What I’m Reading

These past few months I have been on a reading binge — dozens of mystery novels, of course, and tons of poetry. But I just finished reading a novel, White Dog Fell from the Sky, by Eleanor Morse, that is so jaw-droppingly well-written and gripping that I want to buy a sackful of copies and give them to all of my friends. Barring that, telling you about it will have to suffice.

Set in Botswana in 1977, White Dog tells the intertwined stories of a South African medical student, Isaac Muthethe, who has had to flee his homeland; and Alice Mendelssohn, an American who followed her husband to Botswana, and, despite the end of her marriage, stays on. I don’t want to share much more of the plot than that. I think part of my pleasure in this book came from the unexpected and yet

Sunset, Casco Bay, Maine, 2019
Photo by Rhonda Berg

perfectly wrought twists of the track. Yes, at times it felt like watching a train wreck. At times, I wanted to set the novel aside and not read another word. I couldn’t help but plunge on.

Morse has a talent for letting ordinary descriptions shift into reverie:

The lilac-breasted roller flew again. [Alice] thought it must be the most beautiful bird ever created, with its shining wings, aqua tipped with deeper blue, its lilac throat and breast, white feathered forehead, and perfect dark eye. She thought of God speaking out of the whirlwind, how He reminded Job (as though he needed reminding by then) who had caused the morning stars to sing, who shut up the sea with doors and commanded the proud waves to come only this far, no farther. If He could harness the stars and the ocean, why could He not harness cruelty? Was it more powerful than all the stars and oceans? (289)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWiWl21F28c

I’m tempted to share one of the sweeping philosophical passages from late in the novel, but that, too, may give too much away. What I do want to convey is the lushness of Morse’s prose. It is never so ornate that it intrudes on the story, but enhances it, and becomes part of the trippiness of the whole experience. Sometimes beautiful, often brutal, it felt absolutely true. In this novel, there are no easy answers — no magical realism, no superpowers to help Isaac and Alice get out of their troubles. It doesn’t settle into that familiar track of the romance. All they have to work with are the truths of their time and place and their humanity.

Here are two paragraphs from the first chapter, just to give you a taste. Isaac, who has been transported in the bottom of a hearse from South Africa to Botswana, wakes to this scene:

A thin white dog sat next to him, like a ghost. It frightened him when he turned his head and saw her. He was not expecting a dog, especially not a dog of that sort. Normally he would have chased a strange dog away. But there was no strength in his body. He could only lie on the ground. I am already dead, he thought, and this is my companion. When you die, you are given a brother or a sister for your journey, and this creature is white so it can be seen in the land of the dead. The white dog’s nose pointed away from him. From time to time, her eyes looked sideways in his direction and looked away. Her ears were back, her paws folded one over the other. She was a stately dog, a proper-acting dog.

A cigarette wrapper tumbled across the ground, stopped a moment, and blew on. A cream soda can lay under a stunted acacia, its orange label faded almost to white. Seeing those things, he thought, I am not dead. You would not be finding trash in the realm of the dead. (1-2)

In another book I just began reading this morning, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Words Are My Matter: Writings on Life and Books, I came across a passage that does a fine job explaining why we read fiction. Le Guin also goes into how people often read: only for the operating instructions. But this is how Le Guin concludes her essay, “The Operating Instructions”:

The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life. (6)

 

 

Where to find me

The #SealeyChallenge

Here it is, the last day of August, and already it feels like fall. Leaves are changing color, the air is cool, and this morning a light mist accompanied me on my walk. It’s a perfect day for curling up with a book of poems.

Lucky me, I’m a long-time follower of Kathleen Kirk’s blog: Wait! I have a Blog?! and all through August she’s been doing the #sealeychallenge and reading a book of poetry a day, then sharing her thoughts with us. (See this link for a LitHub introduction to The Sealey Challenge.) So I enjoyed glimpses of lots of poets and books of poetry, ordered a few new ones, and sighed with pleasure to see some old favorites.

You can catch Kathleen’s final post here: https://kathleenkirkpoetry.blogspot.com/2021/08/and-there-is-many-good-thing.html and scroll back through to read all the reviews.

But (Wait!), what’s our assignment for the week? Maybe take a quick squint at Kathleen’s August 14 review of Priscilla Long’s Holy Magic. I’m noticing this excerpt from “Indigo & Violet”:

Indigo’s deep, black before dawn.
Violet’s an evening song.
Indigo’s ex is silver,
Violet’s–obsidian.

–and it makes me think of my great-aunts whose names were Rose and Violet and Opal. Come to think of it, there was also a Pearl and a March, the latter being not a color but provocative in its own way. (And a provocative woman, too.) What if you introduced us to a color as if it were a person? Who would that person be? How would they behave?

 

The Freshwater Review

Here’s your poetry assignment for this week, but it’s also my shameless plug for the freshwater reviewv. 24, in which my poem “Considering a Photograph of a Piano Abandoned in a Field” appears. The review is student run and operates out of Duluth, MN (The College of St. Scholastica).

I’m pleased to be part of this eclectic mix of prose and poetry, and our poetry assignment this week is drawn from its pages.

Your assignment is to 1) collect a series of images (I’ll be using postcards), and then 2) write an email to someone—alive or dead, known or unknown (you don’t have to send it)—preferably about a topic you find it difficult to talk about, and then, 3) to use the images from step #1 to rearrange the email into a series of … well, poetic images.

I can almost guarantee that isn’t what Daye Phillips did while writing her poem, but take a look and see if it can’t be reverse-engineered to fit:

Husks

The wind roared against the farmhouse all night,
all day, west to east, great, howling dire-wolf
at the door who never ran out of breath,

that scoured the harvested corn field clean
of dry husks, sent them winging through the air
like a migrating flock that came to rest

across the grass—east pasture, barn lot. Husks
the shape of mourning doves, wings folded close,
shape of Dürer’s “Praying Hands,” pen-and-ink,

hands emptied of everything but need.

—Daye Phillippo

Photo by Michael Morse from Pexels

featured photo is  by David Selbert from Pexels