Who's Reading What

MONICA KIDD, Six Poems, "Ground-truthing"

Sadly, my basket of books to read is starting to warp the floor on my side of the bed, but the book I've been slowly picking away at for the last several months is Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Cancer Ward (1968). It's a sprawling Russian novel full of thyroid cancers and police state informers, and I feel like I should have started a cast of characters (with genealogy) in order to keep everyone straight. But it's full of little slices of wisdom such as: "Compulsory loudspeakers, for some reason generally regarded in our country as a sign of cultural breadth, are on the contrary a sign of cultural backwardness and an encouragement to intellectual laziness... The permanent mutter - information you hadn't ask for alternating with music you hadn't chosen (and quite unrelated to the mood you happened to be in) - was a theft of time, a diffusion and an entropy of the spirit, convenient and agreeable to the inert but intolerable to those with initiative." Grumpy? Absolutely. But oh, so prescient.

GILLIAN WIGMORE, "The Back Then, The Here and Now"

I'm hip-deep in Jen Hadfield's Nigh-No-Place from Bloodaxe Books. Its language, its place, its current, all sweep me away. Although she's British, the book was partially composed in Canada and the Alberta landscape is bare and blatant and the Sheffield tongue informs every poem. I love it. I'm also reading Kennth J. Harvey's Blackstrap Hawko, slowly but surely, savouring every twist and untruth it drops on me. I love an unreliable narrative, and paired with Harvey's skill, the book is deadly and great.

KIM JERNIGAN, Editor

I've recently finished Zadie Smith's collection of occasional essays. Changing My Mind, a Christmas gift from my daughter Amanda. I fell in love with the title before I headed into the book, my own mind being a changeable thing. Dedicated to her father, who figures in an essay on the Smith family Christmas and another on his experiences as a soldier in the Second World War, it's a compendium of reviews (of both fiction and film), rereadings, and essays on writing. It is delightful to see her mind at work. She is an unassuming but original critic, unafraid of owning up to her true loves (films from the 40s & 50s, comedy clubs, lounging about in slippers and a housecoat long after the rest of the world is at large) and equally unafraid of tackling the unknown (wherein lies the genius of David Foster Wallace?). I'd no sooner finished the book than I was worrying the question of how much of it I could, in good conscience, photocopy to send to friends.

ELISABETH HARVOR, "A Postcard From Iceland"

A Woman In Berlin, Eight Weeks In the Conquered City

A Diary

by Anonymous

At the end of World War ll the anonymous narrator of A Woman In Berlin occcasionally buys dried vegetables (Berliners call them "shredded wire") but she mainly subsists on bowls of porridge along with the nettles she finds in vacant lots and bombed gardens. Glances of contempt are aimed her way at the local pump, though, but she ignores them: she was starving when the Russians marched into Berlin and a small group of officers rescued her with black bread and herring, but most of all, her psychic salvation comes from not being raped any more. For she was one of the many thousands of Berlin women raped not long after the Red Army conquered the fallen city in the spring of 1945.

As for the Russian major who shyly courts her, he introduces himself by placing all of his documents on her bed in a way that suggests that he too has been psychically wounded by war. He also speaks a sophisticated Russian: whole sentences go by without MH---the initials I am calling her by since she was much more automonous than anonymous---understanding a single word. And the major is clearly taking pains to behave like a gentleman. He even jumps up to ask, "Is my company not pleasing? Do you despise me? Tell me frankly!"

When MH cycles through the bombed city a few weeks later, she spots a customer in the half dark of a barber shop and "a man jumping around with a pair of scissors. The first sign of life in the city carcass." Her evocation of this scene, like her description of a clinic where the doctors have replaced the windows with "old x-rays of unidentified chests," has an eerie touch of the absurd, like images out of Kafka, as once again she is revealed to be a writer with the gifts of an extraordinary novelist. A few years ago I reviewed this book for the National Post, but recently I've begun reading it again for its intellectual unflinchingness and, in spite of its dark themes, its great resilience. MH was pragmatic when she needed to be pragmatic, brave when she needed to be brave, and always an inspired witness as she jotted down these notes that became such an essential record.

COLETTE MAITLAND, "Keeping the Peace"

I am reading The Fearsome Particles, by Trevor Cole and Come, Thou Tortoise, by Jessica Grant. Both books are set in the present, which I find refreshing. Both books share a wonderful sense of humour while exploring some pretty tragic territory. Very fine writing. I will read both of these books again at some point, which is always the litmus test for me.

SUSAN YOUNG, Three Poems

At the moment I am rereading Olive Kitteridge, a summer find that stunned and amazed me with its quiet power. Elizabeth Strout inhabits the lives of her characters so fully that even now, months later, I find myself thinking about Olive, wondering what happened since that disastrous last visit with her son. (I catch myself, but barely.) In a similar vein, I fell in love with Home by Marilynne Robinson, another summer discovery, and am now reading its predecessor, Gilead, with slow and exquisite pleasure.
In terms of poetry, I've been dipping in and out of Carnival Evening, New and Selected Poems by Linda Pastan and Lucille Clifton's Selected Poems. Whenever I read one of Lucille's poems I am taken back to the spell-binding reading that she gave in a gorgeous old church at the Dodgeville Poetry Festival. An absolute feast, by the way, for poetry lovers.