Tree Poems

I was thinking of working on this Let's Make Art journaling project and think about text I might include if I made it a two-page spread. Of course, I thought of Frost's "Nothing Gold Can Stay," which I love but wasn't feeling for this. Someone in the Facebook group used Mary Oliver, a good choice. 

Anyway, the Googling led me to "Arbolé, Arbolé" by Federico Garcia Lorca. (And, hey, I just figured out how to do accents in Blogger.) I haven't read it before, and I really like it! It's romantic; the lyrics could be a folk song. (I don't know Spanish, but I like the rhythm of the translation by William Bryant Logan. I have to image "Come on over, muchacha" sounded a little less skeevy when originally written/translated, but I think the hint of skeeviness still works--after all, we know what those riders and bullfighters and flower-bedecked travelers are after.) I don't know enough about Lorca and Spanish history to know if the "dry and green" olive tree landscape represents a different region of Spain from those represented by the men, or if the pretty girl is a more general figure for Spain. On the personal or non-figurative level, I like a girl who doesn't need a man to entertain or define her: enjoy the single life, muchacha. 

I might have to read some more Lorca, either after I finish Best American Poetry 2020 or interspersed with that reading. 

Other poetic Googling: on the theme of "impermanence," there just aren't too many flowers are quickly here-and-gone as the wisteria. It's still lovely, but what I see along the road has already faded from the hues of a few days ago. My research turned up some interesting poems, but I think my favorite is "Extreme Wisteria" by Lucie Brock-Broido. 

But is it really a gauntlet?

Phoenix Rising, Havenfall's sequel was a quick read. Still fun, though some of the encounters/decisions didn't make a lot of sense. I actually wish the pacing was slower--although the book does introduce one intriguing new major character, the characters are pretty much the same as Book 1-- because some of the conflicts are interesting and could benefit from nuance. For example, the novel opens on Maddie fishing for information from guests at a Havenfall ball and there are tantalizing details mentioned (giant eagles, Fiorden family histories) that seem to be set up but are instead mostly dropped; when a higher-stakes undercover mission comes up later, the protagonists pretty much go straight for the main suspect and find what they're looking for in one night. Taya is notably missing for most of the book but arrives in time for the climax with basically "I'll tell you about it later" (but not in this book, apparently) as the explanation for her sojourn in an entirely different, long-forbidden world. On the plus side, there are giant wolf puppies (and we could have used more time with them, too!).

My main annoyance with this book, and it is not a minor annoyance, is that there is a significant magic item that is referred to as a "gauntlet" throughout despite, although not described in huge detail, the details given suggesting it is a VAMBRACE, bracer, armguard, wristguard, or cuff rather than a gauntlet. (The item is described as a "delicate tapered cylinder of gold" that "flares at the end, shaped and sized for a wrist. It looks like finely wrought armor, opening on tiny hinges and closing with a delicate latch.") A gauntlet is not a cylinder; it is a glove. Nothing in the description suggests this item has fingers or even protects on set of knuckles. It is consistently described as being worn on the wrist; other characters check Maddie's wrist to see if she is wearing it on more than one occasion. (Also, this delicate cylinder apparently fastens just fine around a female human's wrist and a male Fierden's wrist, to name two, no problem.) Now. some Internet research does turn up some "demi-gauntlets" that don't have fingers or cover the full fingers--but they still cover at least the first set of knuckles. Wikipedia asserts that "In Western women's fashion, a gauntlet can refer to an extended cuff with little or no hand covering. Such gauntlets are sometimes worn by brides at weddings." I question this, but even so, choosing an obscure fashion usage over the more common armor usage in a fantasy with plenty of medieval weaponry gets major side-eye from me. There's one stray mention of the gauntlet extending to the palm; I don't know how that works for actually using one's hand. If this item is partly made of chain rather than plate, nothing in the description suggests it. I maintain that the phoenix flame gauntlet is a vambrace.

So, not a flawless book by any means, but the characters are still likable, and it's exciting to travel outside of Havenfall in this installment. If there are more in the series, I'll read them. I may not rush out to buy them in hardcover ... but then, sometimes you just want something fun, and the covers are quite pretty. (In this case, the back cover, showing a fuller landscape with gardens, is lovely as well and shows how the front cover is a collaboration between the illustrator and the jacket designer.)

Lighter Fare

I  was looking for something a little more fun, and indeed Havenfall by Sara Holland is. A YA fantasy with elements of mystery and romance, Havenfall is set at a secret Colorado inn and mountain retreat that just happens to be the neutral zone of the multiverse. There are two main Adjacent Realms that still visit earth, or Haven, regularly--wintery Fierden and Byrn, plagued by storms of elemental magic--and there's a satisfying sense of history in the novel's worldbuilding. When her innkeeper uncle is struck down in a magical attack and a guest of the Inn is murdered, teen Maddie Morrow must step into the role of Innkeeper and peacekeeper between rival delegations. Not all is starlight and poetry--in the world outside the Inn, Maddie's mother is on death row, falsely (she believes) accused of murdering her brother when Maddie was only five, while at the Inn itself, not all of the guests are who they appear to be. Some of the plot points are predictable; there's a bit too much overlooking of the obvious and some of the secret-keeping is excessive and seems contrived to further the plot, but the book is still a fun read that leaves lots to explore in the sequel(s). I hope we get to hear some of that Fierden poetry.

I'm pleased at making it to Day 12 of the Blog Along, and I'm pleased with the page I made this afternoon, taking a break to journal jam with Effy Wild. I went my own more or less,  starting from the initial prompts of "overlapping circles," "red," and "use pretty tape."

On a less unmitigatedly happy note, I finished The Changeling by Kate Horsley tonight. Horsley's work was recommended to me by a teacher I train with. I looked her up and was surprised I hadn't heard of her before: theoretically, it's exactly my jam. Confessions of a Pagan Nun is set in fifth century Ireland; the writer Gwynneve (the novel is in the style of a recovered and translated medieval manuscript) is one of the monastics (or cele de) at Brigid's church, but she was trained as a Druid. The best part of the book is the imagining of what pre- and early-Christian Ireland was like, from life in a tuath (not glamorous and most involving pig tending, although tales are still told of the deaths in skirmish of Gwynneve's grandfather and great-aunt). Gwynneve's mother is a member of the woman's council, a healer and collector of herbs, and Gwynneve learns from her but becomes fascinated by the Druid Giannon and his great power of literacy (as well as the traditional Druidic power of satire). The novel tells of Gwynneve's childhood, her training as a nun, and her adventures in young adulthood as the traditional order regulated by wandering Druids comes under assault by the worldview of Christian monks (particularly those in the Augustinian mode as opposed to the more pleasure-loving and tolerant Pelagians). This coming-of-age story is intercut with scenes from the monastic community at Kildare, which becomes troubled by extremism and conflicting ideaologies.

The downside of The Changeling is that it's pretty bleak. Life is hard, and it isn't fair. Gwynneve, like many spiritual seekers, tries to understand and explain this. Her teacher, Giannon, is accused of rejecting both the old ways of Druidry (and magic he dismisses as trickery) as well as the new doctrines of Christianity, though he embraces knowledge in many forms. Gwynneve finds her solace mostly in the natural world, but also in writing; although in her Confession, she attests the official party line that Pelagian Christianity's doctrine of original grace and lack of asceticism are heresy, it is clear that she disagrees, In the main, The Changeling is perhaps primarily a philosophical text (it's published by Shambhala press; though I could occasional elements of Buddhist philosophy in Gwynneve's ruminations on suffering, they felt more Epicurean or Stoic to me) with passages like:

    And what message would I have wanted from the stars that night when I wandered motherless for the first time in my life? What message would I want the sky to tell me on any night? That I am loved? That I am protected? That something understands my efforts though they fail? That the sky is a curtain behind which all that we long for waits, that all the dreams we mourn that are held in the arms of the dead, who wait and whisper like children in a game of hiding? That if I have faith I will be embraced by an understanding that is complete and blissful? Perhaps if one stops looking up at the stars and looks instead at this world, the messages we need would be there and the gods could tend to larger matters than one tiny person's sorrow.
    I did not know and still do not know what message would give me the greatest comfort, for all signs in the end seem to be desperate interpretations by those who must have some explanation for the pain of living.

Overall, Confessions is rather bleak, although Gwynneve does take her own journey and claim her own choices, even when her options seem limited. The Changeling is set nearly ten centuries later, still very invested in the . It starts out promising, with the birth of young Grey to the Finnistuath goatherd and his wife, raised as a boy out of fear the goatherd would expose or beat to death yet another girlchild--okay, not exactly a barrel of laughs (especially when you add in a few scenes with the abusive English Lord and his sons and the casually callous and violent local Priest), but then it takes bleak to a new level--including Grey being pimped by an unscrupulous monk and lengthy visceral descriptions of the Black Plague. It's one thing to try to capture a historic mindset or to confront the hardships of life head-on without a false or easy positivity; it's another to envision a world without pleasures (except, in this case, rolling the grass, eating cheese, and--clearly dominating many characters' minds--sex). There's the occasional song, but I was three-quarters through the book and reading about a world where it seemed no one had a drum or a whistle or ever picked berries or baked fruit or distilled whiskey. Time passes; life happens; things start looking up (at least for Grey; and we get mention of a drum and flute and brewed ale) and I started to imagine the book might actually have a happy ending, but (spoiler alert) those hopes were pretty much dashed. Still, the book ends on what in this context seems a relatively hopeful note: the closing sentences, "Sometimes she was a warrior, though she still didn't know what her true cause as a warrior was. Perhaps it was simply living each day without succumbing to bitter sorrow over the pain of being human; perhaps it was fighting to savor what one has and to honor what one has lost."

In Under the Wire

Well, after dinner & a couple of episodes of The Crown, I nearly forgot about updating the blog. I could skip today, but I feel like keeping the momentum going even if I don't feel much like writing.

So, I'll be brief. Instead of writing about books today, maybe I'll share my recent listening. Shortly after getting my second vaccine shot, I went down some algorithmic rabbit holes and ended up ordering several CDs. (The timing was not deliberate, but in fact, as I've been out & about just a bit more most-vaccination, I've had more opportunities for listening in the car. Even though my pre-pandemic commute was pretty short, I find I do miss the music. I mean, sure I could play music around the house more often; I just don't, especially as I'm still in mourning for my defunct iPod nano. Maybe at some point I'll get in a trip to the Apple store in hopes of resurrection.) I won't talk for now about the albums that seemed disappointing or mediocre (in fact, none of this year's purchases would make the desert island list), but I'll mention the two I've been enjoying most:

The Green World by Dar Williams. While it isn't going to displace Mortal City as my favorite Dar album, it grows on me more with each listen. I bought this primarily because the song "Calling the Moon" was recommended by Effy Wild. It's a good track, but my favorite is "After All." I noticed more Christian references in the lyrics than in the albums I'd heard before, including in a song that pays tribute to the Berrigan brothers, anti-war protestors. And "I Won't Be Your Yoko Ono" is fun--even though it prompted me to look for YouTube videos of Ono singing (I've never been a fan of Ono-bashing, especially as most of it is blatantly misogynistic, but the Ono music left me ... unimpressed).

We Are by Jon Batiste. I enjoy seeing Batiste on A Late Show on the rare occasions I stay up for it (and although the music snippets are usually tiny), and I also enjoyed watching the movie Soul, which Batiste consulted on. This album has a strong element of New Orleans brass, a sense of community (I didn't realize the opening track included members of the Batiste's high school's marching band until I saw this interview online, a cool detail; I also appreciate how he rejects genre pigeon-holing in the interview),and a variety of moods. Some of the tracks like "Boy Hood" have more of a rap/spoken word vibe than I prefer--but it also has some really nice instrumentals (and to me there's actually something about the spoken sections that remind me of Van Morrison's setting of the "When the child was a child" poem from Winds of Desire). My favorite track is the ebullient "Freedom."

The Best American Poetry 2020, Part 3

In Vievee Francis' "The Shore," the speaker observes a couple at a hotel and reflects on her own affairs and others'. The language is vivid. I really need to read her book, Forest Primeval, which is upstairs either on my desk or on the poetry bookshelves.

Some of the other poems in this small batch touch on similar themes. In "Sex," Christine Gosnay writes, "... I can't help closing my eyes to imagines/ the boat that carries me to the middle/ of a lake as dark as the gaps between the clouds." Rachel Galvin's "Little Death" describes, in intense and sometimes violent detail the catching of a fish. (The poem's--subtitle? epigraph?--is "after Jonathas de Andrade"; in the notes, Galvin says she wrote the poem after watching the Brazilian artist's film O Peixe; I saw some of this work at Richmond's ICA and it is indeed striking and memorable.) Despite its tight descriptive focus, Galvin's poem packs a punch: "Remember: when a man captures a fish/ he will seduce it while he slaughters it".

I didn't care for "Birches Are the Gods' Favorite Tree" by Regan Good. Some visceral images emerge, particularly in the poem's latter half, but the dense language, classical allusions, and intellectual diction makes the balance feel off to me. In her contributor note, Good writes, "The randomness of suffering and grief is at the heart of the poem. ... It is not really bearable, but we bear it."

In a somewhat stream-of-consciousness style, Jorie Graham's "It Cannot Be" foregrounds the suffering of refugees, mixing and blending with the personal (the death of Graham's mother) and the impersonal (an implacable sea, the prospect of "extinction"). 

The most powerful poem in this section, for me, was Julian Gewirtz' longer, multi-part "To X (Written on This Device You Made)." The epigraph quotes a newspaper article about a "24-year-old migrant worker" who jumped out of the window of a Chinese factory dormitory run by iPhone manufacturer Foxconn. The poem begins with an iPhone: "Pick it up./ Black glass our mirror when it's/off but it is never/off." It continues:

I see you I think I
see you load your 
poem onto it, into me, into now     Did you, just like that, standing
fall asleep Did you fall farther than you meant Did you
mean me to be reading this I want
to touch the sky/ feel that blueness so light/
but I can't do
any of this/ so I'm
leaving this
world/ I was fine
when I came/ and fine when I 
left     In this blue touchlight
fine rain starts
scrolling down

The "you" throughout the poem is tricky--usually, it seems, the dead worker, but sometimes the phone itself (Siri makes an appearance) and sometimes the end user, the author or perhaps the reader. A section describing consent forms (optional, but not really) is followed by sections on the inhumane conditions of factory work, facts woven in with musings. And at the end, poet and reader are horrifically complicit: "I pick it up // forgive me // I pick it up". 

After reading the poem, I wasn't surprised to find in the notes that Gewirtz is a historian. He writes, "This poem responds to the extraordinary collection Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Worker Poetry, edited by Qin Xiaoyu and translated by Eleanor Goodman. ... The experience workers--and the intimate connection to their exploitation of every person who wears 'Made in China' clothing or texts on an iPhone--is almost wholly absent from mainstream conversations in the United States, even though those workers' labor has reshaped our world."

Eagerly Awaiting the Paperback Release

I did my taxes. Yes, a whole six+ days before the original deadline and more than a month before the extended deadline. Anyway, I'm blaming that small burst of effort for my current desire to go cuddle up in bed with a volume of medieval historical fiction. In other words, I don't feel like writing an involved post.

So I thought it could be fun to mention some of the books I've recently wishlisted or that the Great Amazon Algorithm has recommended to me recently. I can't say much because I haven't read them yet.

The Final Revival of Opal & Nev by Dawnie Walton: The Algorithm recommended this one. The description makes it sound kind of like a mash-up of Kiley Reid's Such a Fun Age and Taylor Jenkins Reid's Daisy Jones and the Six. I mean, I want writers to make that hardcover money, but I can't help wishing for paperback initial releases.

Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age by Annalee Newitz. I can't wait to learn more about Catalhoyuk, and while I've
read a few recent articles on Cahokia, I'm looking forward to Newitz's take. (Her novel, Autonomous, by the way, is a lot of fun and packed with ideas.) The Angkor section should also be illuminating; Pompeii doesn't seem quite so exciting in this company, but it should be interesting to compare the Roman city with other models.

The Murderbot novellas were highly entertaining, so I'm ready to check out the two (so far) sequel novels, Network Effect and Fugitive Telemetry.  Martha Wells hasn't let me down yet.

Karen Tidbeck's short story collection Jagannath was weird and powerful. Her dystopia Amatka was an unsettling page-turner. I know her new novel, The Memory Theater, is sure to be one of a kind, but the description alludes to a fairytale/fantasy realm setting that really heightens my anticipation.