Who's Reading What
Issue 110: "Last Poems"
A voyeuristic peek into the bedside reading habits of the literary- minded contributors, editors and board members of TNQ, CanLit journal extraordinaire.
IAN BURGHAM
Though I rarely read anything other than poetry, I am currently reading Stephen Hawking's "A Briefer History of Time" as well as Al Moritz's "The Sentinel" (which I have been referring to and dipping into again and again for months now - a significant addiction) and "Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke". Hawking's work proves the link between language, meaning and concept when working to create poetic logic.
REBECCA ROSENBLUM, "Stuff They Wrote"
I just finished "Twilight of the Superheroes," Deborah Eisenberg's short story collection. It blew me away. These stories are emotionally and structurally complicated, very funny and relentlessly open--to interpretation, to argument, to the lives that the characters seem to be living beyond the pages' margins. The stories are long, and as I say, they ask a lot of the reader, but I read them with great joy, always looking forward to whatever would come next. How could an author who created "Apathy Man" be so fiercely pereceptive and creative?
CHANGMING YUAN, "My Crow"
Currently I am reading a dissertation entitled "Drawing the Dragon: Western European Reinvention of China" (New York: Peter Lang, 2008). The author is Zhijian Tao, an old friend of mine who has recently moved from Montreal to Vancouver.
FIONA LAM
I've just finished reading Nora Heale Thurston's deeply satisfying classic, "Their Eyes Were Watching God", a novel written in the 1930s, about a young Black woman growing up in the South, moving through different relationships to eventually find a man to love on her own terms. With its rich, evocative writing, vividly drawn characters and wonderful dialogue, I can see why Alice Walker said it was one of her favourites. I'm also reading the work of a well-known Romanian poet, "Life Sentence: Selected Poems of Nina Cassian" edited by William Jay Smith, published by W.W. Norton in 1990. I love the vigour, passion, brutality and sensuality of Cassian's poetry.
ELISABETH DE MARIAFFI, "The Astonishing Abercrombie!"
Since I started work on an MFA thesis in poetry, I've set a kind of no-fiction bylaw over my own head. To try and keep the prose out, I guess: you can see this reflected in my list of current obsessions. Books that travel with me these days? For one, "The Poet's Notebook," excerpts from the notebooks of some 20-odd contemporary American poets, some of whom I already knew, some of whom are new to me. All valuable for their word quirks and for the very quality of the entries. Something recognizeable in them; calms a girl down. Poetry: I keep returning to a few books, including Louise Gluck's "Meadowlands," Karen Solie's "Modern & Normal," Esta Spalding's "The Wife's Account," Anne Sexton's "Love Poems" and "To Bedlam -- and Part Way Back." All of this makes for a heavy pack, but it's true that I've been dragging this collection around with me quite a bit. I just picked up Solie's "Pigeon" this morning, and in the category of secret fiction, I've been reading Stuart Ross' very fine "Buying Cigarettes for the Dog" -- wild and engaging and the stories are short enough that I can let myself get away with it and turn a blind eye to the poetry-only rule.
CAROLYN BLACK, "By Analogy"
I am reading James Dickey's "Deliverance" and "Selected Poems" and this is how I came to them. One night, I saw a poet give a fine reading of one of Dickey's poems. (If I say the poem was called "The Sheep Child" and begins with the line "Farm boys wild to couple", and if you know anything about "Deliverance", you can see that Dickey had his themes.) Best about the reading was that the poet had a half beard, half grown, and when he read the phrase "woolly baby" through this beard, the words themselves seemed to sprout wool. For this alone, this human mouthing of the animal, I took the books out of the library. The poet who read Dickey's poem was Paul Vermeersch, and he can be heard reading this very same poem at www.seenreading.com/30in30/.
RICHARD CUMYN, "Speedwell"
John Berger's From A to X: A Story in Letters. It's epigrammatic, wise and angry, meted out in letters from a woman named A'ida to her lover, Xavier, who is a political prisoner. Rather than replies from Xavier we get short statements such as the following, written on the back of A'ida's brave, newsy missives: "To tell the truth? Words tortured until they give themselves up to their polar opposites; Democracy, Freedom, Progress, when returned to their cells, are incoherent." The effect, rather than feeling one sided or imbalanced, is a growing, all encompassing ache. John Berger teaches us how to pay attention.
