Kristjana Gunnars
Coach House Books ($25.95)

by Dashiel Carrera                            

Kristjana Gunnars’s The Scent of Light is a work unyielding in its sensuality, uniquely attuned to the slippery nature of reading in the Information Age. In five autofictive novellas, Gunnars waxes on everything from her homelands of Iceland and Canada to train track romance, weaving together images of ice fishing, silk clouds, and half-eaten tomatoes into a portrait of Icelandic-Canadian diaspora.

In its totality, the omnibus is an unmistakable member of a lineage of experimental feminist literature that extends from Marguerite Duras’s The Lover to Carole Maso’s AVA. For these works, in which no overt central plot governs the order of scenes and images, fragments are given room to breathe, forming a tangle of memory and thought free from the tyranny of a cumulative, climactic, Aristotelian whole. An extractive reading of The Scent of Light—one which assumes the purpose of literature is to be a conduit for ideas—is doomed to return with nothing in hand. Gunnars seems less concerned with ideas themselves than with the interstitial spaces between them, alternatingly suffusing her stories with descriptions of diaphanous landscapes and thoughtful interrogations of the readerly experience, only to cut away when our interest is piqued most. With these cutaways, Gunnars also prompts us to consider our own thinking rather than merely digest her own.

We have to take breaks when we read novels. But when we put down a book for a moment to check email, or take a walk, or feed the cat, the lingering experience of what we’ve just read colors our perception of the world around us. I often found myself so lost in Gunnars’s luscious descriptions of flora, the ponderosas that “stand spread with upward-bending limbs as if conducting the dreams I dream in the mist,” that I could not go on a walk without my eyes wandering to the branches that wind my Toronto neighborhood, wondering what dream they may be reaching for—all of which could be dismissed as tangent to the text itself, but which, when I return to The Scent of Light, have changed my understanding of the book and the world around me.  

Despite the seeming ubiquity of experiences like this, few works of fiction appear to be written with them in mind. The Scent of Light, however, is different. Gunnars draws us in with provocative images, koans, and questions (“I imagine a text which refuses to play its own game,” “Nothing existed but the tiny rippling waves on the lake and the bulky mountains,” “I am a stranger in my own memory”), only to send us spiraling back into our own thoughts with another dinkus or block of white space. In doing so, the book creates space for life to leak between its pages, illuminating the world around us with a lingering consciousness of the readerly experience.

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Three Native American Poets

Dark Traffic
Joan Naviyuk Kane
University of Pittsburgh Press ($18)

All This Time
Cedar Sigo
Wave Books ($18)

Toledo Rez & Other Myths
Thomas Parrie
That Painted Horse Press: A Borderless Indigenous Press of the Americas ($20)

by Nancy Beauregard

In Joan Naviyuk Kane’s latest collection, Dark Traffic, the poet addresses the brutality of colonization and its effects on language, culture, ancestral lands, and way of life for her Inupiaq people and family from Ugiuvak (King Island) and Qawiaraq (Mary’s Igloo), Alaska. Kane’s lyrical and often haunting poetry evokes both a feeling of despair for what was lost and a consistent theme of the resilience of a people fighting to keep their traditional ways of life, even after circumstances forced many of them to relocate to the mainland of Alaska.

In the opening poem, “Rookeries,” Kane depicts “the bicornuate woman” surviving in a world that rapidly changes with colonization:

The moon pronounced with clarity
its known topography. Our letters

and lists, reconstructed grammars:
they replace the ways in which we were

grabbed, and pushed, then shoved.
Set a wife and her children

to rove with indefinite orders.

Evident in these lines is a sense of finality, as if the natural world has the final say on what will be. This sense is confirmed in the last lines of the poem, where Kane writes,  

                      Of those men,
we knew I could never do

them any good. In this way
I forget, and let the wind

river. It gales and tears
at my shoulders and wrists.

These beautifully enjambed couplets create an image of movement in the reader’s mind, with the word “river” becoming a verb to transport memory to the narrator.

In the title poem, “Dark Traffic,” Kane’s rich diction evokes images of water and never-ending wind in which the ocean is constantly changing. The opening lines warn of an impending crisis: “Before it ceases, the ice collapses easily, / There is no day without a symptom.” Ghostly movements take us up one side of a wave and back down the other side to fight for breath before we drown: “There is nothing but the wind, a howl / and dive where water is thrown // over water and sown into it.” There is an urgency in this poem—a warning that must be heeded if we are to survive as snow melts and ice cracks.

Several poems crisscross this collection like a tightly woven braid of history. “White Alice,” for example, focuses on a telecommunication system installed by the military in several remote areas of Alaska during the Cold War. After being replaced with satellite communication, they were abandoned and became areas of contamination. Most standing structures were eventually removed due to environmental and health issues. In the collection’s final “White Alice” poem, titled “White Alice Changes,” the poet asks questions that require answers and accountability: “Was there once a live, green tree? / White Alice, will you look at me? // White Alice, why would you come back?”

All This Time by Cedar Sigo, who grew up on the Suquamish reservation in the Pacific Northwest, is one of several collections of his that explore language in a first-person perspective. Themes include the process of writing, revising, and seeing beauty in everything, including the ordinary. The book’s introductory poem, “On Distortion,” offers advice to both reader and writer: “(Welcome everything in).” This first line gives permission to let the mind wander, to take a breath and to play with words found on the page. Sigo explains how paper during the civil war was scarce and “cross-writing,” where letters were turned so sentences could continue between previously written lines, became distorted language:

When the words do
not resolve but clank and die next to
each other. Arbitrary actions leveled at
flagstones in architecture, resetting our
margins after the poem has already been
typed into “emotional” paragraphs. A
hovering form of distortion.

In the final lines of the poem, the poet describes how he does not let such distortions affect his own work:

I make
endless destroyed works as they will
become the best poetry, exquisite, half
forgotten, a torn tissue, four to eight
specks of unequal green.

Sigo dedicates many of his poems to writers who have inspired him, as in “November 19, 2016” for Joanne Kyger, with whom he studied at the Naropa Institute in 1995. Words flow down the page like rain that might glaze William Carlos Williams’ wheelbarrow:

            Poetry is the part
                         that no one sees

            clip the flower
                           burn the brush

                                  watch rain stream
                                                           down

                                 the moon-viewing
                      window

six drops fold together
                                                  then glimmer

The imagery of rain folding and glimmering, combined with the sparse form, feels comfortable and quiet, as if the poem is creating a place for the reader to sit and observe. In another poem in the collection “Solarium,” Sigo does the opposite by breaking that quiet with a glimpse into the writer’s mind. He emphasizes how poems are not easily created on the page: “sometimes / writing is waiting for / a panel of clouded / glass to come clean.”

Toledo Rez & Other Myths by Thomas Parrie, who is affiliated with the Choctaw-Apache Tribe of Ebarb located in west Louisiana, is full of cultural storytelling handed down from father to son. This debut collection, as Parrie puts it, “is about displacement in body and in soul. It is about reclaiming what has been taken, what has been denied, whether it was land, language, or tradition, or all the above.” It is also about creating work that will dance the reader across the page.

One of the standout poems in this collection combines reality with myth. “Sasquatch Woman” follows a woman who is convinced she raised Bigfoot from a baby:

            Even on her deathbed,
            she claimed finding her baby
            Bigfoot in ’64 and nursing
            him back to health.
            She fed him tomatoes.
            He loved chasing egrets.

Although playful at first, as the poem goes on it becomes heartbreaking to realize that people did not believe this elder. The closing lines ask us what stories we choose to believe:

When she got too old, she

was moved to a home where
she told nurses angels sat with her
at night, she could hear her ancestors
singing while she slept, and her baby
bigfoot watched over her
through her third floor window.

Parrie is a deft practitioner of the prose poem as well. In “The Story of Two Lost Indians,” a chief helps two people lost in the woods find their way back to civilization. He invites them into his home: “When he saw their baggy clothes, he gave them tobacco. When he saw their dry mouths, he showed them pictures of his ancestors.” The poem speaks of ceremony, as the chief gives one of the wanderers his son’s Vietnam Service Medal; the other, sage to be split in half for each of them. “He then led them out,” Parrie writes, “and as they entered the forest, the chief began to sing and shake his gourds. Later, the two lost Indians threw away the sage and traded the medal for Spam and Evan Williams.”

In the collection’s final poem, “Toledo Rez,” Parrie explains the displacement, survival, and adaption his tribal community experienced after the Sabine River was dammed and ancestral grounds flooded to turn Toledo Lake into a reservoir to power a hydroelectric plant:

Roofs of houses jut out
of lake as shards
where Indians, turned to fish, dance
in its belly like prize winning bass.
Indians dancing down there
have a brownness that hangs from
their bones like sacks of loot and corn,
like tamales and welfare, like whiskey
and crosses, and my grandmothers’
feet pounding mud dancing
and swim through hollowed out cars
and trucks of flooded junkyard forests
of my ancestors.

Parrie closes the poem by asking us to think about what history books do not tell us—how we need to wake up and listen to the real stories being told. He writes,

There’s blood in the mud from the changing.
Over time, it will harden into clay;
a shard of pottery to prove
we were here at all.

This final stanza cleverly brings the reader back around to the book’s epigraph: “What was left behind still sits at the bottom of the lake.”

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Anju Makhija
Dhauli Books (₹595)

by Rochelle Potkar

Readers familiar with Anju Makhija’s crisp and sharply-observant poetry will find that as a playwright, she is gumptious, experimental, piercing, and clutter-breaking. In Mumbai Traps: Collected Plays, her vision is that of a director, and her characters shine against the backdrop of India’s largest city, with all its comic timing and strobe light effects. Makhija’s brazenly bizarre constructs and concepts, tongue-in-cheek dialogue, and exaggerated storylines lend a tongue-in-jowl tone to the slanted premises throughout these six plays, ruffling notions of what is normal.

In The Last Train, for example, as we wait for the train to reach its destination, the play’s action unfurls in the unmoving suspended state of a still night. Political party workers search for the missing head of their leader, and within the crowded train compartment, characters speak of life and death. The writing, by lending irrealism, evokes smells of a rag-picker’s sack and a severed head in it. Makhija doesn’t fear exploring each character’s mental state in all its refracted directions, from existentialism to nihilism.

Real estate is another leitmotif that doesn’t escape Makhija’s gaze, sometimes forming a pivotal issue, and other times lingering on the fringes of the story. In If Wishes were Horses, a woman’s loyalty to her family keeps fluctuating as she supports the flower-seller to whom her mother willed their apartment, even as the flower-seller’s husband nurses a pipe dream on selling off that opulent inheritance. In Cold Gold, two women living in a high-rise separately conspire to rob looted gold from their new maid, and a police officer and goon are trapped in a crisscrossing of efforts.

Makhija excels at interspersing philosophical reflections, haphazard brainstorming, and spiritual ruminations. In Off The Hook—a musical—a man metamorphosed from a fish wants to belong, but eventually rejects a materialistic life and returns to the sea. In Meeting with Lord Yama, a woman encounters the god of death, flipping the coin of inquiry back and forth between the contexts of her relationship chaos. And in Now she says she’s God, we see the whimsical existence and exiting of a deity-like character.

If one is not used to reading plays on the page, they can come across as staccato, but once that format issue is overcome, they make for good reading in the hands of a multi-faceted artist like Makhija. Allow for the amphitheatre of your mind to light up and shadow down as her characters speak in intonations that reverberate in your cochlea.

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The Fruit Thief
Peter Handke
Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($28)

Quiet Places: Collected Essays
Peter Handke
Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($30 )

by John Toren

Though he burst onto the scene half a century ago with confrontational theatrical works on the order of Offending the Audience, and slim, visceral, Hamsun-esque narratives like The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, the Austrian novelist Peter Handke has in recent decades enraptured the European intelligentsia less often than his complex and political pronouncements have disturbed them. And that hardly changed when, in 2019, he was awarded the Nobel Prize “for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience.”

Another distinguished German author, W.G. Sebald, observed thirty-odd years ago, well before Handke took his Quixotic and largely wrong-headed stance on the Balkan Wars, that “most of what is published on Handke’s newer work is of a distinctly polemical character.” Sebald noted then that unlike Handke’s crisp, youthful works, his style had become more “hermetic,” more “difficult to describe.” And that trend only increased in subsequent works. Such a path of development is common among novelists, of course; for an example look at the aging Henry James: the same themes, but far more elaborate embroidery.

If Handke’s recent novels seem longer than they are, it’s because they’re episodic travelogues that adopt a storytelling style in which neither dialogue nor personal interactions play much of a part. True to form, the narrator of The Fruit Thief, who resembles Handke himself (as usual), makes it clear from the start that he’s going to set out on a journey from one property to another, though he doesn’t spell out why. His manner of describing that journey is ruminative rather than expository, as if he were merely talking to himself, shaping a tale while correcting the details, and offering asides to the reader and advice to himself to ensure that it doesn’t resemble a conventional novel.

For example, though much of this journey takes place on foot, references to numbers, distances, and so on, are taboo. The same goes for historical references. The characters, such as they are, are seldom given names, and when they are identified, those names are rarely used. Though most of the events take place outside, and descriptions of fields, rivers, thickets, and woods are legion, the names of specific plants, animals, or geological landforms rarely appear.

The one element of the journey that Handke seems to relish is its geography. Obscure place names are lovingly mentioned, repeated, and described in relation to one another, again and again, as if the author were structuring an otherwise amorphous succession of episodes by means of a map of the Val-d’Oise region of France laid out on the desk in front of him.

In the first quarter of the novel, the eponymous “fruit thief” is seldom mentioned, and never appears. As the narrator heads off from his home near Versailles, he hears her voice, briefly. Later he sees the swift motion of hands in an apple tree or under a fence but doesn’t really see the fruit thief herself. Crossing Paris via train and metro, he continues northwest to the modern suburb of Cergy, and along the way he comments at length on how wrapped up in their own lives the people in the cafés and on the trains seem. Somewhere along the way, he spots an unknown woman asleep in a stairwell, and it later dawns on him that she is the fruit thief.

At this point the focus of the narrative shifts to her experiences, but they are cut from the same cloth as those of the narrator. On the one hand, she’s often enraptured by the sights and sounds of the journey, and no less often in the suburbs than in the countryside. We learn that she is on a mission to locate her mother, a successful banker who has been missing for almost a year. To that end she decides, for reasons that remain obscure, to head for the construction site north of Paris where her brother works.

The fruit thief’s route takes her to an antique flour mill; she happens upon a funeral service, which she attends, and she encounters numerous strangers along the way—a homeless man, a schoolteacher, an innkeeper, a pizza delivery boy, an old man looking for his cat. These episodes enliven the tale, though they sometimes begin to resemble the elaborations of a storyteller merely padding his narrative. Near the end of the book, the fruit thief expresses astonishment that she has been on the road for only three days, and many readers will feel the same way.

But there is plenty of music in Handke’s prose, and because he has abandoned the quest for verisimilitude from the get-go, he can toss in a speculative query or a philosophical aside whenever it suits him. Here, for example, is a brief description of one of the villages the fruit thief passes through:

Houses, ruins, the church tower, and the gypsum-limestone grayish white escarpments, looming over the vil­lage’s buildings, including the tower, by two or three stories; all consisted of the same material, whether built, grown, or deposited, and the chains of cliffs and crags, surrounding the town at their feet, imparted regularity to what at first appeared to be the chaotic irregularity of the jumble of houses below, and also provided rules, which could not be reckoned only in millennia, and likewise included—now, now, and now—the tracks and the railyard, rusting away ex­cept for two pairs of tracks in the middle, as well as the river, channeled into multi-armed canals. “Now is now” could also mean something entirely different, and “once upon a time” did not have to mean “past and gone.” Oh, the same blackish lichens on the gypsum cliffs, on the square stones of the church tower, on the limestone walls of the houses, on the low stone walls along the roads leading into the town. Oh, the caves here and there at the foot of the cliffs, where cars and tractors parked next to ladder and solid-sided wag­ons, no longer in use.

What’s going on here? Handke has never been interested in the realistic bourgeois novel ala Flaubert, and as he has aged, he’s hitched his team more blatantly to the rhapsodic, bucolic, highly detailed and occasionally tedious cart of medieval “romantic” poets such as Chretien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach, the author of Parsifal, whom he mentions by name five or six times during the narrative. One of his favorite lines, which appears again and again as he pauses to analyze the course his narrative is taking, is: “Strange. But perhaps not so strange.”

Handke is searching, as he mentions very early in the book, for “an entirely different modality” of literary expression. The zeal with which he pursues this goal might be suggested by the fact that the only blatantly erotic episode in the book, highly satisfying for the individuals involved, takes place between the fruit thief and the pizza delivery boy—but only in their dreams.

Such an approach is not for everyone. Yet readers who have had their fill of crime novels, geopolitical thrillers, and memoirs of enlightenment or abuse, might find Handke’s vision attractive, and his approach to describing it methodical but also strangely refreshing.

Alongside The Fruit Thief, Handke’s U.S. publisher has reissued a number his early novels with highly stylized minimalist covers, as well as a collection of his essays under the title Quiet Places, which includes two newly anthologized pieces together with the three essays that appeared in 1994 in The Jukebox and Other Essays on Storytelling. For newcomers to Handke’s work, this collection might serve as a good introduction—though readers ought to be aware that it contains none of Handke’s often exquisite short essays, such as the ones that appear in the compact volume Once Again for Thucydides.

The first piece, “The Mushroom Maniac,” isn’t an essay at all, but rather, a hundred-page narrative describing a friend’s growing obsession with mushroom hunting. It bears all the hallmarks of Handke’s narrative style, but the story is tedious and largely unconvincing. In the title piece, “Quiet Places,” Handke delves into the importance of the time he’s spent over the years in bathrooms, outhouses, restrooms, and so on. It’s an odd topic, but Handke makes it work, avoiding scatological references entirely while describing, for example, the ray of light coming up through a pipe in the “shed” on the farm where he was raised, and his first night at a Catholic boarding school, which he spent, terrorized, on the floor of a toilet stall.

This essay reaches its peak in Handke’s description of wandering aimlessly across Japan for a week, alone, clueless, and bewildered by the language. He finally gets his bearings in the outhouse of the temple at Nara, where a grayish but luminous quality of light overpowers him:

A sense of arrival, of being taken in, of here-and-now? The Quiet Place of Nara was also a site of liberation. It was not a mere refuge, not a shelter, not an out-of-the-way place. In that morning hour it was the essence of a place, such as perhaps had never existed, pure placeness. There I became—what word did people use at one time?—ebullient, filled with an invigorating, unfocused energy. The place awakened enthusiasm. Yes, a “spirit” was at work in that Quiet Place that, to paraphrase Tanizaki, provided “peace and quiet” and at the same time got one moving—a spirit of restlessness, of ebullience, of magical invulnerability. . . . I felt as though nothing could get to me, not even Siberian cold, and if the wood cabin, “fine graining” and all, had suddenly burst into flames with me in­side, I would have escaped without a single hair on my head singed—a pretty illusion?

In a subsequent essay, Handke analyzes the very different forms of tiredness he experienced as a child in church and at dreadfully uninspiring lectures at school. A third type, which it seems he’s experienced more than a few times, is the tiredness felt by a couple who suddenly grow bored with one another, have nothing more to say, and split up on the spot, never to see each other again. On the more positive side, Handke eloquently describes the tiredness he felt as a child after a day of threshing grain on the family farm in southern Austria. The special beauty of this form of tiredness is that it’s shared by the entire group:

While the clouds of dust settled, we gathered in the farmyard on shak­ing knees, reeling and staggering, partly in fun. Our legs and arms were covered with scratches; we had straw in our hair, between our fingers and toes. And perhaps the most lasting effect of the day’s work: the nostrils of men, women, and chil­dren alike were black, not just gray, with dust. Thus we sat—in my recollection always out of doors in the afternoon sun—savoring our common tiredness whether or not we were talking, some sitting on a bench, some on a wagon shaft, still others off on the grass of the bleaching field—the inhabitants of the whole neighborhood, regardless of generation, gathered in episodic harmony by our tiredness. A cloud of tiredness, an ethereal tiredness, held us together (while awaiting the next wagonload of sheaves). And my village childhood provided me with still other pictures of “we-tiredness.”

Though he mentions them explicitly only on occasion, these two extremes are the poles between which Handke’s narratives almost invariably run: the isolated clarity and ecstatic ebullience of the temple outhouse and the selfless harmony of the mythic village neighborhood. The intermediate zone, where “normal” people meet, interact, converse, and develop relationships, is evidently too static, too predictable for Handke’s taste. Hence the importance of storytelling, of adventures. Taken in tandem, The Fruit Thief and Quiet Places indeed offer the exploration of humanity’s periphery and specificity referred to in the Swedish Academy’s Nobel citation.

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The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin

Edited by Paul Herron
Sky Blue Press ($22)

by Robert Zaller          

The diary is a literary genre beloved in Europe, and particularly in France, where Anaïs Nin came of age in the Paris of the 1920s and 1930s. The daughter of Cuban parents, Nin had begun a private diary in the form of a letter to her absent father at the age of eleven; it evolved, under French influence, into the major work of her lifetime, and when its first volume was published in the United States in 1966, it revolutionized American letters in many ways.

The Diary of Others is the penultimate volume of the second edition of the Diary, whose original manuscript is housed in the UCLA Library. The first edition, covering the years from 1931 to 1974, was prepared by Nin in collaboration with her long-time friend and agent, Gunther Stuhlmann; the second was created under the aegis of Nin’s second husband, Rupert Pole. The current volume, continuing the work of Pole, has been sensitively prepared and edited by Paul Herron, the publisher of the former Nin annual A Café in Space and an author in his own right. Covering the years between 1955 and 1966, much of it deals with the preparation of the first edition of the Diary and Nin’s concurrent struggle to publish and keep in print her fiction. As well, it engages the stress of maintaining separate households in New York, where Nin lived with her first husband, the businessman and filmmaker Hugh Guiler, and in Los Angeles with Pole, to whom she was bigamously married between 1955 and 1966. This arrangement, which had some parallels to the ménage à trois Nin maintained in Paris in the 1930s with Henry Miller and his wife June, was part of a deeply complicated life which, when revealed in full, would create the air of scandal that continues to hover over her life and reputation.

Nin married Guiler at the age of twenty in 1923, and their connection was lifelong. Her acquaintances in Paris, to which the couple moved in 1924, included a who’s-who of the luminaries of the period, among them Antonin Artaud, Otto Rank (with whom Nin studied and briefly practiced psychotherapy), and the then-unknown Henry Miller. In the mid-1930s, she was reunited with her estranged father, the concert pianist Joaquin Nin, with whom she was briefly intimate. This liaison was hinted at in her fiction,but not revealed until the Pole edition of the diaries. Guiler was absent from the Stuhlmann edition as well, at his request. Settling in New York at the outbreak of World War II, Nin had affairs with Edmund Wilson and other prominent figures. In 1947 she met Pole, sixteen years her junior, with whom her relationship endured beside that of Guiler, from whom she was never divorced.

Nin was neither facile nor opportunistic in her choice of lovers. She acted based on desire, but she demanded emotional openness and honesty of her partners, and she did not casually discard them, maintaining friendships with many over decades. Sexuality for her was a means both of self-discovery and of discovering others. The enduring human connection, however, was what mattered for her above all.

The Nin of this Diary, moving through her fifties and into her early sixties, is at a critical moment of transition as she at last approaches the publication of the Diary and begins to see her fiction recognized through connection with a new publisher, Alan Swallow. But the heart of it is the story of her evolving relationships with Guiler and Pole, candidly expressed in the journal entriesalthough more tactfully in her correspondence with each. Guiler, at first, is someone she wishes to protect but whom she bears as a burden; he is essentially a man of business (though by this time established, as Ian Hugo, as a filmmaker as well). Her physical life is with Pole, but to her increasing dismay she finds him arrested and incurious, a tender lover but satisfied with a mediocrity that, for her, reflects American life in general. Her quandary, then, is to find herself trapped between two men, neither of whom can truly satisfy her but neither of whom she is capable or desirous of abandoning as well.

A choice of one man or a rejection of both might have seemed a logical step, but, as the Diary makes clear, loyalty—not to be confused with conventional attachment—is also a deep virtue in Nin, and so she continues to work with both relationships, achieving intermittent successes and what appears, at the end, to be a new openness with Guiler. Nor is it a matter of others simply failing to live up to her expectations and demands, for she is above all self-critical. In a revealing passage about the Diary itself, she writes:

The Diary is the museum, the storeroom, the attic of the mind. The past, intact, and the child are there. Whenever the love has a moment of inattention, or gives it to some other matter (business, art, other women, friendships), what I recall is not what I am, but rather this angry child who clamored for love and did not get it.

When we recall that the Diary began as a love letter to an absent father and that even physical union in adulthood did not requite her longing, we understand that the Diary is at its root—as perhaps all diaries of value are?—the record and recovery of a trauma that, if not faced clearly, denies one emotional fulfillment and the capacity for mature growth. To put it another way, as Nin suggests, if healing requires others, it must begin with oneself.

The other major story in The Diary of Others is of Nin’s long quest for recognition. Other women writers had achieved renown—Colette, Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf—but Nin was in quest of a psychic penetration only signified by external circumstances and events, and when in the 1950s she decided to collect her fiction in a single volume, she would call it, fittingly, Cities of the Interior. It was where she herself wished to live.

Still, despite the appreciation of figures such as Wilson and Gore Vidal—not to mention the support of Henry Miller, himself now famous with the American publication of The Tropic of Cancer—Nin was compelled to subsidize publication through much of this period. This changed in 1961 when Alan Swallow, a small press owner in Denver, agreed to publish the corpus of Nin’s fiction in handsome softcover editions. Swallow was also interested in the Diary, but that was a project beyond his scope alone, and much labor (with numerous disappointments) would be expended before Harcourt Brace undertook the primary work of publication. Friends and fellow writers had long approached Nin with the idea of publishing the Diary in excerpts and fragments, but she resisted this, regarding the Diary as an integral whole. At the same time, it was clear to her that, apart from the necessity to protect or conceal certain identities, it could neither be approached as a simple reproduction of her journals nor as an act of confession; rather, it had to have its own literary shape on the French model of André Gide and others.

For Nin, the Diary and the fiction had always been in dialogue. Much of the fiction had been adapted from Diary material, poetically as well as narratively reshaped; this meant changing names and recasting events. In returning to the Diary as a literary work in its own right, the same techniques were applied—sometimes by choice, sometimes by necessity. There was a further consideration as well, namely the audience to which the Diary was now to be addressed. The 1960s had brought a belated sexual revolution to America, as well as a feminist one. The story Nin wished to tell was of a woman in search of herself as well as an artist developing a highly personal artistic vision, at first on the freer stage of interwar Paris but later as an expatriate adjusting to the very different climate of wartime and postwar America.

Nin had found the right moment, and, if the term be properly understood, the right persona. She could have told her story in an autobiography, but that, she felt, would have smoothed the difficult path she had traversed, for if she was now on the cusp of all but undreamt-of success, her life had been one of long struggle and frequent disappointment. The Diary had not only been the record of that struggle as it transpired, but the only form in which it could be properly presented. For millions, it would strike a deeply resonant chord at a moment of cultural crisis unlike any America had experienced before. As such, it was not only a literary event, but a phenomenon in the unfolding of modern feminism itself.

The Diary of Others ends with the publication of the first volume of the Diary in the spring of 1966, and Nin’s wary apprehension of its success; a final volume from Sky Blue Press will take it from her emergence as a major cultural as well as literary figure to her death in 1977. Nin left her literary estate in Pole’s hands. She could not but have known that, with the notebook journals secured, the first Harcourt Brace edition would not be the last word on the Diary, and that a fuller story and a partly different truth would emerge from it.

The Pole edition, which appeared after Guiler’s death in 1985, was advertised as “unexpurgated,” with the unfortunate implication that the first one had been censored to conceal or misrepresent intimate truths. But Nin gauged, accurately, what a principally American public could digest and productively utilize in the 1960s and 1970s, and the care she took to protect and archive the original journals suggests her anticipation that a fuller truth would emerge, and that her legacy would be reevaluated in light of it.

The Pole diaries did, of course, fill in much of what had been omitted or circumspect in the earlier ones, but as some of their titles indicated—Fire, Incest—the emphasis on what might seem not only erotic but salacious gave short shrift to the maturing of a woman and an artist, a view that played all too readily into the more cynical atmosphere of the 1980s and 1990s. What we learned was, in short, all too often distorted as well. If the Diary reveals anything to us, it is the multidimensionality of a remarkably complex personality determined not only to explore life fully but to understand it as well. As with works by other iconic figures such as Simone de Beauvoir and Sylvia Plath, we will be deciphering it for a long time to plumb the feminine experience of the twentieth century.

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Gregory Corso
Edited by Raymond Foye & George Scrivani
Lithic Press ($20)

by Gregory Stephenson

Reflecting on the poetry of the late Gregory Corso (1930 – 2001), the phrase “internal combustion” comes to mind: compression, auto-ignition, energy. (Fittingly, his second and perhaps most famous collection of poems was titled Gasoline.) And indeed, Corso’s work arose from a combustive mix: he was an orphan, a grammar school dropout, an ex-con ravished by the English romantics, a street-surrealist steeped in the classics, and a poetic iconoclast with a penchant for archaic diction, all leading to a volatile compound of sensibility and swagger. But there was always more to Corso’s poetry than verbal energy; it was also an art of oblique angles and displaced perspectives, of words set aslant and things eyed askance, of lyrical raids on the vertical world.

The Golden Dot: Last Poems, 1997-2000 gathers, as the subtitle suggests, the final writings of this audacious poet. Through much of the time these poems were written, Corso was afflicted with the illness that was to be the cause of his death. These same years saw the deaths of many of his friends, while the poet himself became reclusive. Reflecting this sere, severe latter era of Corso’s life, this collection has fewer of the verbal pyrotechnics that imparted such verve to the poet’s earlier work. The poems gathered here are for the most part bare and spare, the tone conversational, the mood most often subdued. Even the punctuation of the poems is subdued: question marks far outnumber exclamation points, and individual lines, stanzas, and poems commonly end in ellipses or dashes. Still, for any admirer of Corso there is much here to be relished. There is dash and dark fire, offbeat insights, and a serious engagement with the unfathomable mystery at the heart of things.

Thematically, the poems fall into three groups: those engaged with the poet’s personal life; those concentrated upon human history and the fate of humanity and the planet; and those concerned with cosmology, with the history of the universe, its origins and evolution. “Redundant, Chaotic, profoundly heart-felt; / without order,” Corso describes these poems in a lyric titled “From birth to ’80 no one I knew died…” (Nearly all the poems in The Golden Dot were originally untitled, titles assigned to them by the editors for reader convenience are taken from the first lines of individual poems). This is an accurate, if incomplete, characterization of the poems assembled here; among a number of other adjectives I would add are candid, confiding, self-scrutinizing, self-assessing, self-recriminating, self-deflating, and unself-pitying.

Corso’s personal history in these poems bears scant trace of nostalgia. Again and again, he recalls his lonely, loveless childhood, the bewildering brutality of his father, the aloof indifference of six sets of foster parents, his repeated incarcerations, the terrors and griefs of a “lovelack boy” in a relentlessly unkind world. In a poem titled “I can predict with 99 percent accuracy…,” Corso deploys the metaphor of a foreign child riding alone on a train through Nazi Germany, surrounded by suspicious, hostile faces. Yet revisiting in memory these painful events impels him to attempt to understand the Great Depression-driven desperation of the impoverished foster parents who gave him such bleak accommodation, and to attempt to reconcile with a father who mistreated and abandoned him. 

Two luminous childhood memories include Corso’s stamp collection and his discovery of poetry. In “Used to be the stamps of Egypt…,” Corso recalls gazing on the grandeur and mystery of the Sphinx on an Egyptian stamp, the heroic faces of great men on French stamps, the paintings of Utamoro, Hiroshige and Houkusai on Japanese stamps, the depiction of a wild west cattle drive through snow on an American stamp, kangaroos, musk oxen, gorillas. The little colored bits of paper opened a world to him, proffering an exotic elsewhere. In a dozen other poems, he celebrates the glorious occasion when first he was visited by poetry. This crucial epiphany, occurring while Corso was incarcerated in Clinton Prison, was preceded by a portent – voices in his head whose words he recorded on paper. Soon afterward, he discovered the book that opened his soul: Ideas and Forms in English and American Literature, Volume 1: Poetry, by Homer A. & James B. Munn Watt, 1925. “Smart, Herrick, Hood, Marvell, Milton and the immortal Romantics” induced in his young, damaged spirit transports of joy. In a soiled, blighted world poetry was a thing set apart, a thing exempt: “bright, flawless, eternal” (“Head—bowed like a bull…”).

There are wincing recollections of follies and failures of later life: the time he callously abandoned a pet cat, the time in Paris when a waiter knocked his teeth out, regrets for his longstanding addiction to heroin, remorse for his seeming inability fully to love another: “My lips took but never gave / . . . / Starved of love leaves one fat with emptiness” (“When something of power dies…”). Repeatedly, ruefully, he accuses himself of hubris, of having lived his life in a trance of ignorant pride: “Little did I know how little I knew” (“Not recognizing just the kind of person I was…”). Now, mortally stricken, contemplating his own imminent end, he gropes toward “Faith.” He acknowledges that beneath the external, social personality, the defensive, self-protective face he turned to the world, he had long sensed “the emptiness / gnawing at my spirit” (“In The End Was The Word”). The form of belief Corso embraces is unorthodox and eclectic: “I hold the highest respect for the best of all religions / Impossible for me to embrace the entirety of one religion / I love like a box of wondrous toys the Greek gods of yore / And the men of religion I honor are Jesus, Buddha…” (“My leadership ability…”). “Spirit,” he affirms, is “Eternal and Absolute” (“Soul sickness devils the brain…”).

Read as fragments of an autobiography, Corso’s poems follow a pattern: self-discovery, self-betrayal, self-recovery. Poetry was an epiphany of vocation; his life of drink and drugs figures as a violation of that vocation and a denial of what he truly loved. Several of the poems record his endeavors to recover what he feels has been forfeited and to redeem from a life of hubris new faith and humility. Humor also tempers Corso’s confrontation with mortality. “I’m too old to die,” he jests, and imagines making scary faces at infants in prams in resentment of their likely longevity or chopping down trees out of pique because they will outlive him. He envisions the moment of his demise: “i seep out airy & silent / singing celestial monotone,” discovering solace in his posthumous condition as a de-materialized spirit, pleased that now he will be “more difficult to throw stones at” (“the need is there…”).

Intermittently, bursts of cryptic lyricism erupt into poems concerning his memories and reflections—enigmatic passages unrelated to the immediate topic of the poem. These would seem to testify to the persistence of his earliest poetic impulse, the unconscious imaginative process that breaks forth in vowels and verbs, finding expression in lines that bear comparison with Corso’s mysterious early image-rich poems, evoking worlds with words:

On a tripod in the Gobi
in a suitcase on the first street corner

Who sold me?
Who bought me?

He with two hands on one arm;
buy, sell, buy, sell, back and forth
from hand to hand
… endlessly buying and selling me to himself—
To be rid myself of this insufferable redundancy
I chopped off his buying hand

(“Space is in motion…”)

at the moment before I acknowledge it
i arrive in between
nothing
and entirely inside
cemetery-like and stoned
epitaphs sprouting from my eyes
nickels on my tongue
……………………..

mystic with steel in sabbath dark
cock crow in the courtyard blood
robed in high- sentence

(“the muse”)

In the end, there may be no definitive resolution to Corso’s psychological and spiritual issues. In a poem titled “My ancestral home was a cave…,” the poet recounts a recurrent dream in which he belongs to a species of primitive man living during the ice-age:

I would be frost bitten
with puffed belly starved
trudging the wind snows
looking homeward in circles
encircled by mountains
no stepward path to climb
but ever upward
and deep within wishing to fall where I hardly stand
and sleep my life away—

Natural history, human history, and the ultimate fate of the world are very much in Corso’s thoughts. The extinction of prehistoric species would seem, he believes, to portend the eventual doom of humankind, despite the confident affirmations of optimists: “Five layers beneath the mesa chunks of sea-shell / Hear the yea-sayers marking spots where dinosaurs fell” (“There were two times…”). Other poems catalogue past catastrophes and the forces arrayed against our fragile race. In “Forces of nature that destroy man…,” Corso inventories the multiple menaces that threaten humankind, including “Avalanches, tornadoes, hurricane, earthquakes; / frenzied fire, squalls, el niño, cyclones—” and foresees “earth ill, moribund, dead / … / Gone the whale … / Gone humankind, the lemur too.” In “I wish I had a bear for friend…,” “The illness of the winds…,” and “The 3 of Ice…,” he advances further evidence for the inevitability of some final annihilating cataclysm: contagion, an asteroid striking the earth, glaciations flattening the seas.

Corso is keenly aware of murderers past and present, tyrants and torturers, the Caligulas, the Hitlers, the evil deeds—great and small—of sick souls from ancient Rome to the streets of New York City. And yet, amid natural disasters and human lunacy, despite violence and greed, there have been, Corso asserts, great civilizations: Sumer, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Israel, the Orient, the Celts, Dorians, Eturians. And there have been great minds: Pythagoras, Socrates, Euripides, Sophocles, Jesus, Buddha, Hadrian, Phidias, Dante, da Vinci, della Francesca, Shakespeare and a host of other poets, Hugo and Flaubert—paragons and heroic souls all. How to comprehend such radical inconsistencies within homo sapiens?  Perhaps, the poet implies, they cannot be understood, only acknowledged, however sadly, as here in these poems. As Corso recognizes himself as a union of contradictory opposites, a “duad,” so too is humanity perpetually burdened with a dual nature, one that is riven with internal contradictions and inconsistencies. As within, so without, as a Hermetic aphorism states, the macrocosm mirrors the microcosm. And, assorted perfectionist and utopian visions notwithstanding, no final resolution to the human predicament is likely to be discovered.

Beyond the riddle of human destiny are the mysteries of cosmology and metaphysics, still exerting a fascination upon Corso’s imagination. Ever distrustful of doctrines and systems, he creates his own cosmic myth—“the Golden Dot”—expressed bit by bit through several poems in the volume. In Corso’s mythopoetic cosmology, the vast universe—of which we inhabit only a miniscule portion—was generated from a primary singularity which the poet names “the Golden Dot.” This mysterious, infinitely dense energy exploded into the vacant space surrounding it, multiplying itself, combining into matter, generating forces and physical laws, ever expanding outward in all directions, assuming the forms of suns and worlds and all that exists. The poet foresees that ultimately the process will reverse itself, and the galaxies, the stars and planets and everything that has being will be drawn back into unity, merging, contracting, returning to the primal form of the Golden Dot: “The ever-expanding shall join the deflation of black matter / Black holes shall excrete Quasars / from the wide part to cone to the pin point of its end—“ (“I know where all the beauties lie…”). When this contraction is accomplished, the process will then begin anew: the Golden Dot will again explode and expand, and “the beginning will begin again.”

“Time passes in its arrival,” Corso writes, “Space expands in its departure” (“Ask me not of moons…”). The vision of such cyclic infinitude can induce in the mind a kind of vertigo, while at the same time offering solace, for while all is transient, yet nothing is lost. All that is impermanent and ephemeral returns to the imperishable, everything returns to the bright womb of being, there to be born anew. As in one of Corso’s favorite Greek myths, the story of Demeter and Pluto, retold by the poet in “If I had strolled down the Via Sacra,” in the universe at large there is a perennial alternation between life and death, between numberless muchness and next-to-nothingness, between infinitesimal finitude and vastest infinitude. The ultimate nature of the Golden Dot is an enigma and Corso seems inclined to respect it as such, to accept it according to his newly won faith. The universe, the poems here seem to suggest, is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be revered.

The editors of The Golden Dot, Raymond Foye and George Scrivani, have done fine work in assembling Corso’s jumbled manuscript poems into this worthy valedictory volume (Foye’s introduction relating the harrowing history of the manuscript makes fascinating reading). Like “time’s wondrous play on ruinous marble” (“Closing a file drawer…”), the abrasions of the years brought to Corso a rougher, huskier poetic voice, but one that spoke still with resonance and clarity, force, and grace. The Golden Dot is a substantial, consequential collection.

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Brad Zellar
Coffee House Press ($17.95)

by Frank Randall

I met Brad Zellar, fittingly, via cassette, at the dawn of the 1990s, in one of the dozens of Minneapolis duplexes that housed aspiring bands at the time. Minneapolis was a city that managed to amplify its talent far beyond expectations for a town of its size, and it was a natural destination for young people who had grown up in the surrounding prairie towns. On this particular night, my own band had just come up from rehearsal in the basement, and while lingering about with assorted rockers, roadies and other characters, someone mentioned, “We just got a new tape from Brad. He’s been travelling in France.”

A boom box appeared and the room fell silent. Click-close-play and soon a Midwestern voice began a tale of being far from home, describing the strangeness of Paris days and sleepless nights filled with dreams of home. The narrator spoke directly to his fellow escapees from small-town Minnesota, but wrapped up the rest of us in his words as well.  Throughout a complete side of spontaneous prosody, he moved back and forth seamlessly from his encounters in a foreign land, to memories of hometown exploits that my fellow listeners were surely reliving with super-8 accuracy in their imaginations. The room was transported. Brad was their bard, and this voice in the night was clearly ready to explode a novel into the world.

Fast forward to the Minneapolis of 2022, where success or happiness or human connection isn’t a settled matter for anyone. Most of those basement bands are now nostalgia acts. And vinyl, the most musically pleasing of the audio formats, is making an unexpected comeback, much to the delight of listeners of a certain age. How did we get here? Well, no single novel could possibly describe such a far-ranging journey, but Till the Wheels Fall Off takes one path through the myriad gauntlets of the 1980s-90s that will win fans for decades to come.

Matthew Carnap is carrying a heavy load through his teen years: He lives in small-town Prentice, Minnesota, a town with few prospects for a record-collector-in-training—and one with no friends to boot. Matt never knew his father, who died in Vietnam before he was born. His sleep disorder is turning him into a zombie at school. His mother has been battling depression for his entire life. Her marriage to roller rink owner and obsessive record spinner Russ Vargo gave her lift at first, but lately the charm of his offbeat lifestyle is beginning to wear thin for her.

Screaming Wheels, the downtown roller rink that they operate and live in together, has opened up a new and magical world for Matt. Finally, a place to call home that actually feels like home: mirror balls, colored lights, and kids wheeling themselves into oblivion, all to the soundtrack of Russ’ precisely curated playlists. And thanks to Russ’ staunchly non-conformist outlook, Matt begins to curate his own playlist, for life. But there’s a downside: He’s well on the way to becoming one of the all-time outsiders his hometown has ever seen. Yet Matt has also picked up on Russ’ supreme trick of the trade: The right music does more than reflect your mood. It can change your life.

With challenges at school and parents not quite up to the task, Matt lands on the radar of social services, and his precarious situation could spiral out of control. With one misstep he could be sent to the local reform school. But his ultimate concern is how to stay connected with Russ, the best shot he has at having a father in his life. Luckily, there are a few folks still in Matt’s corner. With the help of his well-connected uncles (local legends Rollie, Big Leonard, and Mooze), his one friend, the streetwise Greenland Earle, and the Cowboy, an analyst who takes as much counsel as he provides, Matt receives some well-timed, lifesaving course corrections.

Time is fluid in Zellar’s roller-saga, and Matt’s narration rocks rhythmically between the 1980s world of a perplexed teen in his Screaming Wheels universe, and the 1990s world of a perplexed late-twenties soul seeker who has recently moved back home, trying to figure out what the hell happened, and what might be the path forward. Like listening to a favorite album at different times in your life (like Sly Stone’s Stand!, Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, the Replacements’ Let it Be, Neil Young’s Zuma, or Big Star’s Third—just a handful of the many albums referenced throughout Till the Wheels Fall Off), the novel offers the alternating effects of revelation and affirmation when life’s pivotal moments require a soundtrack, and Zellar is a master at both.

In the flash forward to the late 1990s, where vinyl and skating have already become anachronisms, Matt’s Uncle Rollie convinces him to move back to Prentice from Minneapolis, where he has made some unsteady progress toward an adult life. Rollie’s crew builds him a bachelor’s paradise of an apartment in the press box overlooking the town’s abandoned high school football field. With room for his prized collection of records and books—the objects that have defined his life thus far—it offers a stellar view of the town, his troubled past, and a possible future.

There is some meandering in the book’s first half, as Matt establishes the landscape of Prentice, his obsessive listening habits, and his family’s various histories. To any minimalists out there: If any of this exposition feels under-edited, it’s entirely appropriate for a narrator who lingers in a perpetual state of hypnagogia rather than a normal cycle of sleep. Zellar’s rendering is clinically accurate and revelatory. So take your time, savor the asides, and enjoy the ride. You’ll know when you’ve arrived because the payoff is undeniable. Zellar’s third act is a tour de force, where his fine ear for dialogue shines, our hero finally engages in a meaningful way with those around him (the crowd roars!), and the plot lines weave like a Brian Wilson score. 

This novel satisfies on so many levels. There are brave reckonings with mental health issues. There are pitch-perfect portrayals of teen uncertainty, longing, and confusion. And many times over, there are sublime moments of connection spurred by discovering a new song that that simply feels right and fits forever. To the casual witness, here’s a lonely kid surrounded by quirky characters—some maddeningly so—standing up to the big questions. How do we become ourselves? And is it worth all the trouble? The answers Matt uncovers move from hard lessons to pure magic, and the sometimes magical plot will only seem unreasonable if you’ve somehow managed to avoid spending any time in a small town. They are Petri dishes of the peculiar, where the oddest fellows are held in reverence by those that appreciate the beauty of the unlikely scenario. A novel about a sleep-deprived record collector who lives in a roller rink and then later, a football press box? Of course. With boundless empathy for his patient zero, Zellar makes it all work.

Perhaps the most admirable aspect to Zellar’s coming of age tale is that it doesn’t happen over the course of a wild teenage weekend, or a single school year. As for many of us, it takes years.

Brad Zellar has been a book hound, a record slinger, a sage of the baseball beat, a Thursday night bowler, a dog’s best friend, and an incredibly versatile writer who has produced a trove of quality work over the years, including the meditative novella House of Coates, the amusement park of a blog Your Man for Fun in Rapidan, and various poems and rants from his zine Scread.  You’ll have plenty of time to explore the backlist, and you will be richly rewarded if you do. But this is the novel that was ready to explode all those years ago, as heard on that spoken-word cassette sent from deep in the analog night. Sure, it took a little longer than we all thought it would, but the opportunity to finally press play on a long-anticipated mix tape from one of your favorite artists is always worth the wait. Now who’s up for a skate?

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Arda Collins
The Song Cave ($18.95)

by Dobby Gibson

“Poetry seems especially like nothing else so much as itself. Poetry is not like, it is the very lining of the inner life,” wrote C.D. Wright. She could have been addressing the work of Arda Collins, an aeronaut of inner weathers whose poetry sounds like no one else’s more than her own.

Collins’s first book, It Is Daylight—which Louise Glück selected for the 2009 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize—has become somewhat of a cult classic for the way it explores the tense borderland between our public and private selves, the interlocution of its oddball personas, and the pleasures of its jittery surrealism. The house-bound paranoia of It Is Daylight has become only more resonant amid the pandemic and our violent, dystopian nation-state.

If you’re a fan of that book, Star Lake may take you by surprise: The archness and dark humor are gone, and in their place is a significantly sparer, more tender, and even vulnerable poetry. There are still flashes of humor, and more than a few traces of Collins’s signature disquiet, but there is also, well, quiet. It’s been fourteen years since Collins’s previous book, and it feels as if she has inscribed that time, and that silence, into the very text of Star Lake itself:

The trees and sunshine
and sky in the quiet town
where I live. Here
at the main intersection, this kind of summer day
reminds me of driving
and loneliness;
I’m grateful to still be myself.

As she writes elsewhere in the book, “it’s been decades since I started this poem / and now it’s tomorrow.” In many of the poems, one hears the poet’s gears re-setting, senses her searching for a viable peace.

While the diction is simple—nouns like “tree” and “sunshine” and “sky” populate Star Lake—Collins offers a look at what happens when a poet uses these elemental tools often, and in multiples. As Mahmoud Darwish wrote, “Extreme clarity is a mystery.” This is a book of intuitive gnosis, of Beginner’s Mind, and it’s a book in which the question mark, another tricky rhetorical device, also flourishes:

Where is the poem?
The wind is the poem!
I spend the day carefully.
At night, the night sky
comes in: past skies follow. Cold wind,
night wind, white wind,
blue wind, snow wind, slight wind . . .

In an odd way, the poems of Star Lake are even more introspective than It Is Daylight. Certainly, they are more personal, as in “My Mother’s Face”:

    I will have this argument
in my mind, under a blanket
on a light gray afternoon
exactly like my mother’s face.

Along with elegies for family there are inquisitions into the nature of the self, a suite of love poems, and a thread that explores Collins’s own place amid the diaspora following the Armenian genocide. All of this makes it a difficult collection to pin down—to its credit.

The book’s publisher, The Song Cave, has done important work as a kind of search and rescue operation for under-appreciated poets such as John Keene, Alfred Starr Hamilton, and Lionel Ziprin, alongside offering a steadier lineup of millennials and New York School types. In this, it feels like a good fit for Collins’s offbeat lyric making. “I still can’t believe the ending / of this book / isn’t what I thought / it was going to be,” writes Collins, also voicing the reader’s own thoughts at confronting this surprising, long-awaited second collection.

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Friendship and Mourning in the New York Avant-Garde

Ryan Dohoney
Bloomsbury ($29.95)

by Patrick James Dunagan

Ryan Dohoney’s Morton Feldman: Friendship and Mourning in the New York Avant-Garde explores how the composer’s work was both derived from and sustained by his early friendships in the 1950s Abstract Expressionist scene in New York City. Dahoney gives special emphasis to the impact of the tragic early death of poet Frank O’Hara in 1966 and the falling out experienced between Feldman and painter Philip Guston in 1970, but he also touches upon less celebrated artistic affiliations of Feldman’s, such as with dancer Merle Marsicano. There’s little gossip: the author largely avoids sentimental clichés or otherwise overt pandering to emotional cues and dramatic scenes. After all, even as “Feldman relished intimate details and preferred performances between friends,” he wasn’t known publicly or privately for expressing his emotions (aside from existential despair over his art), and his minimalist compositions are anything but effusive in terms of displaying personal feeling. Yet Dohoney succinctly demonstrates that friendship indeed lies at the heart of several of Feldman’s paramount pieces of music.

Pages of Feldman’s scores are reproduced as his own writings and talks are cited alongside critical commentary. Works by the other artists are likewise discussed; Dohoney draws upon outside criticism for useful comparisons with Feldman’s work. For instance, two Feldman compositions, Three Clarinets, Cello, and Piano and For Frank O’Hara were each at one time entitled In Memory of My Feelings, a well-known longer poem of O’Hara’s;

As Nick Shelby notes, the final sections of the poem are marked by an attempt to reconfigure a sense of self out of the collage of images and experiences. This corresponds to Feldman’s own creation of music, which attempts to get itself together, to build up a coherent sense of progression or movement from fragmentary gestures that can seem aimless or inchoate.

Dohoney is a sympathetic and well-informed reader/listener. He recognizes “the precariousness of Feldman’s social ties” and brings them to the fore while noting that “friendship is not always a positive force—it is sometimes an underdetermined name for remarkably varied attachments.” What once sustained a friendship understandably undergoes transformation over several years. With Guston, the ties the two shared during the heyday of 1950s New York proved unsustainable after Guston’s turn towards (crude) figuration as he ceased to resist the figure’s emergence in his work. His struggle with abstraction had moved forward to another stage. At Guston’s infamous 1970 Marlborough gallery show, full of cartoon-like images of heads, coats, shoes, rocks, and other debris of life, Feldman failed to support the change of direction and the two were never in direct conversation again.

The reader can’t help but feel melancholy that the days of spending hours hanging around each other in Guston’s studio, followed by deli sandwiches or long dinners at Chinese restaurants while bantering about their inner struggles, were over. Dohoney describes how at Marlborough, Guston “needed Morty’s opinion instantly, to feel Morty’s affection and understanding to keep going. And he didn’t get it in time. The ‘truth of abstraction’ proved stronger for Feldman than friendship itself. Therein lies the tragedy.” They remained silently in dialogue throughout the years, however; Guston painted images recollective of Feldman into pieces from the ’70s, just as Feldman composed For Philip Guston in tribute to his old friend after Guston’s passing. Feldman also honored one of Guston’s final requests: that he read the Kaddish over his grave.

For Dohoney, there’s no doubt of friendship having been the motivating influence upon Feldman. More so, he’s adamant that his survey of Feldman’s work demonstrates just how vital friendship was within the wider context of the era: “Feldman’s laments for his community provide clear evidence that friendship in fact produced New York School modernism.” Whether all readers agree or not, Dohoney’s argument is quite persuasive, especially when it comes to the heart of his study: engaging with the composer’s work. He suggests that “Feldman’s music encourages us to hear and feel this loss of coterie as an afterimage—something vanished yet affectively present.” Indeed, Feldman always kept on going with the work even when the impetus of friendship that once sustained it had moved on. Like all great artists, he had no choice.

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