Month: July 2026

The Secret Staircase, by Jill Barklem

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The children in my life love this story, part of the Brambly Hedge series. They are fascinated by the idea of a hidden stair and rooms that have long been locked up. Who isn’t? Surely I wasn’t the only child who went around tapping on walls and measuring the inside and outside of houses, hoping to find a secret passage or cobweb-laden room that no one remembered was there.

In this story, young Wilfred arrives at the Old Oak Palace along with Mr. Apple and the other children to prepare for that night’s big midwinter’s eve celebration. Lord Woodmouse and his daughter Primrose welcome them, and the two children go off to find costumes and to practice the poem they are to recite.

With all the bustling preparations Wilfred and Primrose have trouble finding a quiet place to practice until they enter a crowded storeroom at the end of a passage. However, they get distracted by all the things around them. Primrose explores a dresser and finds a small key in a drawer. Wilfred pulls at a green curtain that reveals a locked door hidden behind it. To their delight, Primrose’s key opens it.

Thus begins their adventure, all the more beguiling because of Barklem’s illustration of a secret stairway within the huge oak tree.

Why are we so drawn to hidden passages, mysterious rooms, and secret gardens? Though I was a practical child, I liked to imagine there was more to the world than the bare bones I could see, hear and touch. It could be a legend, a family story, or a bit of history about a place. It could even be the possibility that a dense forsythia bush hid a unicorn.

J.R.R. Tolkien wrote about adding what he called shimmer to his stories. He said that creating histories and legends around ordinary objects made them more real by adding the dimension of time—hence all his references in The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings to certain legends and songs. Sketching in those shimmering ghosts of the past can deepen the texture of the world in any story.

I’ve always been fascinated by houses anyway. My walk to and from school took me past a variety of houses large and small. I’d try to guess the layout of the bedrooms from what I could see of the windows and decide which room I would want to have. I used one of my favorites as the cover for my poetry collection Terrarium.

Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space says:

. . . if the house is a bit elaborate, if It has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated. All our lives we come back to them in our daydreams . . . In its countless alveoli space contains compressed time. That is what space is for.

Another reason to search for these hidden spaces is the thrill of entering a place where no one has been for years and years. Or perhaps ever: my brother, a lifelong caver, was part of the first team to explore Lechuguilla when it was discovered in New Mexico. He described for me that feeling of being the first person ever to step into a particular chamber.

While that’s not something I’ll probably ever experience, I like the idea of including a little bit of mystery in stories by the discovery of some hidden place. Adding shimmer to the place by giving it a history or legend would deepen its appeal. Perhaps readers would add their own shimmer as they remember being young and looking for a disguised door that might hide a secret staircase.

Did you ever search for hidden passages or secret spaces when you were young?

Shades of Isolation, by Danuta E.Kosk-Kosicka

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What do you want from poetry? A bit of a dream, a sweet memory, a surprising turn that takes you where you never expected to go? 

Maybe a glimpse into who you really are, or a step into another life, another world?

I found all this and more within the covers of Shades of Isolation. As I read, I kept thinking Oh, this is my favorite poem, only to change my mind as I absorbed the next one. Even the shortest poem contains a world of meaning. Short or long, each poem rewards a reader who lets time slip away as they allow themselves to fall into its music. 

In “The Red Glow,” the poem turns from the moon-lit snow outside where “the fox leaves no trace / across the hill” to inside where “a candle glows—” and the narrator wonders “am I talking to a memory or a new form of you / filling the emptiness . . .”

These are poems about isolation that also tell of love and mortality and change. Some are whimsical while others summon unexpected connections. Some, like “In a People House,” subtly critique society while others, like “Daughter of Trees,” go to the heart of identity.

The first poem “East/West” introduces us to the poet and her unique point of view. We see her as a 17-year-old student in Poland, meeting her future husband. We follow her through university, marriage, and work as a scientist and activist, leading to the offer of a fellowship in the United States. Then four simple words turn her world (and the poem) around.

A bilingual poet and translator as well as a photographer, Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka has translated the work of six Polish poets into English and the work of four Maryland Poets Laureate into Polish. With many publication credits, Kosk-Kosicka is the author of two previous chapbooks, one of which won the Clarinda Harriss Poetry Prize. She is currently the Poetry Translation Editor for the Loch Raven Review.

A few of the poems in this collection made me chuckle, though humor, as we know, contains both truth and pain. Others made me ooh and aah, while a few made me gasp in recognition. Reading them aloud, I savored the sound of them.

I have just returned from a week of reading poems with a group of novice poets. We lingered over each piece, sharing our thoughts. I wish they were with me now, so I could hear their reactions and insights regarding these poems. I want to ask them Was is it like this for you, too?

These are poems to be shared. They are to be read alone as you trace your own steps through them. They are works to be treasured.

Have you read a poem that made you feel less alone?

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a PDF review copy of this book from the author. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.
 

Parnassus on Wheels, by Christopher Morley

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When I was in Madrid in the 1990s, walking the streets in the evening, I glanced down a short, dead-end alley and was astonished by what I saw. Earlier in the day I’d visited the book stalls lining the Cuesta de Moyano, a small pedestrian street by El Retiro Park, and thought myself in heaven. So many books! So many book lovers!

Now, though, in that dim alley, I saw a young man grasp the bottom of a wooden board hanging on the stone wall and lift it to reveal shelves of  books. He propped the board up to be an awning and was ready for business.

Not only was I charmed by this unexpected bookshop and wished I could change places with him—what a life that would be!—but I was also reminded of a story I’d read twenty-some years earlier. In it a man had made a horse-drawn wagon, something like a Romany vardo, with sides that opened to reveal shelves of books. He traveled about the countryside selling books to farmers and townsfolk and “evangelizing” about the delights of reading.

Published in 1917, Morley’s novella is about Helen, a former governess who cooks and keeps house for her bachelor brother Andrew on their farm. Ever since Andrew started writing books and unexpectedly became famous, she’s become disenchanted with her life, left alone on the farm while he travels about giving readings and looking for inspiration.

Then one day Roger Mifflin drives his traveling bookshop into their farmyard. A short, balding man with a red beard, he has a gift for holding forth on the wonders of books and life on the road. However, he’s now decided to retire and sell his creation, and he thinks Andrew is just the person to take his place.

So does Helen. Foreseeing many more months of being left to tend the farm alone, she takes the remarkable step of buying the Traveling Parnassus herself. Though only 39 and a self-described “fat old woman,” she’s inspired to kick over the traces and set out on a bookselling trip herself.

They decide that she’ll drive Roger to the train station which will take a few days, and along the way he’ll tutor her in the business. As she and Roger travel the New England country roads, adventures ensue.

It’s been more than fifty years since I first read this delightful, old-fashioned story. I’d forgotten the details of those adventures, but I’ve never forgotten Roger’s joyous literary orations or the Traveling Parnassus itself. I’ve never forgotten my dream of a life surrounded by books and sharing them with others.

If you’re looking for something that reminds you of the joy that life holds, The Parnassus on Wheels is a great place to start.

Have you reread a book from your youth and found it better than ever? Did it change your life?

Time of the Child, by Niall Williams

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Williams returns to the fictional Irish village of Faha, where a lone doctor, Jack Troy, sees to the medical needs of those who live there. A widower, two of his daughters have married and gone, while 29-year-old Ronnie keeps house for him. Every day seems much like the last, although it being December (1962), some of the usual seasonal shenanigans are afoot. His patients even seem to have inherited the ills that plagued their parents, as attested to by the notes left by Jack’s father, the previous doctor.

Jack often pulls out his father’s sayings, like smooth stones he keeps in his pockets. “The sick are ourselves . .. When you stop understanding that, take your name off the wall and throw your bag in the river.” Yet Jack holds himself aloof from others, maybe because of his position and his sorrows or perhaps just the weight of all the secrets his patients confide in him.

I loved Williams’s earlier book This Is Happiness. The man can write about the big emotions without sentimentality. He treats all his obstreperous characters with gentle humor and tenderness and respect. There are some outsized characters here for sure, but he never invites us to laugh at them, just to appreciate them for themselves. I love this description of Ronnie:

Like the triangle that has one leg longer than the other, Ronnie had an asymmetrical relation with Faha. She was and was not part of the community, known by everyone, but kept at that distance that had too many causes, but was condensed into the phrase, the doctor’s eldest. And, because she was the one who opened the door to patients in the morning, the one who wrote their names in the book, helped those who needed help getting to chairs in the waiting room, help rising from them, and getting down the creaking hall into the riverward room of the surgery, she shared the perspective of those statues prayed to across the penny candles: she knew the parish through its illnesses. She was also the only person in the parish you could tell your complaint and not hear that she had that too or was suffering from worse.

As you can see, his writing is extraordinary: tangled sentences that somehow always make sense and capture the peculiar voice—syntax and sayings—of the residents of Faha. And that last sentence!

Although there are brief references to it, starting with the title, the promised child doesn’t appear until almost the halfway mark. Some may complain about that, but I say: Who cares about standard story structure when there is so much entertaining wordplay and so many wild events to enjoy, such as rebellious cattle being driven to a market that itself mixes chaos with kindness? I also didn’t mind the slow pace because every page is so rich with music and humor and heart.

This book is a treasure. I was almost afraid to read it, fearing it couldn’t possibly be as good as Happiness. It’s better: a genuinely moving story about what we are and can be to each other.

What novel have you read about what ties a community together or tears it apart?