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The Paper Garden by Molly Peacock

June 1, 2012 by

Poet Molly Peacock’s The Paper Garden is not only a collage and biography of a woman, Mary Delany, who began a career as an artist late in life, but it also is partially a memoir of Peacock’s own life and the nuggets of wisdom she’s gained from her obsession with this floral artist and her collages or flower mosaicks.  Delany is a woman who began working with scissors and paper long before she gained recognition for her art, starting as a young girl in school.  While one of her classmates recognized her talent, life got in the way as Delany was plucked from her home and moved to her aunts and back again as English politics became tumultuous and her family backed the Pretender.

“A few of the papers she used — all of the papers in the eighteenth century were handmade — in fact were wallpapers, but mostly she painted large sheets of rag paper with watercolor, let them dry, then cut from them the hundreds of pieces she needed to reproduce — well, to re-evoke might be a better word — the flower she was portraying.  There is no reproduced hue that matches the thrill of color in nature, yet Mrs. D. went after the original kick of natural color, and she did it like a painter.”  (page 7-8 ARC)

Through all of the upheaval, Delany kept to her crafts and her music, once inspired by a meeting with Handel.  Peacock’s prose is intimate and conversational as she speaks of Delany like a beloved friend and peer.  She speaks of her journey to learn about Delany’s life and craft like a careful historian citing her sources and engaging in reverence for her subject.  Through her delicate prose, the beauty of Delany and her work emerge gradually, like the petals of a bud opening slowly as the sun rises.

Peacock does a fantastic job comparing individual mosaicks to events in Delany’s life in England and Ireland even though many of the pieces were created long after the death of her second husband and her younger sister, Anne.  She was an early mixed media artist who used wallpapers, paints, dried leaves, and other materials to create her portraits of flowers, breathing new life into even the most simple flower.

The Paper Garden by Molly Peacock is a quiet read chock full of details about Mary Delany’s craft, her family, and her inspiration, but it also is full of advice, beautiful images of Delany’s work, and tidbits about Peacock’s motivations in her own poetry and life.  Readers will dip into this book, think and wonder about Delany’s craft, but also ruminate on what this journey she embarked upon taught her and ourselves.  In almost a meditative way, the biography pulls the reader in and pushes them out to ensure the depth of the art and its meaning is thought about on a deeper level.

***Some of my favorite quotes from the book that can apply to writing***

“Great technique means that you have to abandon perfectionism.  Perfectionism either stops you cold or slows you down too much.  Yet, paradoxically, it’s proficiency that allows a person to make any art at all; you must have technical skill to accomplish anything, but you also must have passion, which, in an odd way, is technique forgotten.”  (page 28 ARC)

“Not to know is also sometimes the position of the poet, who depends on close observation to magnify a subject, hoping to discover an animating spirit.  There’s romance in that forensic impulse . . .” (page 34 ARC)

About the Author:

Molly Peacock is the award-winning author of five volumes of poetry, including The Second Blush. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and the Times Literary Supplement. Among her other works are How to Read a Poem . . .  and Start a Poetry Circle and a memoir, Paradise, Piece by Piece. Peacock is currently the poetry editor of the Literary Review of Canada and the general series editor of The Best Canadian Poetry in English. A transplanted New Yorker, she lives in Toronto.

Visit Molly Peacock’s Website.

Click for Tour Stops

This is my 4th book for the 2012 Ireland Reading Challenge.

Filed Under: ARC, Bloomsbury, Ireland Challenge, nonfiction, Publishers/Publicists, Read in 2012, reviews, tlc book tours Tagged With: ,

The Time It Snowed in Puerto Rico by Sarah McCoy

May 31, 2012 by

The Time It Snowed in Puerto Rico by Sarah McCoy is a coming of age novel about a young girl, Maria — also known as Verdita — in Puerto Rico during the debate about whether or not the nation should become a member of the United States or remain independent.  Part of Maria Ortiz-Santiago’s family lives in the United States and part lives on the island in a little barrio, and readers get a taste of the differences between the two lives when Omar, her cousin, comes back to visit.  As the two grow older and grow apart, Verdita continues to ramp up her competitive spirit when he’s near to retain her hold on her father.  She’s always had a fear that a boy would usurp her father’s affections, especially after her mother becomes pregnant.

“For my eleventh birthday, Papi made piraguas.  He left balloons of water in the freezer until they were solid, then peeled the plastic off like bright banana skins.  On the veranda, he used his machete to shave the globes into ice chips.  Hard bits of cold spit out where the ball and blade met, landing on my arms and legs, cheeks and nose.  Papi said it was a Puerto Rican snowfall, and laughed long and deep.”  (page 1)

Verdita is a willful girl and very curious about everything around her, including the independence debate, the cock fights at the local bar, and the United States.  Readers will find that she’s obsessed with the United States and how different it is from her home in the barrio.  She wants to be blond, listen to Elvis, and learn English.  She wants to remain close with her father, but push her mother away.  All this mixed up emotion and desire in one girl is so vibrant on the page, female readers especially will remember what it was like to become a senorita and leave girlhood behind and all of the mixed and high emotions that brought with it.

“I ate until my stomach pushed into the table ledge.  I didn’t even really like the hamburger, but I liked that it came from America — that I was eating like an American.  It made me feel bigger than my finca on the mountain, bigger than the whole island.  I’d seen the States, even if I hadn’t seen President Kennedy.  My stomach was full of America.”  (page 59)

Even as she sees the goodness in her roots and her family, she still longs for the foreignness of the United States.  She becomes accustom to sharing her life with a sibling, but still longs to break break free.  She’s struggling between the desire to grow beyond her roots, deeply earthed in Puerto Rico, but barely realizing that she can grow taller and broader by taking the leap without having to sever her ties to home.

McCoy’s choice of first person point of view is spot on for a coming of age story, and while filtered through Verdita’s eyes rather than the other characters, readers will not feel as though they have missed anything.  She’s observant, opinionated, curious, and eager to explore.  The Time It Snowed in Puerto Rico is not only about growing up, but about taking chances and spreading wings to find out who we are, who we want to be, and how we can make the best of everything we are given in terms of familial support and available opportunities.

This was a book I just had to pick up at the Gaithersburg Book Festival when Sarah McCoy was in town.  She’s a lovely writer and woman, and it was great to see her again and get another autograph.  I cannot wait to read her next novel.

About the Author:

SARAH McCOY is author of the novel, The Time It Snowed in Puerto Rico. She has taught English writing at Old Dominion University and at the University of Texas at El Paso. The daughter of an Army officer, her family was stationed in Germany during her childhood. She calls Virginia home but presently lives with her husband and dog, Gilbert, in El Paso, Texas. The Baker’s Daughter is her second novel. She is currently working on her next.

Filed Under: fiction, Publishers/Publicists, purchased, random house, Read in 2012, reviews, young adult fiction Tagged With: , ,

Best & Worst and More…

May 30, 2012 by

Those of you expecting my review of Molly Peacock’s The Paper Garden, please forgive me.  I’m hoping to have the review up on Friday. 

Sometimes life just gets in the way, and I want to extend an apology to TLC Book Tours and Molly Peacock for the delay.

 

 

 

However, I did want to let everyone know that I would be over at Alyce’s At Home With Books today with a guest post for her Best & Worst series. 

Check out my post, here.

 

 

Filed Under: announcements Tagged With: , , ,

Archie’s War: My Scrapbook of the First World War 1914-1918 by Marcia Williams

May 29, 2012 by

Archie’s War: My Scrapbook of the First World War 1914-1918 by Marcia Williams is the story of ten-year-old Archie Albright, who receives a scrapbook from his uncle Colin.  Archie is a boy living in East London, England, who’s in love with drawing and comics, and he’s a got a best friend named Tom and a dog named Georgie.  In the book he explains a little bit about his family, particularly his 16-year-old sister’s interest in voting.  Once talk about Austria declaring war on Serbia begins, Archie’s house becomes divided with his grandmother and father in favor of Britain entering the war, and his sister against the war and eager for peace to remain.  Once Germany invades Britain’s ally Belgium, Britain has little choice but to enter the war.  Archie’s scrapbook includes a nice break down of which countries were allied with Germany and which were allied with Britain, and it includes copies of news articles reminiscent of the time period.  Plus, there is a running body count, which is something that young boys would likely keep track of.

Unlike other scrapbooks that merely use memorabilia and newspaper articles, etc. to depict the time period and the events in the story, Williams has incorporated comics as a young boy would draw them, complete with images of his family in hilarious poses, slapping and biting of siblings, and other typical family events of the time period.  Even in spite of Archie’s jokes and comics, it is clear that the war has him rattled as adults talk about German residents as if they could be spies.  He even pees out the window of his room rather than go to the outside bathroom to avoid a German attack, though when his grandmother finds out about his antics, he’s scolded and yet resolved to continue peeing out the window rather than go outside.

There are other more serious moments, like when Archie’s father goes off to war with his Uncle Derek and his mother and older brother begin working outside the home.  Nurse Edith Cavell‘s story is depicted in comic form as well, with Archie saluting her bravery.

Archie’s War: My Scrapbook of the First World War 1914-1918 by Marcia Williams is a fun way to introduce WWI to kids and provides parents an interactive tool to teach history to children in a way that will not bore them.  The colorful drawings are things that children can easily relate to, and the newspaper clippings provide the book a nuanced historical accuracy.  Williams does well including letters and mementos as well as stories that accurately depict the times of rationing, women heading to work outside the home, soldiers dying or returning shell shocked, and more.  Archie’s world changes before his eyes, and he can do little else but roll with the punches and record his family’s history.

About the Author and Illustrator:

Marcia Williams is famous for her retellings of classic stories. From Shakespeare and Dickens to the Canterbury Tales and Greek Myths, her humorous comic-strip illustration is hugely popular all over the globe. She lives in London.  Visit her fun Website.

This is my 11th book for the WWI Reading Challenge.

 

 

 

This is my 43rd book for the 2012 New Authors Challenge.

Filed Under: challenges, children's fiction, historical fiction, New Authors Challenge, purchased, Read in 2012, reviews, WWI Reading Challenge 2012 Tagged With: , ,

Mailbox Monday #178

May 28, 2012 by

Mailbox Mondays (click the icon to check out the new blog) has gone on tour since Marcia at A Girl and Her Books, formerly The Printed Page passed the torch. This month’s host is Martha’s Bookshelf.

Both of these memes allow bloggers to share what books they receive in the mail or through other means over the past week.

Just be warned that these posts can increase your TBR piles and wish lists.

Here’s what I received last week:

1. The Lighthouse Road by Peter Geye for review in October.

This story moves back and forth in time, from the arrival of Norwegian immigrant Thea on the shores of Lake Superior to the travails of her orphaned son, Odd, some 20 years later. When Thea’s aunt and uncle do not meet her boat as planned, she has no money, prospects, or English language. Befriended by a local businessman and apothecary, she obtains work as a cook in the nearby logging camp. Raped by an itinerant peddler, she delivers the baby in a blinding snowstorm, and the apothecary, Grimm, takes the infant into his household. The boy grows up under Grimm’s influence to be a fisherman, smuggler for Grimm’s whiskey trade, and a boat builder. Still, he struggles to find himself and to reconcile the loss of his mother, and he becomes increasingly troubled by Grimm’s criminal enterprises and dirty secrets — until an unlikely love affair puts everything on a collision course.

What did you receive? Have a great Memorial Day!

Filed Under: mailbox monday, meme Tagged With: ,

Guest Post & Giveaway: The Main Event by C.E. Lawrence

May 27, 2012 by

Silent Kills by C.E. Lawrence:

Everyone Has What He Wants: The killer picks her up in a Manhattan nightclub. Another trendy victim of the latest downtown scene. Young. Fresh. Healthy. Perfect. The police find her body in a Bronx park. Pale as a ghost. Peaceful in death. Her life has been drained away. Slowly. Methodically. Brilliantly…No One Survives What He Takes: NYPD profiler Lee Campbell has seen the gruesome handiwork of the most deranged criminal minds. But this is something new. Something unbelievably twisted. A blood-obsessed lunatic who chooses his victims with deadly, loving care – and forces Campbell to confront the demons in his own life. No matter who wins this game, there will be blood…

Today, author C.E. Lawrence is going to share some of her writing tips about plot, particularly for mystery novels. She shares tricks about providing backstory and clues for readers to get them invested in the story.

For US/Canada residents, there will be a giveaway following the guest post; so stay tuned. Without further ado, here’s C.E. Lawrence:

Back a few thousand years ago, a proto-human went out hunting.  Maybe he was a Neanderthal Man, maybe an member of Australopithecus – maybe even an early Homo Sapiens.  He found a herd of proto-antelopes, or gazelles, or maybe water buffaloes.  He managed to isolate and kill one, using a sharpened wooden spear, and brought it home.

But along the way, many things happened – he had to ford a river, almost drowned, was stalked by a tiger, bitten by a spider, or a poisonous snake.  In other words, in accomplishing his goal, he faced conflicts and obstacles.

That night he went back to the campfire, deposited his kill, and settled himself on a boulder to entertain his mate while she cooked the game, telling her of his day.  One by one, other members of his tribe gathered in front of the fire to listen.  Some of them left their dinners uneaten, or their chores undone, to listen to what he had to say.

What he told them that night was a story.  It had a beginning, middle and end, and it had drama, danger, and conflict.  And by the end of the evening, he had a sizeable audience.

So what exactly is story?

Story is action, in the here and now – not yesterday or next week or in some imagined future, but now.  Readers are most interested in a character they can identify with in some way and who has something at stake – preferably something to lose as well as win – now, before their very eyes. And if you give that character the ability and the will to influence the outcome of his or her situation, you will be on your way to creating a story people will want to read.

A story must have an Event.  In a mystery story, this is most often a crime of some kind, and the vast majority of crime stories these days involve a murder of some kind.  But again, go ahead and be inventive; a kidnapping can be interesting, and in a spy story, political events can take center stage.

In a crime novel, there may be as many as three or more subplots beyond this main event – usually the solving of a crime – each with their own protagonist.

Subplots are important in a novel, and can accomplish several things at once.  A comic subplot can be used to give the reader a break from the tension and briefly lighten the mood.  Shakespeare was a master at this – he would cut from the action of the major character in his tragedies to show some foolishness taking place between two grave diggers (Hamlet, which is a kind of murder mystery), giving the audience a chance to breathe before the next onslaught of tragedy.

Subplots can also be used to complicate the main plot – a common variety of this is using a romance or family subplot to raise the stakes for the protagonist when the bad guy kidnaps a love interest or family member.

In The Singing Detective the protagonist is struggling with a crippling skin condition, which, in addition to being a subplot, becomes part of the main storyline as well.

In Silent Screams my protagonist, Lee Campbell, is struggling with clinical depression.  His struggle functions as a subplot until his condition begins to impact his job performance, at which point it becomes a complication in the main story.

A subplot can also be used to show another side of a character.  In the criminal-as-protagonist film Monsieur Verdoux, Charlie Chaplin’s murderous wife-killer is softened by a romance subplot in which he cares tenderly for his real wife, gentle cripple, and their son.

A subplot should never overshadow the main plot – for instance, a thriller with a romance subplot must still read like a thriller, not a romance novel. Keeps subplots in their place, but have fun with them – they can be a welcome change of pace from your hero’s relentless search for the killer.

Backstory

The term “backstory” refers to anything that has happened in the characters’ lives before the curtain goes up – i.e., before your story proper starts.  This can be anything from a death in the family to a drug arrest to a psychotic episode.  Literally, anything in your characters’ past can potentially be part of the backstory.

The trick in mystery fiction is to choose the backstory elements that pertain to your story, and that you can use to twist, complicate, or move the plot.  For instance, in Silent Screams my protagonist, Lee Campbell, has lost his sister – she disappeared five years ago.  I use this to motivate him to solve crimes, but also to complicate the plot: he gets mysterious phone calls from someone – who may or may not be the killer he is chasing – who claims to know something about his sister’s disappearance.  This causes him to have an attack of depression and anxiety, further complicating his efforts to find the serial killer.

Skillfully used backstory can be used as a pivotal plot moment:  remember the “Luke, I am your Father” moment from Star Wars?  That’s backstory, and George Lucas used it at a climactic moment to twist the plot for Luke Skywalker, making his response to Darth Vader even more complex and emotional.

However, do NOT throw in large “info-chunks” of superfluous backstory just because you can.  Be wary of anything that interrupts the forward flow of action; remember, only tell the reader what they need to know when they need to know it.

Raising Cain and Raising Stakes

It has been said that a story is not about a moment in time, it is about the moment in time.  A traditionally structured story must answer the Passover Question: “Why is this night different from every other night?”

In a crime story, that question is usually answered by the commission of a crime.  But see if you can dig deeper – see if you can make relate this question to your protagonist in a more personal way as well.  Is the victim someone the detective knew?  (The plot of The Maltese Falcon is a play on this theme, of course: Sam Spade needs to find out who killed his partner).

And then, as the story continues, you must continuously raise the stakes for the protagonist – simultaneously making it harder to solve the problem he is confronted with, all the while making it more important that he triumph.

Not an easy thing to do, I know.  But here are some helpful ideas.  I already mentioned giving the protagonist a personal stake in the outcome – for Sam Spade it is solving the murder of his partner; the important thing is that it matters to him personally.  The second way to raise the stakes is to widen the importance of the story into the society at large.  If an elderly aristocrat is murdered by his nephew at a country house, the number of people affected by that crime are few, but if someone kills a world leader, it may just start a world war (which is in fact what happened in 1914 with the murder of Archduke Ferdinand of  ).

Another thing you can do is beat up your protagonist physically or emotionally.  It is a cliché of detective stories that the private investigator is ambushed on a dark street and given a thumping by the bad guy’s henchmen.  In Friedrich Durrenmatt’s interesting and dark novel The Judge and His Hangman, for example, the protagonist, Detective Baerlach, suffers from stomach cancer.  In the middle of trying to catch a criminal, he must deal with the ongoing attacks of pain from his disease.  Find interesting ways to accomplish this on your own: if your hero has a weakness, for example, you can play with that in making his life more difficult.  Imagine a detective who is afraid of heights, or elevators, or guns.

Combining the personal and the professional can be very effective – maybe your super spy has a problem at home, like the poor beleaguered George Smiley, with his ever unfaithful wife (who he very much loves – her infidelity would be meaningless otherwise).  Best of all, if you can give your protagonist an unconscious, contradictory desire which impedes him solving the crime or identifying the traitor, etc., so much the better.  A good choice to give a hero is love vs. duty – especially in crime fiction, this can be agonizing.  Maybe your detective is a young sergeant who suspects that his commanding officer is behind a string of murders – but he loves this man, who saved his father’s life more than once.  Elmore Leonard does something similar to this in his brilliant nouveau noir novel, L.A. Confidential.

Planting Clues

In mystery fiction, one of the things you have to do is plant clues and red herrings.  The number of each you decide to include in your story is up to you – but since mysteries involve a challenge to the reader to solve the puzzle, you must play fair.  In other words, you want to give the reader a fighting chance to solve the mystery.

Clues help them to do this; red herrings are there to get in the way and confuse them.  Ideally, red herrings and clues should look very much alike – only you know the difference.  If you want to make a mystery harder to solve, you bury the clues more (sometimes this is called “hiding them in plain sight”).  There are many ways to do this:  you can plant a clue so that it just looks like a story detail and not a clue at all, or you can put it right next to a red herring so that the red herring jumps out at the reader much more than the clue.

For example, let’s say you have a victim who was killed by her brother, but she also has a jealous boyfriend.  You might mention that her brother had written to her a few months ago asking for money – but right before or after you have a dramatic scene with the jealous boyfriend.  The fact of the jealous boyfriend will sink in more than the unanswered letter – thus you have buried the clue “in plain sight,” as well as obscured it with a nice juicy red herring.

Story is all these and more.  And as long as there are people on this planet, I suspect there will be stories, because we seem to need them as much as we need food and drink and sex.  No one knows why this is – Kenneth Burke said that stories are equipment for living, and that’s no doubt part of the answer.

But as long as people need stories, they will need storytellers.  That is fortunate for those of us who wouldn’t be much good at doing anything else.  So here’s to more stories, and more storytellers!

Thanks, C.E. Lawrence, for sharing your tips with us. 

Additionally, one of her short stories is receiving great feedback from the anthology edited by Lee Child, Vengeance; check out the Publisher’s Weekly article.

Click for her featured poem

About the Author:

Carole Bugge ( C.E. Lawrence) has eight published novels, six novellas and a dozen or so short stories and poems. Her work has received glowing reviews from such publications as Kirkus, The Library Journal, Publisher’s Weekly, Booklist, The Boston Herald, Ellery Queen, and others. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines. Winner of both the Euphoria Poetry Competition and the Eve of St. Agnes Poetry Award, she is also a Pushcart Prize nominee and First Prize winner of the Maxim Mazumdar Playwriting Competition, the Chronogram Literary Fiction Prize, Jerry Jazz Musician Short Fiction Award, and the Jean Paiva Memorial Fiction award, which included an NEA grant to read her fiction and poetry at Lincoln Center.

Now, for the giveaway, please leave a comment here about what you look for in a novel; what makes a good plot for you?

Deadline for US/Canada residents is June 3, 2012, at 11:59PM EST

Filed Under: giveaway, guest post Tagged With: , ,

151st Virtual Poetry Circle

May 26, 2012 by

Welcome to the 151st Virtual Poetry Circle!

Remember, this is just for fun and is not meant to be stressful.

Keep in mind what Molly Peacock’s books suggested. Look at a line, a stanza, sentences, and images; describe what you like or don’t like; and offer an opinion. If you missed my review of her book, check it out here.

Also, sign up for the 2012 Fearless Poetry Reading Challenge because its simple; you only need to read 1 book of poetry. Please visit the stops on the 2012 National Poetry Month Blog Tour.

Today’s poem is from Osip Mandelstam’s Stolen Air:

Mandelstam Lane (Page 54)

What the hell sort of street is this?
Mandelstam Lane.
Diabolical name!
Twist and twist
And it all comes out the same:
More kinked than the kinks in a madman's brain.

Well, a ruler he was not.
I'll say, and his morals hardly lily.
And that's why this street,
Or rut, really,
Or pit pickaxed to the tune of Goddamn! --
Goes by the name of Mandelstam.

What do you think?

Filed Under: virtual poetry circle Tagged With: ,

The Wonder of It All by Elizabeth P. Glixman

May 25, 2012 by

The Wonder of It All by Elizabeth P. Glixman is a very small volume of poetry, but has a large sense of humor that will at times have readers giggling to themselves about the absurdity of it all.  Many of the poems are very much in the here and now of the moment.  The collection can fit in your pocket and can be taken out on the subway ride in between stops.

One of the best in the collection is “The Man from TSA — Unrequited Love Did Not Stop Glenn Close,” in which the narrator opts not for the scanning machine, but the gloved hand of a TSA agent and falls in love — or is it obsession?  Pop culture references infuse these poems, grounding readers in their own lives to draw parallels, but oftentimes the situations are too surreal for readers to connect with.  In a way, this may be the point that Glixman is trying to get to — that life is a series of absurd moments that we categorize to make sense of them and their meaning.

Other poems, like “Avalanche Worry,” have a tongue-in-cheek humor to them, telling readers to always have a cell phone, a year’s supply of groceries on hand, and other supplies so they are prepared.  But many of these poems are narrations of moments, offering vignettes, but little else.  While these characters and stories are fun and humorous, they lack the poetic nuance many readers are looking for in terms of images and larger connections to the human condition.  However, there are gems in this collection that poke fun at pop culture and its pervasiveness, including “The Wonder of It All” in which Minnie Mouse is transformed into a flirtatious girl, like Brittany Spears.

The Wonder of It All by Elizabeth P. Glixman is a mixed bag of poems, but entertaining in fits and starts.  There are some poems that could have ended sooner and more powerfully, but there are others that are deftly crafted.

This is the 17th book for my 2012 Fearless Poetry Exploration Reading Challenge.

 

 

 

This is my 42nd book for the 2012 New Authors Challenge.

Filed Under: challenges, Fearless Poetry Exploration Reading Challenge, New Authors Challenge, poetry, Read in 2012, review copy, reviews Tagged With: , , ,

Stolen Air by Osip Mandelstam, translated by Christian Wiman

May 24, 2012 by

Stolen Air by Osip Mandelstam, translated by Christian Wiman is a selection of poems from Mandelstam’s entire career translated from his non-native Russian into English.  The introduction is rather long, but with good reason as it strives to capture a poet that was always evolving and striving to breath new life into the Russian language and to provide a voice to those seen as outsiders of the government.  Living through WWI and a Russian revolution, Mandelstam — a Poland born Jew who moved to Russia with his parents — became an exile and later died in a Siberian transit camp in 1938 after being arrested.

“From the inarticulate comes the new harmony.  The lyric poet wakes up the language:  the speech is revealed to us in a new unexpected syntax, in music, in ways of organizing the silences in the mouth.”  (Page XIX)

Mandelstam and Wiman approach poetry in much the same way, according to the introduction — not through word-for-word translation, but through the silences and the music of the lines.  The collection is broken into three sections beginning with his early poems between 1910 and 1925 and ending with the poems written between 1934 and 1937.  Mandelstam’s work is very musical and generally uses a great deal of rhyme and alliteration, but the ways in which these poems are translated, they are neither cutesy nor predictable.

Interrogation (page 21)

Official paper, officious jowls, unswallowable smells
Of vomit, vodka, cells, bowels,
And all these red-tape tapeworms gorging on reports.

Choir, stars, your highest, your holiest silences...
But first, sign here on the dotted line
That they may grant you permission to shine.

The poems are song-like, but ripe with derision for Stalin’s totalitarianism and the control over freedom, which provided many with the guise of free expression that was received at a high price. Mandelstam speaks of a life choreographed by others and punishments that are deeply harsh when spontaneity strikes. His words are like hammers on the chains attached to boulders in prisons of old, making sure the lack of freedom is felt most acutely. From the “legislated” freedoms to the starvation and lack of heat, it is all present in Mandelstam’s roving poetry. He moved from city to city, presumably fleeing the government, and this movement is in poems like “Night Piece” and “Prayer” but it also is in the other poems through their quick imagistic movements from one moment to the next — the narrator always in motion.

Stolen Air by Osip Mandelstam, translated by Christian Wiman is not only about the absence of freedom, but finding that freedom within that totalitarian regime — grabbing onto it, stealing the air to breathe creatively. The narrator has learned to grab onto that stolen air and run with it, traipsing through beauty and finding the music everywhere, even in the darkness.  The translation does not read as such with very few moments where the verse stumbles, and this is the best tribute to a poet — a translator who hears the same music even across time.  Well done and highly recommended.

About the Poet (from Poets.org):

Born in January, 1891, in Warsaw, Poland, Osip Emilievich Mandelstam was raised in the imperial capital of St. Petersburg, Russia. His father was a prominent leather merchant and his mother a teacher of music. Mandelstam attended the renowned Tenishev School and later studied at the Sorbonne, the University of Heidelberg, and the University of St. Petersburg, though he left off his studies to pursue writing. He published his first collection, Kamen, or Stone (1913), when Russian Symbolism was the dominant persuasion.

The Bolsheviks had begun to exert an ever increasing amount of control over Russian artists, and Mandelstam, though he had initially supported the Revolution, was absolutely unwilling to yield to the political doctrine of a regime that had executed Gumilev in 1921. The poet published three more books in 1928—Poems, a collection of criticism entitled On Poetry, and The Egyptian Stamp, a book of prose—as the state closed in on him. Mandelstam spent his later years in exile, serving sentences for counter-revolutionary activities in various work camps, until his death on December 27, 1938, in the Gulag Archipelago.

About the Translator:

Christian Wiman was born and raised in West Texas. He is the editor of Poetry and the author of three collections of poems, Every Riven Thing, Hard Night, and The Long Home, and one collection of prose, Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet.

This is the 16th book for my 2012 Fearless Poetry Exploration Reading Challenge.

 

 

 

This is my 41st book for the 2012 New Authors Challenge.

 

 

 

This is my 10th book for the WWI Reading Challenge.

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Some Winners…and More

May 23, 2012 by

 

Winner Kathy at Bermudaonion

Winner Beth Hoffman

Congrats to both winners!

In other news, I’ve been interviewed by poet and fiction writer Emma Eden Ramos on her blog. Check it out!

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New in Mass-Market Paperback, Wendy Wax’s Ten Beach Road

May 22, 2012 by

Wendy Wax‘s Ten Beach Road (my review) is out in mass-market paperback, so for those of you who have missed out on reading this book and have a book-buying budget, now is the time to grab a copy.

I absolutely adored this book and its characters, strong women –Madeline, Nicole, and Avery — who face a financial crisis and rub one another the wrong way but manage to pull it together to restore their only remaining, shared asset, a house.  I loved this book so much for its summer feel, humor, and strong characters that I just had to share it with my mother, who normally reads action thrillers.  She loved it.

I even loved this book so much that it was one of my picks when asked by Women’s World Magazine which summer, feel good books I’d recommend for mother’s day.  (My recommendation made it into their May 14th issue on page 45, if you’re curious).

Here’s an excerpt from Ten Beach Road:

An eternity later, they hobbled out to the backyard just as the sky was beginning to pinken. Bedraggled, they dropped into the beach chairs with a scrape of aluminum against concrete.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been this dirty in my entire life.” Madeline plopped a family-sized container of hummus and triangles of pita bread on the upside down packing box that their Sam’s purchases had been carried in.

“Me, neither.” Avery dropped a bag of Cheez Doodles beside it and swiped the back of her forearm across her forehead, managing to add another streak of dirt to her face.

Nicole set an unopened bottle of Chardonnay on the pool deck next to her bare feet and handed a plastic cup to each of them. “If there was an inch of water in this pool, I’d be in it.” Nicole slumped in her chair. “I think we should make it a top priority.”

“We barely have a working bathroom,” Avery pointed out. “It took me forever to clean the shower and tub up in the hall. There’s pretty much no water pressure. I’d rather have a shower than a swim in a pool.”

“I want both,” Nicole said, lifting the cup to her lips. “It’s not an either/or sort of thing.”

“Well, it is here.” Avery took a long sip of wine as the sun slipped farther toward the Gulf. “Everything’s not going to get done at once, but I will talk to Chase about the schedule and how things should be prioritized.”

Madeline looked ruefully down at herself. Together they could have posed for the illustration of “something the cat dragged in” – even Nicole in her high-end running clothes and her hair pulled back in a glittery clasp. This was only day one; she could hardly imagine what they’d look like after the long, hot summer that lay ahead.

Her arms were so tired that it took real effort to lift even the small plastic cup, but she nonetheless touched it to the others. “Cheers!” she said, and they nodded and repeated the toast. “Will you be able to run your business from here?” she asked Nicole as they contemplated the sinking sun.

Nicole’s cup stopped midway to her lips. In the pass, a boat planed off and gathered speed as it entered the Gulf. “Sure,” she finally said. “Have laptop and cell phone, will match make.” She turned her gaze from the boat that was now disappearing from view to focus on Madeline. “How about you?” Nicole asked. “Can you really leave home for the whole summer?”

Madeline finished the last drops of wine and set her glass on the makeshift cocktail table. “You make it sound like going to camp,” she said in what could only be described as a wistful tone. “I was hoping my husband, Steve, would come down and help for a while.”

“Oh, is he retired?” Avery asked.

Madeline felt her cheeks flush. Nicole raised an eyebrow and poured them all another glassful.

“Not exactly,” Madeline admitted. “He was a financial planner who made the mistake of putting all his clients’ money in Malcolm Dyer’s fund. Along with his family’s.”

Her teeth worried at her bottom lip. She hadn’t meant to say so much. Or sound quite so pathetic.

“He stole my father’s entire estate,” Avery said. “Everything he’d built over a lifetime of hard work went into that thief’s pocket.” She grimaced and shoved her sunglasses back up on top of her head. “I still can’t believe it. Anything short of being drawn and quartered would be far too good for him.”

Madeline saw Nicole shiver slightly. “Are you cold?” The sun had not yet set, but its warmth had diminished.

“No.” Nicole turned her attention to the boat traffic in the pass. A Jet Ski swooped close to the seawall, its plume of seawater peacocking behind it. The rider was big shouldered and solid with jet black hair and heavily muscled arms. Nicole watched idly at first, presumably because he was male and attractive, but straightened in surprise as the rider locked gazes and offered a mock salute before revving his engine and zooming away.

“Do you know that guy?” Madeline asked Nicole, surprised. “He waved at you.”

“No,” Nicole said. “I don’t think he was actually waving at me. He …”

“Yes, he was,” Madeline insisted. “He acted like he knew you.”

“That guy was definitely hunky,” Avery said. “And he was definitely eyeing Nicole.”

“He must have thought I was someone else,” Nicole took a sliver of pita and chewed it intently before changing the topic. “So, how many kids do you have?” she asked Madeline.

“Two,” Madeline said, unsure how much information to share. “My son’s struggling a bit at school; he’s in his freshman year at Vanderbilt,” she said. “And my daughter, well, right before I left she lost her job-she’s a filmmaker- and she came home unexpectedly to live.” She cleared her throat as if that might somehow stop this bad news dump. “That was right after my mother-in-law moved in.”

“Good Lord,” Nicole said. She lifted the bottle, eyed the little that was left, and poured the remaining drops into Madeline’s glass. “No wonder you want to go away to camp.” She smiled with what looked like real sympathy. “Drink up. Girl; I’d run away from home, too, if I had to deal with all that.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes, sipping their wine, as the sun grew larger and brighter. A warm breeze blew gently off the Gulf, stirring the palms and riffling their hair.

“Maybe you should get your daughter to come down and shoot some ‘before’ video for us,” Avery suggested. “That’s actually what led to Hammer and Nail.” She furrowed her brow. “I had no idea what was coming down the pike when I shot that first ten minutes.”

Madeline considered the small blonde. “My mother-in-law seemed to think it was your husband’s show, that he got you on it.”

“A lot of people came to believe that,” Avery said, her tone wry. “Including my ex-husband. But the idea was mine. I’m the one who sold it, and us, to the network.”

They fell silent as the sun burned with a new intensity, shimmering almost white, then turning golden red that tinged the Gulf as it sank smoothly beneath it.

“God, that was beautiful,” Madeline breathed as they all continued to stare out over the Gulf, unable to tear their gazes from the sky and the last painted remnants of daylight. “It makes me feel like anything is possible.”

No one responded, and she supposed she should be grateful that no one trampled on her flight of fancy. The show was over, but Madeline could still feel its power. It moved her in a way her fear and even her resolution and Little Red Henness had not. She raised her now-empty glass to Avery and Nicole. “I propose that we all make a sunset toast. That we each name one good thing that happened today.”

“Good grief,” Nicole said. “Look around you.” She motioned with her empty plastic glass at the neglected house that hunkered behind them, the cracked and empty pool, the detached garage with its broken windows and listing door. “Is your middle name Pollyanna?”

Madeline flushed at the comment, but she didn’t retract her suggestion. “I’m not saying we should pretend everything’s perfect,” she said. “I’m just saying that no matter how bad it is it would be better to dwell on the even slightly positive than the overwhelming negative.”

“You’re serious, aren’t you?” Avery asked. They all still held their empty glasses aloft. “How good a thing does it have to be?”

“That’s up to you.” Madeline said. “I’m not interested in judging; there will be no ‘good enough’ police.”

“Well, that’s a good thing,” Nicole snorted.

“All right, hold on a sec,” Madeline said. She went into the kitchen and retrieved a second bottle of wine from the fridge, grateful that John Franklin had had the power turned on. As she refilled their glasses, she searched for a positive. Nicole was right, it wasn’t an easy task.

“Okay.” She raised her now-full glass and waited for the others to do the same. “I think it’s good that three complete strangers were able to reach an agreement and commit to a course of action.”

They touched glasses and took a sip. Madeline nodded at Avery. “Your turn.”

“Hmmmm, let me think.” She looked out over the seawall at the gathering darkness as the three of them sat in a spill of light from the loggia. A few moments later she raised her glass. “I think it’s good that this house is not going to be torn down. It deserves a facelift and a new life.”

They clinked and drank and turned their gazes to Nicole. Madeline could hardly wait to hear what she would say.

Nicole looked back at the house, then at them. A small smile played around her lips, and Madeline wondered if she was going to tell them to stuff the happy crap or simply refuse to participate. But she raised her glass in their directions and with only a small sigh of resignation said, “It’s a good thing no one saw me in that minivan. I can’t imagine how I’d ever live it down.”

The mass-market paperback release of Ten Beach Road is in advance of the June 26 release of the sequel, Ocean Beach, in which the three lead women — Madeline, Nicole, and Avery — from the previous book are back.  I just knew Wendy Wax was not finished with these characters!

About Ocean Beach:

Unlikely friends Madeline, Avery and Nicole have hit some speed bumps in their lives, but when they arrive in Miami’s South Beach neighborhood, they are all hoping for a do-over. Literally. They’ve been hired to bring a once-grand historic house back to its former glory on a new television show called Do-Over. If they can just get this show off the ground, Nikki would get back on her feet financially, Avery could restart her ruined career, and Maddie would have a shot at keeping her family together.

At least, that’s the plan – until the women realize that having their work broadcast is one thing, having their personal lives play out on TV is another thing entirely. Soon they are struggling to hold themselves, and the project, together. With a decades-old mystery—and the hurricane season—looming, the women are forced to figure out just how they’ll weather life’s storms…

Yes, you’ll want both books.  Don’t forget to follow Wendy on Twitter and Facebook.

To enter to win 1 copy of Ten Beach Road by Wendy Wax you must be a U.S. or Canadian resident.  Leave a comment below by June 1, 2012, at 11:59PM EST to be entered.

If you’ve already read Ten Beach Road, leave a comment telling me why you want to read Ocean Beach to be entered by June 1, 2012 at 11:59PM EST.

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The Cottage at Glass Beach by Heather Barbieri

May 21, 2012 by

The Cottage at Glass Beach by Heather Barbieri is about mothers and daughters and sisters and their tension and love filled relationships.  Nora Cunningham returns to Burke’s Island to get away from her scandalous political life in Boston with Malcolm and clear her head in upper Maine. Irish-American immigrant ancestors infuse her memories, memories she barely remembers from her younger childhood of her mother, Maeve, and their life together on the island before her mother’s disappearance. Nora reconnects with her aunt Maire as she begins to find her self — the person she is without Malcolm and the person she’s been deep inside.

“Her mother laughs.  Her voice is as sparkling as light on water.  The folds of her skirt cling to her legs.  She’d dived in fully clothed.  She isn’t like the other mothers with their rules and careful ways.”  (Page 1 ARC)

Nora’s daughters, Annie and Ella — ages seven and twelve — are like Maire and her sister Maeve used to be — one always cautious and one who lives in the moment.  Barbieri’s weaves in Irish folklore about selkies, seals that shed their skin to become humans on land.  These seals play a protective role in the story as they are always just off shore, watching carefully.  Soon, a man, Owen Kavanagh, washes up on shore near Nora’s cottage in the middle of a rainstorm.  But he’s not the only mysterious male on the island; there’s also a young boy named Ronan who befriends Annie.

“Indeed, a shiny head bobbed in the eddies that curled toward the shore, indigo depths between.  The creature met Nora’s gaze directly, its dark eyes wide and oddly human, before the children’s laughter drew its attention once more.”  (Page 18 ARC)

In many ways Ella and Annie act older than they are, but readers will see the toll that potential divorce can have on kids as their father makes a surprise visit to the island.  The island’s oasis atmosphere can be easily disturbed by outsiders, even if the inhabitants are eager to remain in between the past and the future like Nora.  However, how the characters react to those disturbances is a sign of strength and the support of their ancestors.  Barbieri blurs the lines between folklore and reality well here, and readers will be swept up in a cadence of storytelling that is reminiscent of Irish stories.

The Cottage at Glass Beach by Heather Barbieri is an oasis and a safe harbor in which Nora comes to reassess her life and decide how to move on after being deeply hurt by the one man she thought she could trust.  But she also must take into account the feelings and needs of her daughters, which is tough when harboring so much anguish.  A perfect summer read about mother-daughter bonds, bonds between sisters, and redemption.

Check out my review of The Lace Makers of Glenmara.

About the Author:

The author of two previous novels, The Lace Makers of Glenmara, and Snow in July, Heather Barbieri has won international prizes for her short fiction. She lives in Seattle with her family.  Please visit here on her Website and Facebook.

 

 

This is my 3rd book for the 2012 Ireland Reading Challenge.

 

 

 

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