the top, it is. Add in a Tibetan business colleague, some random vandalism of Frank’s car, a real estate deal that Frank perversely sours, an explosion at a hospital (the same one where Frank’s son died years earlier), a set of nasty neighbors, some gun shots at close range, and Thanksgiving begins to look like a holiday from hell.

The Lay of the Land becomes as much about perseverance – Frank’s perseverance – as about anything else. Despite his inveterately garrulous nature, Frank believes in a humane and American sense of home. This partly explains his happiness at selling real estate (not commercial buildings but single-family dwellings): he genuinely wishes people would live in places that might offer the prospect of making them happier. Similarly, Frank also believes deeply in a sense of family, which to the extent that he’s able to understand it means connection, concern for, and a genuine if rarely achieved effort to see things from the point of view of others.

Ford’s novel also serves as a useful example of the differences between novels and movies. How, for instance, does one capture on film this tone of voice: “I haven’t seen, spoken to or thought much about Vicki/Ricki, who I guarantee was a yeasty package, since ’84, and wouldn’t recognize her if she shot out of Fuddruckers on a pair of roller skates” (p. 317). Parts of this novel would easily enough translate to video. But the core of it, including Frank's sense of humor, would likely be lost to caricature. The trouble with Frank Bascombe is that you come to know him pretty well – at least as well as more than half your relatives. Finish the book, and he’s still there. You remember he said once that "Americans are hardwired for something to be thankful for" (p. 26) You remember his offhand way of making up place names like "Ruckusville, Alabama" or "Lake Laconic," or that he said once "the devil is in the details, of course, even the details of our affections" (p. 89) You wonder if he might call. You wonder what he’s doing now.

John Burnside, Part 2

Selected Poems, by John Burnside, Jonathan Cape, 2006.

By any measure, Burnside’s Selected offers a severely limited selection indeed: drawn from eight earlier volumes, it runs only 112 pages. Of the twenty-three poems in Asylum Dance, winner of the 2000 Whitbread Poetry Award, only six (the largest number for any one volume) find inclusion here. The book carries no introduction. Hence, though we might readily assume Burnside himself made the selection, we cannot positively know how poems were ruled in or out. Interestingly however, while the table of contents clearly indicates a chronological presentation of a handful of poems from each of eight separate volumes, the body of Selected Poems shows no such separations: the book is designed and printed to appear as, and to read as, a continuous single volume.

If one determines to read any book of poems straight through, attentive to its ordering, then one must start at the start. And it makes sense to presume that the first several poems in a book strike the opening notes or themes or voices. (Whether such a presumption is proved accurate becomes one of the ongoing questions reading addresses.)

Burnside’s Selected Poems begins with these three words: “Like me, you…,” and with them, this book asserts a directly personal voice that asks for and assumes an immediate human commonality. “Like me, you sometimes waken / early in the dark / thinking you have driven miles / through inward country”. And thus, the first full stanza also claims a territory – that metaphorical, dream haunted “inward country.”

Interestingly, the second poem seems no poem at all. It’s called “Suburbs,” and it is presented in 14 prose sections (or paragraphs). If this were music, the notes of the first poem would be a brief bit of Mozart; the notes for the second, a slow movement with full orchestra. Or, to mix metaphors, in its first two poems, Burnside’s Selected claims a large territory. As different as they are in form and length, the first two poems share a common interest in what is real and what is not:

“The suburb has its own patterns: arrangements of bottles on front steps and scraped ice on driveways, enactments of chores and duties, conversations at gates and hedges, sweeping and binding movements, arcane calculations of cost and distance. All this activity is intended to make it appear real – a commonplace – but its people cannot evade the thought, like the though which sometimes comes in dreams, that nothing is solid at all, and the suburb is no more substantial than a mirage in a blizzard, or the shimmering waves off an exit road where spilled petrol evaporates in the sun.” (p. 3)

And eventually, the suburbs implies a place

“where everything is implied: city, warehouse district, night stop, woods emerging from mists, as if newly-created, like those Japanese paper flowers which unfold in water, empty back roads at night where, momentarily, a soughing of wings passes close in the dark, followed by the tug of silence, the feel of grain fields shifting under the wind, a lamp in a window beyond, where someone has sat up all night, drinking tea, remembering something like this.” (p. 5)

With “Suburbs” we see confirmed one characteristic element of Burnside’s poems. Even when they echo William Carlos Williams, they give the sense of being allowed to make themselves, to follow a line of imagery and of thought until the process itself arrives at some satisfactory stopping point. Here, for example, is the poem that follows “Suburbs.” It’s called “Signal Stop, Near Horsley:”

Smoke in the woods
like someone walking in a silent film
beside the tracks.

A shape I recognize – not smoke, or not just smoke,
and not just snow on hazels
or fox-trails from the platform to the trees,

but winter, neither friend
nor stranger, like the girl I sometimes glimpse

at daybreak, near the crossing, in a dress
of sleet and berries, gazing at the train. (p. 7)

Though the form here shows some regularity, two stanzas of three lines followed by two stanzas of two lines, the regularity seems to result not from artifice determined in advance (as, for example, a sonnet might) but rather from a way of thinking that uses form to encourage itself forward.

In technical terms, the early poems in Burnside’s Selected face the challenge of how to mediate between the brevity of poems like the one quoted in full above and the large prose sprawl of “Suburbs.” Thematically, the Selected makes it clearest initial claim with the early poem “Halloween.” In it, the speaker confidently and directly recounts what has been necessary “as I come to define my place.” It’s a definition pursued not in church or school or home, but out of doors, in backyards, among “barn owls hunting in pairs along the hedge, / the smell of frost on the linen, the smell of leaves…

The village is over there, in a pool of bells,
and beyond that nothing,
or only the other versions of myself,
familiar and strange, and swaddled in their time
as I am, standing out beneath the moon
or stooping to a clutch of twigs and straw
to breathe a little life into the fire. (p. 11)

Perhaps what beguiles most in Burnside’s poems is their deft modulations of sounds, of consonants and vowels. The language itself carries richness and beauty, the word music of English. Here’s another example, the first stanza of “The Pit Town in Winter”: “Everything would vanish in the snow, / fox bones and knuckles of coal / and dolls left out in the gardens, / red-mouthed and nude” (p. 14). And the stanza is deft in one other way. While it affirms the vanishing of things, what it does is reveal them plainly.

As one reads farther into Burnside’s Selected Poems, one can see his growing mastery of a particular lyricism most immediately described by his use of sentences that carry themselves forward over many lines. Burnside often pairs this technique with another: he links lengthy individually numbered sections (each carrying its own title) underneath the entire poem’s overall title. Thus, the poem “Settlements” includes four numbered sections that run a total of seven pages. The result reads with the intensity of image and the pace one expects in a lyric poem, yet it also carries some of the reach of an essay. It’s demanding reading, but it’s also rewarding. Here is a fragment from the middle of section III, titled “Well”:

So when I turn to say, at times like this,
that something else is with us all along
I’m thinking of that woman in the town
who told me how she worked all afternoon,
she and her husband digging in the heat, bees
drifting back and forth through currant stands,
the sound of their breathing
meshed with the weave and spin
of swallows:
how, after an hour, they struck on an unexpected
flagstone of granite
and lifted the lid on a coal-black
circle of fresh spring water under the stone, … (p. 52)

In a way, the quoted lines above almost describe the reading process for a Burnside poem. It requires pleasant work (“digging in the heat, bees / drifting back and forth through currant stands”). Rewarding for itself, it can lead to discoveries entirely unexpected (“a coal-black / circle of fresh spring water…”).

* * *

In what is called the western tradition, questions of home – which are also always questions of identity – have vexed us at least since Eve and Adam were expelled. If that wasn’t bad enough, Galileo proved the Earth was not the center of the solar system, Darwin determined that evolution made everything from amoebae to human beings, and Einstein posited that the universe can be compared to a huge rubber sheet each planet weights down differently according to its gravity. Now there are rumors everything from basalt to a child’s tear is made of unimaginably tiny vibrating strings. In short, home gets harder and harder to figure. If to this we add the contemporary commonplace assumptions that each of us must, for our own happiness, choose our own occupation, belief system, ethics, place of residence, and relationship (if any) to our kin or ancestry, then perhaps it’s no surprise how much effort home asks of us in its construction. The times ask us to construct our own ad hoc myths (the alternative, one supposes, is to bob on the waves of entertainment and advertising).

One could argue that home – in all its making and unmaking, its deceptive calms and sudden storms – constitutes John Burnside’s essential interest in his Selected Poems. It’s a big subject – place, animals, people, the relationships they assert, the sense of something larger than ourselves as immediate as a view of ocean or sky, leavings and arrivals, the company of history, the company of neighbors, the observation of beauty, the daily “finding evidence of life in all this / driftwork…” (p. 89). Burnside’s Selected succeeds partly because he has learned ways to make poems that let in so much experience – either as he knows it firsthand or via his intelligent imagination. To read this book as a book is to watch technique grow and become surer, more supple, more attuned to the ambitions of the poem or the requirements of its material. By its end, the book moves deftly from long poems in numbered sections to single page poems, like “The Good Neighbor,” which read over and over as absolutely right in construction and deeply humane in sensibility.

A Note on Thomas Carlyle

Perhaps we’ve always given biography its own special niche – neither journalism, nor science, nor fiction, nor poetry, yet it borrows from all of these. And a good biography remains one of the best introductions to a writer heretofore unknown.

Once the “Sage of Chelsea” and considered by many of his contemporaries (including Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Lord Tennyson, George Eliot, and Leslie Stephens, father of Virginia Woolf) a kind of exemplar of Victorian England, Thomas Carlyle certainly seems little read and less discussed now. The reasons aren’t difficult to figure. As presented in what reads as a thoroughly researched, eminently fair 1983 biography by Fred Kaplan, Carlyle’s wrestling with science and religion seems now almost commonplace, while his absolutist and patriarchal views of the roles of women and men seem archaic.

With regard to science and religion, Carlyle came to disbelieve any view of a personal God. He took from the profoundly religious convictions of his parents only an abidingly strong belief in work and the need to act virtuously, especially in matters of commitment. This partly explains his thirteen-year effort to complete a six-volume study of Frederick the Great despite the fact that he dreaded the writing itself and found his subject less than compelling. He was a writer: it was his duty to work as one. Somewhere there is a line between compulsion and commitment, virtue and simple obstinacy, but one wonders if Carlyle knew it.

Carlyle’s determination also allowed him to weather an episode that must rank as every writer’s horror story. Hard at work on what was quickly stretching to a three volume discussion and history of the French Revolution, Carlyle gave the manuscript of the first volume to his friend, John Stuart Mill, who was eager to read it and offer comment. Somehow, while it was in Mill’s custody, the manuscript was burned and destroyed (one story blames a zealous servant who mistook scattered pages on the floor for trash and used them to light the day’s fires). As might be imagined, Carlyle was blindsided by this loss. He had to rewrite the entire volume from memory, and he did.

As a husband, Carlyle demanded such devotion and such accommodation to his ambitions that he tended to ignore his wife, Jane, to the extent that she was frequently happier (as was he) when they were apart. He also viewed a woman’s role as one in support of her husband, and though he realized in some way that he was himself the cause of much of her distress (she was clearly a smart, capable woman who had, essentially, too little to do), he seemed ever unable to turn that recognition into any sort of effective action. As a result, Jane Carlyle’s real illnesses (migraines were likely one) were made worse by her own sense of frustration and lack of good work. Furthermore, they were both examples of such sexual repression that they could offer each other little in the way of physical intimacy or the common comforts of touch. Yet, as Caplan presents them, they were also clearly devoted to each other, in their own ways. When apart, they wrote each other almost daily.

As a writer, Carlyle's voice was emphatic and personal. Always convinced of the nobility and necessity of labor, Carlyle was also a strong advocate for the working poor, a class made ever larger with the spread of factories and mechanization. One of the bitternesses of his life was his failure to change British society for the better.

Oddly, despite being known as the “Sage of Chelsea,” Carlyle was a Scotsman who returned to his home landscape regularly. He loved London for the availability of books, books and literary company; he loved Scotland for its quiet and for his notion that such quiet calmed his nerves (though in effect, the isolation and lack of company for good talk tended to get on his nerves).

Is Fred Caplan’s biography a good introduction to Carlyle, a writer Emerson revered and visited at least twice? It is, if you come to it with some knowledge of Carlyle’s writings. Caplan summarizes them and their themes, but clearly they are not his main concern. This is not, really, a fully vivid intellectual biography. But it is a scholarly and humane account. It is, in fact, a good biography in that Caplan acts as a friend to his subject. The Thomas Carlyle that Caplan presents is a man of complexities, many of them unattractive. Caplan likes Carlyle well enough to justify his interest (and ours), yet Caplan’s also well aware of Carlyle’s limitations and blind spots, from which he does not shy. The biography thus manages a middle way, one that is often content to describe carefully and lets readers judge. What emerges is a complicated human being, one who told a friend that when he looked into the mirror on his eightieth birthday, he said to himself “What the devil then am I, at all, at all? After all these eighty years I know nothing about it” (524).

Thomas Carlyle: A Biography,
by Fred Kaplan,
Cornell University Press, 1983

Introducing John Burnside -- part 1

Discussed Below:
A Lie About My Father
by John Burnside
published by Jonathan Cape, London, 2006

Note: This is the first of two projected essays on new books by the Scottish writer, John Burnside. The second essay (forthcoming) will discuss his Selected Poems, also published in 2006 by Jonathan Cape.

1. A Lie About My Father

Our parents are cursed or blessed always to be our parents.

As young children, we deify them without knowing it, and we can’t help it: they know the rules crucial to our survival. As we grow older, these gods start to shrink. They had mysterious lives before our arrival. They become old, fallible and old; they become themselves. We conclude they were never gods. But what, at last, should we understand from their foreign and intimately known lives? Such questions John Burnside pokes and prods, wrestles with and thinks hard about in his new memoir, A Lie About My Father. Because his books are not yet published in the U.S., Burnside’s work may not be well known here, which is a shame. Both his memoir and his Selected Poems were published in 2006 by Jonathan Cape. Together, they make for a useful and compelling introduction to a writer already well-established in his native U.K.

Burnside’s memoir focuses on his father, Tommy, because his presence (and occasional absence – he was hospitalized for several weeks once as a result of a bad fall) made such a difference to Burnside’s family life, first in the small, rural Scottish town of Cowdenbeath, later in Corby in Northamptonshire, England. The family included John’s younger sister, Margaret, and two ghost siblings who died at birth. Elizabeth would have been John’s older sister, and Andrew would have been the family’s youngest. But it’s Burnside’s father, Tommy, who commands the family center. He is a man who, Burnside learned only after his father’s death, invented his past out of the truth of being “left on a doorstep in West Fife in the late spring of 1926, by person or persons unknown” (18). As Burnside’s aunt explains, “Those were hard times…From what I heard, he was passed about quite a bit. Of course, there weren’t the social services they have now (20).” Thus, just about as soon as he could know anything at all, Tommy Burnside would have known that he was left by someone, even if he would never know by whom.

In a move this memoir frequently makes, Burnside tries to fill in a picture where none exists:

I can imagine it as I like: as a scene from a fairy tale, perhaps, the unknown baby left at the door of some unsuspecting innocents, who take him in and try, as well as they are able, to bring him up alongside their own children, only to tire of him after a while and pass him on… I could imagine it wet and windy, the blanket sodden, the child crying plaintively, weak with hunger and terrified. (21)

However, Burnside knows that his father “wouldn’t have liked that image.” So Burnside offers this instead:

…what I choose to imagine is a summer’s morning. It would have been sometime in late May or early June, so there is a slim chance it was one of those days when the sun comes up warm and, in a matter of minutes, burns off the dew on the privet hedges and the little drying greens between the houses… I try to imagine a pleasant day because, in this story, the baby on the doorstep of one of those coal town houses is my father. He is about to be discovered by one of the many foster-families he will know during his childhood, people with whom he will dwell for a few years before being passed along, in the years when the General Strike was turning into the Great Depression. (21)

Only having finished A Lie About My Father do readers understand the depth of generosity John Burnside brings to this scene of his father’s earliest childhood. For Tommy Burnside is, for much of this memoir, a cruel and terrifying presence in his son’s early years. Haunted not merely by the uncertainties of his own origins but also by the death of his first child, Tommy is a father who frequently tells his son that “he and my mother had had another child before me, that her name was Elizabeth, that she had died and that he wished she had lived, and I had died instead (32).”

Any child knows considerable firsthand experience of his or her parents. Burnside knew his father as a verbally abusive man quick to anger, a gambler and drinker, a laborer in construction who never managed an income sufficient for both his family and his habits. He was, as his son portrays him, insecure, unpredictable, desperate to hold onto the little social position he had, and resentful of the family his wife brought to their marriage even as he wished for and could not make his own version. He’d had an indifferent education, enlisted in the R.A.F., and returned home to a life of physical labor in construction. At home, his seething unpredictability, his drinking binges and disappearances, made for a level of pretense difficult enough for his wife to manage but worse for his children:

Everything stayed hidden. My father’s late-night parties, his occasional drunken rampages around the house… my mother’s attempts to hold things together, it was all secret – known by anybody who cared to know, but unacknowledged, like a priest’s feverish brightness around adolescent boys, or the beatings Mrs. Wilson endured on those Saturdays when Dunfermline lost at home. (97)

Burnside’s effort in this book is to relieve such pressure – to abandon the need to keep so many secrets of his own childhood; it is an effort to quit pretending, to quit lying.

Even as young as five or six, Burnside learned ways to escape the family tensions. Most often he did so by roaming the nearby woods, finding there a quiet predictability and sympathy with natural landscape. Soon, however, Tommy decided it was time to move. Burnside the memoirist understands this as his father’s way to exercise “the ‘geographical solution’, where a drinker leaves behind the bad memories and debts of a place where he has outlived his slender welcome, and moves on to pastures new” (123). This took them, briefly and abortively, to Birmingham, and later to Corby, a booming steel town whose blast furnaces “befouled the Northamptonshire countryside like some medieval plague town wrapped in a grey-gold cloud of smoke” (126). By this time, Burnside was a teenager who, at 14, saw his father “as just another bully, ready to make me pay for even the smallest mistake,” yet also a puzzle of a man who could “come home from the pub with his pockets full of change and buy every child playing in the square an ice cream from the van” (126). Of course, in a household perpetually on the edge of poverty, this meant that his own children would go without.

As one reads more and more of Burnside’s account, it becomes clear that each member of the family needed to pretend a common life based in small town Scotland’s generally accepted family roles. Burnside’s father needed to believe his drinking, gambling, and general abuse were commonplace, normal for the man of the family. His mother, Tess, needed to ignore her husband’s outrages and focus instead on what could be: tomorrow might be better. Such evasions at the private level were compounded by the prevalence of public falsehoods delivered via the then new medium of television:

A web of untruths about how we lived and what we consumed and what was considered useful knowledge constituted the very fabric of my world. I would sit in front of the TV, watching some politician or company CEO look straight to a camera and tell a barefaced, deliberate untruth, and the thought that almost always struck me was that these men had children of their own, that they were lying to them, as well as to the rest of us. It wasn’t just my father who was lying, it was everybody’s father. 179-80

A. L. Kennedy identifies this book as “a haunting, beautiful read,” and it is at once deeply engaging and frequently painful to note how readily Burnside’s father exercised his own brand of cruelty. Yet, Tom Burnside’s cruelty was also inspiration: “…I had my imagination. He was always saying that to me when I asked him a question he didn’t want to address: What do you think? Use your imagination.” (127-8). Interestingly enough, that is precisely what his son has done.

The latter third of Burnside’s narrative presents Burnside’s teens and twenties as years of avoidance of his father and his own past, years dominated by Burnside’s serious exploration of hallucinogenics and drugs of almost any kind. This time reads as a difficult, entirely interwoven combination of a son’s determination to escape and to explore; it seems at once self-destructive and self-inventive. Eventually, it all led to two hospitalizations, that latter of which was the more curative. All this time, Burnside’s visits to his father were rare; only through his sister’s persistence in her efforts to contact him did he learn of his father’s successive heart attacks, including the last one, which happened in a pub. Long before that, his mother had died.

While it is clear that A Lie About My Father works hard to be accurate to Burnside’s own recollections, it’s also very much John Burnside’s effort reconnect, fill in blank spots, and make meaningful connection with a past that was frequently a source of deep anger (Burnside details one plan he had devised, but did not act on, for killing his father). Though for years Burnside avoided home and his father, the memoirist son wants to experience, at some level, the solitary life his father lived in his later years:

On days off, he would still get up early, wash and shave, put on a blazer, clean trousers, his black polished shoes. Then he would go through the paper, seeing what he liked in that day’s racecard. Not that he put a bet on very often. I suppose he didn’t see much point. At around noon, he would go to the Hazel Tree for a few pints, then he would go home and watch television. He still had his ‘big seat’ where he sat, a foot or two from the screen, with his glasses perched on the end of his nose, the sound turned down as far as it would go without becoming completely inaudible. (227)

In fact, though A Lie About My Father tells a story of survival, what motivates it is John Burnside’s wish to make it something of use, a foundation. Burnside’s telling enacts a generosity and care that make for some of this book’s most arresting moments. Nowhere is this clearer than in Burnside’s consistent effort to make his father’s consciousness clear, so that it becomes something the adult son and the deceased father share. Here is part of Burnside’s effort to imagine his father’s basic grasp of the world:

Everything begins elsewhere, he knows that: dawn, Christmas, love, beauty, terror, the wind, the sky, the horizon, his own soul. It begins far in the woods, or out on some windy field by the sea. He wants to be there, not here: he wants to be where things begin, and he is so close, he is so near. Only – for reasons he cannot explain – something stands in his way, something he didn’t ask for. Reason, terror, unworthiness, he can’t even name it, it takes different guises every time, but it is always there, standing in his way, keeping him from his destiny. I’m sure my father felt these things – but these are my words, and this is the real lie about my father. (231).