Rebecca Foust has won the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize two years running. Last summer in CBR:15 we reviewed her 2007 award winning debut, Dark Card, a forceful collection of linked poems about her son with Asperger’s syndrome. Foust’s 2008 winning chapbook, Mom’s Canoe, is just out from Texas Review Press. Once again sequenced around a thematic thread—Foust’s upbringing in the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania—these are terrific poems, flinty and tough like the quarries and strip mines she writes about and, like her work in Dark Card, devoid of sentimentality and easy emotions. Nothing is left unscarred. “Gills burned, drowned in air …” she writes in “How the Fish Feels.” In “Things Burn Down,” the same air that chokes the unlucky hooked fish is killing us too: “Thick smoke from the papermill / all day and night, understand? No one asked // in those days if that shit could kill you …”
Hardship and loneliness become stark forces of nature in poems like “Allegheny County Winter Day” (“Everyone’s going / or gone. Sunset bleeds / through bare boughs; / snow hollows go blue”) and “The Mountains Come Close When It Rains” (“And say it’s ten below zero, skies gray so long you / forget what blue looks like, and you can’t find a job”). The twenty-four poems in Mom’s Canoe evoke a world rich in novelistic detail. A traffic light is made memorable in “November”: “The traffic / light is wanton, / an exotic / painted parrot / or harlot— // Emerald. / Burnt gold. / Then / throat-catching / scarlet.” And this glorious cascade of childhood images of her mother’s canoe in the collection’s title poem: “Frail origami, vessel of air, / wide shallow saucer suspended where / shallows met shadows near the old dam.”
An email from Tim Ware informs us that he’s launched an Infinite Jest wiki. Fans new and old of David Foster Wallace’s novel will find it a tremendous resource. Thanks, Tim, for including an external link to my warhorse website, Reviews, Articles, & Miscellany, a compendium of early Infinite Jest material circa 1996-99. Archaic in every way (before a brief touch-up this afternoon, I literally hadn’t updated it in the last ten years), it still contains some useful items unobtainable elsewhere.
The Spring 2009 issue of Cambridge Book Review is now online. It includes four poems from Madison writer Sarah Busse and a review of Eric Baus’s Tuned Droves.
Recorded exclusively for Coffee Spew, here’s Wisconsin poet John Lehman reading from his work. First, from Acting Lessons (Parallel Press, 2008), a film noir reverie:
Things More Distant Than They Appear / John Lehman
Let’s say that you had just two choices. The first, to leave
Rick’s Club, walk the six blocks down to your girl’s place
and apologize. The second, to stay and finish your drink.
The entranceway—stark, mail on the floor, broken buzzer
and unlocked door—with a little Scotch, takes on a movie
musical glow. A set where you tap dance up the staircase
into the arms of someone who is young and silken-robed.
In fact, the place is shabby. One, two, three stories of fried
onion smell. Then, of course her apartment door is locked
and at this time of night, why would she answer anybody’s
knock? So, it would be back to Rick’s anyway, right? No,
not quite, because you see the door is inexplicably ajar,
though all is dark inside. Now there are two more choices:
to call out “hello”—the only sensible thing to do—or push
the door open and, very quietly step within, the idea being
that you’ll make your way to her room, kneel beside her
bed and whisper your affection in her delicate ear as she
dreamily awakes. In you go, for this is the night of fools,
feeling furniture with your toes stealthily as a cat. Each
step takes days, each day is a week. Your lifetime passes
as you breathe through the doorway to her bed which is
—What did you expect?—empty. All you know for sure,
is that you’re tired and drunk and sad. You want to tumble
on top of that bed for a minute’s rest. You do, and dream
that you are back at Rick’s, and this time she comes in.
She puts her fingers to your lips; there’s no need for you to
speak. “My place or yours,” she smiles and since you already
smell the lavender candles of her room and feel the softness
of her pillows on your cheek, there are no choices, anymore.
But you’re not in her dreams, like she’s in yours. You don’t
need to leave Rick’s to discover that. So you sit and listen
to Chet Baker’s trumpet on the jukebox, to remember and forget.
*
Next, from Dogs Dream of Running (Salmon Run Press, 2001), an affectionate encounter with the late, great author:
John Updike Spills the Beans Riding through New Jersey / John Lehman
It was about this same time of year. We
were driving through a rural New Jersey
night, the wife of a Princeton Italian pro-
fessor, Tom Kennedy and me. She had
organized a day for us to conduct writing
workshops and now after the culminating
event, a lecture by the legendary John
Updike, we were headed to a reception
at the house of a dean. “Wasn’t Updike
something?” we all asked, remembering
the eloquence of his extemporaneous
words as they blended seamlessly with
excerpts which he read, like some vast
swelling on a literary sea, to raise us, not
to truth or beauty, but to a profound, new
level of sleep. Tom admitted to nodding
off several times and I to once awakening
with a start. Even our hostess could not
deny, “with the warmth, the lights, the ‘oh
so busy’ day …” But now how deliciously
refreshed we were, ready over cocktails
and hors d’oeuvres to impress each other,
all over again, with cleverness and wit.
Later, in the Cadillac en route to the motel,
we three were joined by the man himself.
He proved humble in a way the successful
are humble, dismissing their genius, though
mindful the rest of us be sure to disagree.
A lanky man slightly bending an enormous
head, he said, “I couldn’t help but notice
there was one person who … fell asleep.”
Was that the engine or his rising voice that
roared? He continued, “All I could think of
was how I might rouse this poor soul in the
third row from her stuporous dreams.” At this
pronoun Tom and I exhaled, and our driver
let us know, from where she was sitting in the wings she didn’t see anything. “Well,”
he sighed, “that reminds me of when T.S.
Eliot came to Yale. We had waited hours
in line to hear him speak. Student seats
were high in the balcony and amidst the
rising radiator heat …” And here the courtly
Updike chortled to himself, like a spent
wave tickling the sand on a distant beach.
“Can you imagine,” he said, “I fell asleep.”
Dublin-born Anne Enright’s 2007 Man Booker Prize-winning novel The Gathering is a stylistic tour de force. Indeed, the quality that most places it within the Irish literary tradition is its besotted piss-elegant obsession with language. Language as balm and bulwark against anxiety and death. Language as weapon, as conveyor of lies and painful truths. Language as bullshit, poisoned by alcohol and Catholic guilt. When a providential tyke loudly shouts “Shut uhhhp!” at a funeral in the novel’s final pages, it’s like a plea for sanity and silence, a halt to the maddening inadequacy of our words to connect honestly with our experience of the world.
Enright’s prose is craggy and lyrical, epigrammatic and at times very, very funny:
The British, I decide, only bury people when they are so dead, you need another word for it. The British wait so long for a funeral that people gather not so much to mourn, as to complain that the corpse is still hanging around. There is a queue, they say on the phone (the British love a queue). They do not gather until the emotion is gone.
The first-person narrative voice belongs to 39-year-old Veronica Hegarty, who often seems drunk or desperate to be drunk or on the way to getting drunk (driving alone in her Saab in the dead of night), restaging over and over in her mind the familial trajectory that may have contributed to her brother Liam’s recent suicide by drowning (Virginia Woolf-style, weighted down with rocks in his pockets).
No Irish tale worth its salt is complete without a long climactic depiction of a funeral wake replete with ghostly psychosexual hauntings. On this score, The Gathering doesn’t disappoint. Veronica’s chilly marriage and two young daughters seem far more remote than her clannish childhood and memory’s awful persistence: growing up among eleven siblings, assorted oddball relatives and sinister hangers-on. And they don’t come any more sinister than the late Lambert Nugent, landlord and louse. It’s a name that conjures gas-lit streetlamps and twirly mustachioed villainy. Placed within the novel’s complex modern sensibilitiy, he’s also pathetic and all-too-humanly evil. The Gathering is a motley, monstrously dysfunctional portrait, constructed incrementally through layered flashbacks and emotionally-charged vignettes and asides. (“Although my father used to hit his children all the time, more or less, it was never personal.”)
It’s giving nothing away to say that sexual abuse plays a role in the story (and is hinted at in the novel’s opening sentence): the terrible secret of what happened in their grandmother’s house when Veronica was eight and Liam was nine. Enright, to her credit, doesn’t drag this out too long. The mystery is resolved for us midway through the novel (not without an element of ambiguity, but with nowhere near the kind of coy “doubt” overplayed by John Patrick Shanley in his comparatively crude Catholic parable) while still allowing for a twist at the end, worth the wait, and satisfying in its own way as a credible suggestion of a future that won’t merely recapitulate the miseries of the past. Enright’s hothouse writing, verging on the wildly melodramatic at times, is tempered by gallows humor and the deftness of her dialogue. Literary fiction of the highest calibre.
Coffee Spew 