books

I have been a fan of Abigail Thomas ever since I read her memoir, “Three Dog Life,” years ago. I recently re-read it along with everything else of hers I could find. I just finished her latest, “Still Life at Eighty: The Next Interesting Thing,” with a beautiful photo of her multi-lined face on the cover and a beloved dog in her lap. I love her for the way she observes her life in moments, nothing longer than a few pages, exploring how she came to be the person she is. The everyday and the ordinary are her territory, and where her mind goes “when it’s off-leash,” as she says.

I order oodles of books from the library.  

I’ve been reading Rob Taylor’s poetry for years and have been looking forward to his latest, Weather (Gaspereau Press, 2024). Now, once again I’m struck by his poetry’s honesty, heart, and honed insights. That’s the thing about news-- / you’ve heard it before, Taylor wrote previously (in The News) but here his poetic updates are fresh with previously unreported advancements.  

I arrived at Laura Cumming’s beautiful book, Thunderclap: A memoir of art and life & sudden death, just before it won the 2024 Writers’ Prize for Non-Fiction. I had lovingly remembered her previous book, On Chapel Sands, a story of her mother’s life. In Thunderclap, she turns her close attention to the golden age of Dutch art in the 1600s, in particular the cataclysmic gunpowder explosion in Delft that killed the painter Carel Fabritius and destroyed many precious works of art.

One of the poetry collections that I keep coming back to is a book of ghazals by Agha Shahid Ali, Call Me Ishmael Tonight. The beloved Kashmiri-American poet has been an absolute favorite of mine ever since I discovered him in my early twenties. His poems pave a path towards a level of lyric expansiveness with their tri-cultural — Hindu, Muslim, and for the lack of a better word, the Western — juxtaposition, which very few South Asian poets have ventured out to do. 

Thirty years ago, I read A.S Byatt’s Possession, the Booker Award winner of 1990, and was possessed by the novel. After her death, in November, 2023, I decided to revisit it, and (sorry for verbal overplay), was repossessed.  

A Few Notes on Metamorphoses 3.158 

Ovid describes the cave dwelling of the hunter-goddess Diana as: arte laboratum nulla: simulauerat artem. Made by no art: mimicking art. 

I was reminded of Niina Pollari’s stunning book of poetry Path of Totality when the solar eclipse occurred earlier this year. This ominous phrase–which describes the area of Earth where the eclipse could be seen–haunted the news cycle for days. I had COVID at the time, and was only able to view the phenomenon on YouTube from my couch in a stupor.

I tend to read voraciously, though perhaps too quickly, since I often retain only an impression of a book and its atmosphere rather than its plot. A recent read that made a strong impression is Fearnoch, by Jim McEwen (Breakwater Books 2022). The details blur (and can’t readily be checked since my library copy has been returned) but I have a distinct sense of Fearnoch, both the small Ontario town that McEwen evokes with language both lyrical and grounded, and the people he populates it with.