justin

Since my memoir came out last summer, I've been teaching some memoir writing workshops, and one question I always hear is How do I start? There are several answers to this question, but one of my favorites is to write little bits as they come to you and then after a while see what you've got, see what makes you want to write more. In the future, I will recommend they read this book.

Winik gives us brief portraits of people in her life who have died. While Spoon River Anthology is her model, these are all real people, and the stories are from the author's point of view rather than that of the dead person. No names; instead each person is identified by some trait, such as The Skater or The Mah Jongg Player. In just a few pages she gives us a strong sense of the person. Each chapter is quite brilliant, though some are more wrenching than others: she writes of her first husband's death, her first child's.

Writing a whole book seems overwhelming. Writing a single scene or a character sketch feels much more manageable, but in fact writing a short piece well is much more difficult. I always find it much easier to write five pages about something than to condense it to one paragraph. Winik succeeds by providing vivid snippets and not falling into a formula. Sometimes she recounts an incident to bring a person to life, sometimes description, like The Jeweler who looked like a Bavarian elf, sometimes just a brief summary. But always her details are vivid and a bit wacky like this summary of The Bon Vivant's background: “He was the youngest of three boys raised in the swamps of East Texas by a Jewish salesman of women's clothing, and all three emerged from that thicket with elegant Southern manners, true modesty, and rare taste.”

Although The Graduate and The Last Brother made me cry, I think my favorite is The Queen of New Jersey who had everything until “As in a fairy tale, everything went wrong.” I think I like it because I've known so many people like this, people whom I thought had it all figured out when it turns that they just haven't been tested yet.

Because of the consistent narrator, this collection of short pieces add up to a memoir, a bit impressionistic perhaps, but the sense of a life. It is this sense of life that keeps the book from being depressing. If we live long enough, we all enter what Jane Smiley calls “The Age of Grief”. People we know have died. People we love have died. And each death marks us in some way.

In the Author's Note Winik says that the book started as an exercise in a writing workshop. Beginning to write about The Jeweler and how he died, she says, “I felt my brain begin to crowd up, as if tickets to a show had just gone on sale and all my ghosts were screeching up at the box office.” Every writer, if she's lucky, knows that feeling.

A writing acquaintance recommended this book as one of the best at providing a sense of place. I have to agree with that assessment. Here the place is the Russian countryside where Turgenev grew up. A member of the gentry just prior to the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, Turgenev's concern with the plight of the peasants he encounters fuels these stories.

Even though a journeyman writer—these are his earliest published writings—Turgenev succeeds brilliantly at writing fiction that reveals a political slant while preventing the politics from overwhelming the story. This is always a difficult task. As Orwell said, “All art is propaganda, but not all propaganda is art.” How Turgenev does it is twofold. First, influenced by Gogol and Dostoevsky, he writes in a realist manner, depicting the peasants, their meagre huts, and the injustices they suffer in a straight-forward manner. Secondly, his narrator is simply an observer, rarely taking an active role or even commenting on what he sees or is told. He lets the peasants and their circumstances speak for themselves.

I guess they spoke pretty loudly: after the book was published in 1852, Turgenev was arrested and then exiled to his estate.

Prior to being collected in book form, these stories were published in The Contemporary, a Russian journal. They do read a little like writing exercises—a character sketch here, a nature description there—so I could almost see him preparing to write a novel. I'm not interested in hunting—I agree with the peasant nicknamed Flea who says of undomesticated beasts and birds, “and a sin it is to be killing such a one, it should be let to live on the earth until its natural end . . .”—but there's actually very little about that. Mostly Turgenev writes about people and places.

The injustices, recounted in a matter-of-fact tone by peasants who expect no more, infuriated me. For instance, there's the farmer Ovsyanikov who when prompted by the narrator as to whether the old days weren't better, says he has no reason to praise the old days. The narrator, he says, is a landowner but not the kind of man his granddad was. Ovsyanikov mentions a patch of land and says, “Your granddad took it off us. He rode up, pointed, said: ‘That's my property,' and took it.”

There are other fascinating characters: two friends, one blustery and one shy, who support and care for each other; an older woman with simple tastes who indulges her artistic nephew; Old Knot whose masters kept moving him from job to job: coachman, cook, fisherman, shoemaker, pageboy, even an actor in his mistress's theatre. Most touching of all is Lukeria, whom the narrator finds in a shed when sheltering from a storm. She had once been a maid in his mother's household, the most beautiful and lively of them all. But now she has fallen prey to a wasting disease, cannot move, can barely eat. Yet she does not complain, but speaks gratefully of the kindness of the villagers who care for her and feed her. She dreams and prays and, when she has the strength, she sings.

Most of all I love the descriptions. As promised I found myself walking through the woods with the narrator, among the “wispy pink runners” of wild strawberries and mushrooms in “tight family clusters.” We lie on our backs and watch the peaceful play of the entwined leaves against the high, clear sky . . . and then suddenly . . . these branches and leaves suffused with sunlight, all of it suddenly begins to stream in the wind, shimmers with a fugitive brilliance, and a fresh, tremulous murmuration arises which is like the endless shallow splashing of oncoming ripples.” Or we go driving on a country road under newly washed willows with larks rising by the hundreds overhead. “On an upland beyond a shallow valley a peasant is ploughing. A dappled foal with short little tail and ruffled mane runs on uncertain legs behind its mother and one can hear its high-pitched neighing. We drive into a birch wood . . .” I could linger here for a long time.

Some friends and I went to see the the Met's broadcast of Mozart's Don Giovanni this month. Although I like all kinds of music, I'm only just getting around to exploring opera. This was the first time I'd seen or heard this one from start to finish and, while I enjoyed it tremendously, several things surprised me.

For one thing, broadcasting these productions to be seen on a movie screen puts much more emphasis on the acting; it's not enough to just have a gorgeous voice. Luckily all but one of the main characters had the acting skills as well as the voice. And not just the grandiose gestures that work from the stage, but also the subtle, sidelong glances, the quick, secretive smiles. It must have been a challenge for everyone on stage to put together a performance that would work for both the live audience in the Met and the enthusiasts packing the movie theatres.

I especially liked the interplay between Don Giovanni and his servant, Leporello. Apparently Mariusz Kwiecien and Luca Pisaroni have played this duo many times. It was fun to watch the shifts in the relationship as Leporello explored how far he could go, alternately criticising and imitating his master. Kwiecien's Don Giovanni displayed the expected arrogance but surprised me by being not only handsome but also elegant and aristocratic. However, I found myself wanting to shake the silly girls for falling for his lines.

No, it was Ramón Vargas as Don Ottavio who stole my heart with his heart-felt aria, Dalla sua pace:

On her peace of mind depends mine too,

what pleases her gives life to me,

what grieves her wounds me to the heart.

If she sighs, I sigh with her;

her anger and her sorrow are mine,

and joy I cannot know unless she share it.

Such devotion might drive me crazy, but I'll take a man who calls me his treasure over one for whom I'm just another notch on his belt. Generosity in love is not to be scorned. I loved the dignity Vargas brought to a role that is often played as a buffoon.

Of course the much-retold story of the famous lover is a man's fantasy: women swooning over him, lining up to be his next conquest, begging him to come back even after he betrays them. The dinner scene at the end was particularly well done, with food and women jostling for room on the table, a feast for the libertine. I was a little taken aback at the servant Zerlina (beautifully performed by Mojca Erdmann) begging her fiancé to beat her. I understand that she was wooing her man back after she'd been flirting too brazenly with Giovanni, and that she was confident her fiancé would not actually do so, but it was an unpleasant reminder of the ugliness underneath the music. And of how times have changed since the libretto was written.

I liked the set a lot: the facade of a Venetian house which separated for large, well-lit scenes such as the wedding festivities and dinner scene. The director used it in interesting ways, delineating inside and outside, enabling characters to overhear each other or hide as necessary.

Altogether a delightful experience.

My book club selected this remarkable first novel for our November read. Some people didn't enjoy it, put off by the odd structure, while others of us loved the ambiguity, the space for interpretation between the scenes. It's certainly not a linear narrative. In a recent blog post Jennie Cruise describes the difference between linear and patterned structure: “. . . sometimes your story isn’t about what happens next. Sometimes it’s about the pattern of events, the accumulation of small crises, the juxtaposition of character reactions, the layering of behaviors that make a character deeper and more faceted and the release of the information about that layering in juxtaposition with other characters . . . It’s not the cause and effect that matters, it’s the pattern.”

Tinkers certainly fits that definition. In the frame story, 80-year-old George Crosby is counting down the days to his death. The patterned structure is appropriate for this story. The author tells us early on that “George Crosby remembered many things as he died, but in an order he could not control . . . showing him a different self every time he tried to make an assessment.” As Cruise says, “Most of the time, most stories need linear structure, but when a story says, ‘I don’t care what happens next, I care what these things together mean,' you’re looking at a patterned structure.”

As his mental state deteriorates, George is not always sure of the identities of the people in the room. His thoughts turn to his childhood in rural Maine and his father, an itinerant peddler subject to epileptic fits who disappeared from George's life when the boy was only eleven.

Many of the fortezza, the pieces George tries to form into a mosaic, are from his father's point of view. Howard's memories, interspersed with George's, sometimes tell of the same incidents, sometimes not. These are not simple flashbacks; George could not know the details Howard relates of his travels and of his own childhood. In one of the most moving sections, Howard tells of the disappearance of his father, a minister who “leaked out of the world gradually” when Howard was still a boy. He tells of seeing his father fumbling in the apple barrel and realizing “that this thought was not my own but, rather, my father's, that even his ideas were leaking out of his former self.” Perhaps this explains how Howard's thoughts inhabit his son's dying mind.

Howard goes on to say that from this realization he understands that “Hands, teeth, gut, thoughts even, were all simply more or less convenient to human circumstance, and as my father was receding from human circumstance, so, too, were all of these particulars, back to some unknowable froth where they might be reassigned to be stars or belt buckles, lunar dust or railroad spikes. Perhaps they already were all of these things and my father's fading was because he realized this . . .”

Howard describes his epilepsy as feeling as though he is filled with lightning, “split open form the inside by lightning.” But he is more than his illness; he is a poet and a philosopher drawing on the Transcendentalist tradition of Thoreau and Emerson. In his lonely travels Howard falls into ecstatic states of wonder at the natural world: “Howard walked along the road and looked at the winter weeds poking up from the new snow. There were papery shells of burst pods and thorns and whitish nubs at the end of pannicles. Some were bent over, broken-backed, with their tops buried in the snow as if they had been smothered in the frost. The interlocking network of stalks and branches and creepers was skeletal, the fossil yard of extinct species of fine-boned insectoid creatures.” I'm tempted to quote the whole book.

Interspersed with George and Howard's memories are excerpts from a 1783 tome on horology, the study of measuring time. In his retirement George has begun fixing clocks and likes nothing better than pulling apart the ancient works to find the problem. The clock imagery is gently persistent, a background to the story without being overdone. We also get excerpts from an old book found in the attic by one of George's grandsons who reads him the profound and mysterious little reports, bits of philosophy and poetry. The first, on Cosmos Borealis, starts “‘Light skin of sky and cloud and mountain on the still pond.'” We even get some flash-forwards to what will happen after George's death.

As readers of this blog know, I am easily confused by such jump-cuts. Here, however, I was never in doubt as to the identity of a section's narrator or the time period. Since the book is written in third person point of view, I had the name of the narrator but also other details to orient me such as George's clocks, Howard's wagon full of odds and ends to sell, and the inexorably decreasing number of days until George's death.

The book is a profound meditation on identity and inheritance. George and Howard share a similar view: “Your cold mornings are filled with the heartache about the fact that although we are not at ease in this world, it is all we have . . .” On a more mundane level, they are both tinkers, though in a different realm. Howard's travels on the back roads of Maine involve not just selling necessities but also fixing things for the isolated folks who live there. George has his clocks, of course. The author too is a tinker, messing about with the workings of narrative. In the end, though, it is the language that seduces me. I'm a sucker for beautiful language and there is some gorgeous prose here. Howard's descriptions of the natural world are particularly luscious. I'm a sucker for ideas, too, and there is no shortage of ideas in this story of what is lost and found. All the pieces I want in a novel are masterfully brought together is this small volume, the best book I have read in a long time.

If you have ever been tempted to run away to sea, then this is the book for you. Derived from transcripts of interviews, this nonfiction book gives you the scoop on what it's like to work as a merchant seaman. Ronnie, the narrator, is the real deal: a 40-year veteran, he's sailed everywhere, including around the world twice. Thanks to Robert Jacoby, we get to listen in as Ronnie recounts some of his adventures, such as his attempt to bring a baboon on the ship, and describes the colorful characters he's met, like Shanghai Jane who coerces sailors into accepting runs they don't want, Omar Sharif who served Ronnie in the bar Sharif owned in Aqaba, and Greg Cousins who was on the Exxon Valdez during the spill.

The dangers aren't always the ones you expect. In Saigon, after unloading ammunition during the Vietnam War, Ronnie goes to a bar run by an Australian that's a “shack with a cooler in it.” To get to the head, he has to go out through the back, with the owner telling him to “‘say hello to the alligator.'” “I walk through these curtains, and I see these boards . . . It's a swamp back there. He just piled the beer cans up, and then he put boards across the top . . . You come back here drunk and just keep walking and they'll never see you again.”

As he travels around the world Ronnie encounters capitalist countries becoming communist and communist countries becoming capitalist, which gives him a healthy skepticism for what he calls “isms”. He describes being in a typhoon near the Philippines which he says is “like driving in a bad storm. You're scared, but you're driving in it. We don't have the luxury of pulling over. There's no pulling over to the Howard Johnson's and get a room or a cup of coffee and wait the storm out.”

I've never been to sea and Ronnie's idea of the perfect life isn't mine, but I sure know about wanting to be free. For me that means free to create my own life. For him, it means not settling down. Here's his take on his first trip, to Belgium and Germany: “I mean, it was total freedom. And there was no recrimination. Like an old girlfriend of mine once told me, ‘You know, you don't try hard enough.' I said, “Well, I don't feel like trying at all.'. . . . It was an opening to a career I could see I could really adjust to.”

I met Robert Jacoby at a writer's conference and was intrigued by his description of this book. As a writer, I'm most fascinated by the voice. Just taping someone talking doesn't usually yield interesting prose, but Ronnie is a real storyteller, giving just the right amount of detail about life aboard ship or a person's history.

I'm also interested in the structure of the book. It is no easy task to organise real-world events into the kind of narrative we are used to reading. Jacoby structures the story chronologically, with separate chapters for separate ships, or sometimes separate runs on the same ship. I was intrigued by how Ronnie's attitudes changed as he grew older and how they stayed the same.

For me, this was not a book to read straight through, but rather one to dip into and read a bit at a time. I found it an especially welcome relief after a long day at the office when the idea of throwing it all up and running off to sea suddenly seems like the most brilliant idea in the world.

Further adventures with Alice in the world of natural wine! I very much enjoyed her first book, The Battle for Wine and Love, and her blog The Feiring Line, even though I'm a wine neophyte. Feiring's engaging prose makes for a fun read even as she slips in technical explanations in easily digestible sips.

Feiring is a champion of natural wines, wines that are allowed to make themselves. I continue to be shocked by the number of invasive techniques and additives used in winemaking: yeast, sulfur, heat, wood chips, and silica gel, to name only a few. Most commercial winemakers are out to create a particular taste rather than letting that particular batch of grapes grown in that patch of land during that particular year express something quite individual. To me, it sounds like the difference between a fast food restaurant and that quirky bistro down the road with the excellent chef. On the other hand, winemakers have to be concerned about their business and so look for ways to avoid the instability they associate with natural wine.

In this volume Feiring has been enticed into creating a batch of wine in her own way. She is the first to say that she is not a winemaker and doesn't aspire to be. However, given the opportunity of having a half-ton of grapes on which to try out her theories, she is tempted though also terrified. Book learning is one thing; feet on the ground (or the grapes, as the case may be) are another.

While we follow the thread of Alice's wine, we also get to go off with her on adventures visiting vineyards. We learn about the techniques they use and problems they encounter and at the same time get to enjoy the evening walks through the vineyards, the charming family luncheons, and the boisterous, good-natured dinner parties that go late into the night. We get to meet the winemakers who stand outside the mainstream, colorful characters such as Nicholas Joly, “the Deepak Chopra of wine biodynamics”, who says of artificial wine, “‘This wine had no song ‘”. Feiring comments, “Joly called it song, I called it voice, but we meant the same thing. Just as writing needs a voice, a distinctive wine needs its own expression.”

She has a deep appreciation for the vignerons of Europe, winemakers who also cultivate the vineyards. Who better to understand the particular nature of a grape than the person who has nurtured it and the soil in which it is grown? This is not a model common in the U.S. where most winemakers purchase grapes grown by someone else. Feiring's quest for an American vigneron takes her on visits to a number of quirky winemakers, including the Coturri brothers who grow fruits and vegetables next to the Zinfandel and Benyamin Cantz, a former art major who creates organic kosher wine.

This thoroughly enjoyable book contains a number of helpful appendices, including a list of additives and processes for wine approved by the U.S. and a list of natural wines that Feiring cautions is a “very personal—and perhaps even eccentric—list”. Alice is a friend of mine, so perhaps I'm biased, but check out other reviews such as these in the New York Times and Bloomberg News. And try some of the wines she mentions.

Everyone was talking about the film a few months ago, but I wanted to read the book first. It starts with a chilling scene: Ree Dolly, in thin cotton dress and combat boots standing on the front steps buffetted by the wind of an approaching snowstorm, staring at deer carcasses hanging from trees across the creek. The meat belongs to relatives who may or may not share it with sixteen-year-old Ree and her two younger brothers. In any case, the children won't ask for it, but will instead make do with grits.

This is not a scene from one of Margaret Bourke-White's Depression-era photos of poverty in the rural South. This is the present-day in the Ozarks where drugs are everywhere and many children are “dead to wonder by age twelve, dulled to life, empty of kindness, boiling with mean.” There may be two hundred Dollys and even more other kin within thirty miles of their valley, but Ree is on her own when it comes to protecting her family. Her mother is sunk in dementia while her father, Jessup, has gone off when the walnuts were falling, without leaving money, food, or a woodpile for winter, telling Ree to look for him when she sees him.

Woodrell's economical prose captures life in this remote valley without sentimental hand-wringing, with just the calm clarity of purpose that moves Ree through her day. He summons characters with a single sentence: “Jessup was a broken-faced, furtive man given to uttering quick pleading promises that made it easier for him to walk out the door and be gone, or come back inside and be forgiven.”

When Jessup last walked out the door, he was out on bail from his latest arrest for cooking crank. The local deputy, whose wife went to school with Ree's mother, shows up at the cabin to inform Ree that Jessup's court date is in a week. Ree isn't concerned until the deputy tells her that Jessup put the house and land up for his bond, so if he doesn't show up in court, the place will be sold out from under them.

Ree's search for her father leads her to various places, to people who might be kin but are as likely to shoot you as look at you. Help is rare, squeezed out of these rocky lives, but all the more welcome when it comes, unexpected and hard to recognise. There are slanting references to the family's distant past: a charismatic preacher and a reckoning that tore the family apart into today's mistrustful schisms, references that add what Tolkein called “shimmer” to the icy hills and creek-cut valleys.

I fell into Ree's life with the first sentence and didn't emerge until the last page. This is the great gift of fiction: it enables us to inhabit someone else's life. I might have thought Woodrell exaggerated the poverty, the careless disregard for children's welfare, if I hadn't read Jeannette Walls's extraordinary memoir, The Glass Castle.

This weekend's unseasonably early snowfall only made the book that much more appropriate. We are so protected. Whatever hardships we face—and we all face hardships—they are nothing compared to the bleak poverty portrayed in this novel. Now I'm ready to see the film.

Jackson Brodie returns! Atkinson entered the list of my favorite authors with her first book, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, and each new book has only confirmed my opinion of her writing. This is her fourth book featuring now-retired private investigator Jackson Brodie. The first is currently being televised by Masterpiece, starring Jason Isaacs as Brodie.

To give some structure to what he calls his “semiretired” life, Brodie is criss-crossing Britain in search of his second wife, Tessa, who has absconded with most of the fortune he unexpectedly inherited. Or perhaps he is searching for a home. He is also making a point of visiting all of the Bettys Tea Rooms. “If Britain had been run by Bettys it would never have succumbed to economic Armageddon,” he muses. I've been to the mothership in Harrogate, and I agree. He is also “bagging the ruined abbeys of Yorkshire on his journey” which brought back strong memories of my first visit to Fountains.

Too much? Tessa, fortune, Bettys, abbeys—keep up! This is how I feel reading a Kate Atkinson book: as though she is laughing and dancing ahead of me down the path turning now and then to say Keep up! In most thrillers, the ever-accelerating action creates the drive that sweeps you through to the last page. With Atkinson, it is the pace of her mind that makes me feel like I'm in a Mini barreling blind down narrow, curved Yorkshire lanes. The tumbling allusions and half-quotations pile on top of each other—keep up!—and make me pay attention. Quick references to the Spice Girls, the laconic Captain Oates, Mother Goose, Paul Simon, Poussin (and from the Poussin, at least for me, it's only a short step to Brideshead and Castle Howard): I don't get all of the references, but enough to admire the agility and scope of Atkinson's writing.

I also admire her use of just the right words. For example, when Brodie's young son falls asleep on his father's lap “The soft, sandbag weight of his boy in his arms was disturbing.” Perfect! And the book is about children, given Brodie's accidental métier of searching for lost children. The story starts with Tracy Waterhouse, moving neatly between a murder in 1975 when she was just a WPC and the present day when she's retired from the force as a detective superintendent and heads up security at a shopping mall. Also in the mall is Tilly, an aging actress suffering from the beginnings of undiagnosed dementia, and Brodie who in a fit of chivalry has acquired a dog.

The title comes from a poem by Emily Dickinson which seems to have some obvious parallels with the story. Brodie, who has recently started reading Dickinson's poetry, does have a dog now and likes to start the day early: “It was good to get a march on the day. Time was a thief and Jackson felt he gained a small triumph by stealing back some of the early hours.” The deeper parallels lie within our understanding of the poem, one of Dickinson's more ambiguous ones. I've seen a variety of interpretations claiming that it's about death or fear of love or the constellation Orion. Maybe the poem is just playful, or maybe fear and danger lurk beneath the playfulness. All very appropriate for the further adventures of Jackson Brodie.

Saidie May and her sister, Blanche Adler, collected art not for their own use but to donate to museums for the benefit of the public. Cousins of the Cone sisters, Claribel and Etta, who bequeathed their amazing collection of Impressionist art to the Baltimore Museum of Art, Saidie and Blanche traveled to France frequently and befriended the struggling artists they met there. Knowing that the Cones planned to leave their collection to the BMA, the sisters concentrated on collecting more modern art that would complement and carry forward the Cone collection. In addition to the many works of art they donated, they gave generously to the BMA throughout their lifetime, Blanche volunteering with the curatorial department before serving as Vice-President of the Board of Trustees and Saidie funding an entire wing to be used for introducing children to art.

Saidie and Blanche grew up in a wealthy Jewish family in Baltimore. Their father, Charles Adler had emigrated from Germany in 1856 and, with Henry Frank, built a shoe manufacturing business that enabled the family to live in a fine house in Bolton Hill and send the three youngest children, including Blanche and Saidie, to private school. They traveled back to Germany often, taking the children. Saidie's early adult life was one of marriage and domesticity but, prefiguring the changes to women's roles in the 20th century, after an amicable divorce she chose a life of art and independence. She, herself, was an artist, challenging herself to learn new techniques and try new forms right up until her death, though she recognised that her talent was not in the same league as the artists whose work she collected.

Throughout her life, she gave generously to individual artists for schooling, living expenses, art supplies, or costs related to a show. During World War II she paid for passage out of Occupied France for many Jewish artists, working with the American Rescue Committee, and acted as sponsor, providing the guarantee of support required by the U.S.

At the same time, she carried on with her life in the U.S., moving from one luxurious resort to another, painting and purchasing new works for the BMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the San Diego Art Museum. I found it a little disconcerting to read about her brilliant social life interspersed with accounts of the war and harrowing escapes from Marseilles, but of course life did go on, even during wartime. And it's a good reminder of how isolated the U.S. was from the fighting. Easy enough, even today, to go about one's life without remembering the wars our military are currently fighting.

This is an engaging book, a quick read even though it is a factual account of Saidie May's life. The extensive research indicated by proper footnotes lends authority to the work. The numerous illustrations support the text and add to the interest. Period photos and postcards evoke an earlier time.

It was a time when the rich used at least some of their wealth to benefit society, establishing libraries, museums, and charitable foundations. Today's super-rich, rivalling and outdistancing the greatest railroad fortunes of a hundred years ago, don't seem to have the same ethic. Some do, of course, such as the Meyerhoff family, Harry and Jeanette Weinberg, and Mary Catherine Bunting in Baltimore alone.

And it's not like everyone can't help. I continue to be inspired by Bea Gaddy, a former welfare recipient who used her home as a donation point for food and clothing for the poor and later as a homeless shelter. She parlayed a small lottery win—$290—into an annual Thanksgiving dinner, free to all comers, and made a point of inviting the whole city, rich and poor. Come on down, all you lonely folks in Roland Park she'd say. You're welcome, too. Since her death in 2001 her daughters have carried on her work, enabling the Bea Gaddy Family Center to continue to serve the community and carry on the Thanksgiving tradition.

Saidie May has joined my pantheon of inspirational heroes. It's true that she had the wealth to give herself a room of her own, but she devoted her life to sharing it with all of us.

Matur's poems ache with power. Her words and images barely control the deep, rumbling force that threatens to explode in blinding light. A Kurdish Alevi from Southeastern Turkey, she draws on that dark heritage of war and defeat and loss and exile to create the poems in this collection, selected from her four books published in Turkey. Perhaps related to that loss is the fact that she writes in Turkish, not the Kurdish of her childhood. In the Introduction, Maureen Freely says that Matur “talks of the way in which dead languages lurk inside living languages.”

Freely also talks of the grief followed by grief, the secrets embedded in Matur's images. These poems burn with a depth of suffering and emotion few of us know in a lifetime, a loss not only of home and family, but of history itself. The extraordinary sixteen-part poem “Winds Howl through the Mansions” tells an epic story in its few pages of clipped fragments, each so full of meaning and yet broken and obscure that I found myself reading and rereading. The mother is “a tattooed oak”, “a rootless oak/Silent, now and then weeping.” The contradiction between adjective and noun—that an oak, the most sturdy and stable of trees, should be rootless!—adds to the power inherent in the exile, the deaths that have occurred and the deaths that are to come. Matur also adds the precise detail that carries emotional weight: when the children are taken away “Our necks ached with looking round/Our eyes narrowed at every bend.” I thought of Hansel and Gretel with their futile breadcrumbs.

These poems have the power of stone, a stone that has been cut and cut again until it presents a puzzle that only the reader can complete. Fragmented and ambiguous, they leave a great space for us to fill, such as this complete section from “The Island, Myself and the Laurel”:

V

Shadow of a great forest, the voices of gods,

no one left here from the sea,

Desire pierces their eyes like a knife

and never leaves.

The multiple meanings of “left” echo in these lines. Some of her poems are quite short, but like haiku, they contain a world of meaning. One of my favorites is this one:

Loneliness

Stones too need loneliness.

And olive trees

and the inside of houses where dark shadows lurk.

She manages to say so much with so few words. The idea of needing loneliness is odd enough, but that these particular things should need it, and that the house should need to be qualified with dark shadows—the juxtaposition so shakes me that I find myself imagining an entire existence previously unknown to me.

The title alone would have persuaded me to buy the book. I stood in the LRB Bookstore in London pondering the idea of a patient god, the possibilities multiplying until my head spun. I turned to the poem from which the title is taken, seeking enlightenment, and found more images, such as: “And rain the river of homelessness/reminds us of god and childhood.” The metaphor alone is startling enough, but the meaning she draws from it knocks me even further off-balance. Yet the poem in its austerity and proliferation of images does come together. Enlightenment, indeed.

These are poems I will come back to again and again.