My next 10 books in the 95 Books Challenge for 2011:
31. The Inquisition Yours (Jen Currin)
I previously read Currin’s Hagiography, and this book is, to me, a great leap forward for Currin. Her surrealistic imagery seems more anchored and necessary — sometimes in Hagiography I found myself wondering if the poems would be substantively different if their images were interchanged. I met Currin while in Ottawa recently and was impressed with her reading from this book, which further confirmed the grounding these poems have in real emotion — too often, similar poets use surrealistic imagery as a way to escape saying anything of note, as a flight into “quirkiness,” but there’s none of that here.
32. The Invention of Honey (Ricardo Sternberg)
33. Abundance (Robert Kroetsch and John Lent)
34. At Alberta (Nathalie Stephens)
35. Moosewood Sandhills (Tim Lilburn)
36. Willard and His Bowling Trophies (Richard Brautigan)
This book really fizzles near the end, as does Brautigan’s The Hawkline Monster. But because it’s Brautigan, the books is full of intelligence, wit, and great writing. Brautigan is the master of simple, stunning, clever sentences that seem to lie flat but upon closer inspection are full of sadness and satire:
The Logan brothers had a good life because they were doing exactly what they wanted to do and they had their bowling trophies to show how good they were at their life. (51)
Where Brautigan shines is in crafting strange, ambivalent images that don’t reveal the author’s own mind, but thrust forward various conflicting options from which the reader must choose. This is difficult to do well, and Brautigan’s genius is in managing to be noncommittal without bleeding his writing of force. Observe how well he sets up the final image here, an image that sets up two different possible and contrasting comparisons:
They always felt sad after making love, but they felt sad most of the time, anyway, so it really didn’t make that much difference, except that they were no warm and touching each other without any clothes on and passion, in its own particular way, had just crossed their bodies like a flight of strange birds or one dark bird flying. (63)
His writing can even be devastating in its simplicity. Here Constance asks Bob for a glass of water, but Bob can’t do anything right, so he brings her a sandwich:
She didn’t know why she was eating the sandwich. Ever since he had brought her the sandwich instead of a glass of water, nothing seemed to make much difference. (74)
And though it all seems silly (the “Willard” of the title is a papier-mache bird presiding over stolen bowling trophies, the loss of which have driven the Logan brothers near-madness and to a life of crime), the books deepens Brautigan’s obsessive engagement with the myth and meaning of America. Here the ghost of Matthew Brady, who after a brief walk-on role flits out of the novel having done nothing, really:
He disappeared back into the swirls of ghostly time, taking with him a photographic impression of Willard and his bowling trophies to be joined visually with the rest of American history because it is very important for Willard and his bowling trophies to be a part of everything that has ever happened to this land of America. (110)
37. The Productive Writer (Sage Cohen)
38. Erewhon (Samuel Butler)
39. Fear Not (Maurice Mierau)
This is an outstanding poetry collection that you should read right now.
40. How Did You Sleep? (Paul Glennon)
Glennon is one of the best fiction writers in this country, although I prefer his The Dodecahedron. Our grandstanding of inferior artists for the benefit of lazy American readers, at the expense of the visibility of truly excellent writers like Glennon (or the previously mentioned Tony Burgess, to name just two examples) is a national shame.
