Books

I’ve been reading Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962-1972 for the past month. I’ve put it down to go to other books and then invariably come quite quickly back to it — I can’t stop reading and re-reading this English language collected poems of Alejandra Pizarnik. I’d found other translations of bits and pieces of Pizarnik’s writing over the years (and tried in my stumbling way to read her work in the original Spanish); it was exciting to me to get hold of this comprehensive collection.

My obsession with persona, especially in the lyric, and with writing the self brought me to Eileen Myles' I Must Be Living Twice. The poems are resplendent with sex, humour, and reflection — a kind of inquiry that is dramatized further by the fact it's a selected works, and she employs herself as a kind of third person. On writing poetry, she writes about the discovery of "something deeply anonymous about the self." 

The British art critic Laura Cumming mesmerized me this summer with her recent book The Vanishing Velazquez, which is an elegantly written cultural history, a whodunit, a meditation on portraiture, and a hymn to two of her favorite painters — Velazquez and her own late father.

Wislawa Szymborksa’s poems in translation — both ones I first read about 20 years ago and ones recently new to me — have been satisfying me at deep levels with their mixes of the everyday and the surreally fanciful, the grieving and the humorous, the raw and the powerfully shaped. Last month I read a few of the poems to my brother-in-law in a hospital during his final week of life.