Category: Books

Some literature — Shakespeare, Dickinson, Faulkner — feels timeless, as if retrofitted with a few new surface details it could have been written yesterday and not decades or centuries ago. Wondrak and Other Stories, by the early 20th century Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, is of another sort: though it deals with eternal themes — war and peace, the state vs. the individual — it reads, today, as if blanketed in a layer of naiveté.

By that I don't mean ignorance of the world; quite the opposite. It is an un-modern lack of irony that marks these stories as unlike those of most modern writers. In "In the Snow" ("Im Schnee"), the brief first story in this collection of three, the very youthful Zweig, a non-observant Jew, tells of a group of medieval Jewish families who flee their village ahead of what would centuries later be called a pogrom. But these Jews are not well-rounded characters; rather they are almost symbolically simple avatars of persecution and gloom. Even singing a celebratory Chanukah song, "the singing echoes like a hopeless lament, and is blown away on the wind." Even before we learn their fate, Zweig has let us know that for these Jews there can be no redemption – not even, it seems, in their own hearts.

"In the Snow" is a very early work; the mature Zweig was capable of much more nuance. Even so, "Compulsion" ("Der Zwang"), the long story at the center of the collection, has a discomfiting up-front quality, as if we're being compelled to press our faces against the glass and experience the story literally rather than reclining to watch the show in comfort.

Ferdinand, a peace-loving artist, has fled to Switzerland with his wife Paula to avoid being drafted into the German army during World War I. Nonetheless he receives a summons to service. Though he and Paula have agreed to take a principled, intellectually rigorous stand against any such conscription, in the event he feels compelled to answer the call, much as he wants to resist. It is an almost Jamesian tale of complex psychology, not just ideas.

This was an order that would not be denied. Somehow he felt himself wavering; that unknown sensation was back. His hands began to shake. His strength faded. Cold came from somewhere, like a draught of wind blowing around him, uneasiness returned, inside him the steel clockwork of the alien will began to stir, tensing all his nerves and making its way to his joints. Instinctively he looked at his watch.

Like Hans Castorp at the end of The Magic Mountain, Ferdinand's fate is left uncertain, though we are given room to hope for both his physical and his mental survival. The final tale lacks certainty for another reason: Zweig never finished it. Wondrak is titled after a minor character, a local functionary charged with assisting the authorities in locating young men avoiding the draft. The story recounts the life of a disfigured woman, Ruzena, who is now trying to hide her only son, Karel.

It's a tale of large cruelties and small mercies. Zweig left it off with Ruzena and her son both jailed, awaiting his transport off to war. Knut Beck, an earlier editor of Zweig, suggested that perhaps the author felt the story couldn't have been published because of its subject matter and therefore didn't finish it. I think it's just as likely that he quit because he'd written himself into a corner.  Either way, again there is no irony; though certain characters may have psychological depth, what actually occurs is plainly motivated and sensible, at least within the twisted sensibility of war. We do, however, wish we knew what became of Ruzena, having dwelt with her for some 33 pages.

I suspect Pushkin Press's earlier Zweig release, Amok & Other Stories, might be a better introduction to the author. But this volume has piqued my interest in reading more from a writer who was one of the most successful of his time but is largely unknown today in the English-speaking world. I was a little disappointed to spot several typos, after finding the same publisher's edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets such a model of small-print perfection. But Pushkin's unique and rather artistic small softcover format remains appealing.

London's East End, the 1950s, winter. A thick yellow smog keeps the local doctors busy treating respiratory problems; elderly folks die by the hundreds. But Conchita Warren, pregnant for the 25th (yes, the 25th) time, has suffered a fall and gone into labor two months early.

The young midwife who has been providing Conchita's prenatal care receives the late-night call, and bicycles through the soupy cloud of pollution to tend to her charge. Jenny is an experienced midwife by now, but has never had to deal with a premature birth. The mother is very sick; the baby is born successfully, tiny but alive. Finally doctors arrive and order the baby transferred to hospital, but Conchita won't let go of the minute infant. No amount of pressure can pry her hand off it, and her husband, Len, takes her side.

This is but one of many dramatic episodes ("adventures" wouldn't be an inaccurate term) recounted by Jennifer Worth in her absorbing, eye-opening, wise, touching, and sometimes suspenseful memoir of life as a nurse-midwife in the poor parts of London in the postwar years. Times were tough and crime always threatened, but unlike policemen, who patrolled in pairs for "mutual protection… we nurses and midwives are always alone, on foot or bicycle. We would never be touched. So deep is the respect, the reverence, of the roughest, toughest docker for the district midwives that we can go anywhere alone, day or night, without fear."

And they had to. Jenny visits bombed-out buildings, condemned many years before but still inhabited by the dirt-poor. She encounters women who've been abused by husbands, by pimps, and by the infamous workhouses, and ravaged by illnesses ranging from rickets to eclampsia. Yet moments of amazing grace shed a different light on the human condition: a first-time father has an unexpected reaction to his new baby's suspiciously dark skin; a young boy befriends a clumsy, socially inept midwife, gallantly defending her against ridicule; Jennifer discerns the startling secret to Conchita and Len's everlasting, unconditional love. And as the young agnostic grows to respect the nuns who run the midwives' practice, she inches towards a religious revelation.

Ms. Worth's prose is only workmanlike, but all her stories are interesting, and for every episode of fascinating but technical medical reporting (I learned a lot about birthin' babies from this book), there's a recollection or reflection that achieves a kind of literary transcendence. Of Mrs. Jenkins, a ragged old woman who magically appears in the street wherever a birth is about to occur, Ms. Worth writes:

She stepped over the edge of the big tin bath and sat down in the water with delight, splashing and giggling like a little girl. She picked up the flannel and sucked the water noisily, looking up at me with smiling eyes. The room was warm because I had stoked up the fire, and a cat strolled up and looked curiously over the edge of the bath. She splashed him in the face with a giggle, and he retreated, offended. The front door banged, and she looked up sharply. "Rosie, that you? Come 'ere, girl, an' look a' yer ol' mum. It's a rare sight."

But the footsteps went upstairs, and Rosie didn't come.

The nuns themselves are among the most interesting characters: ancient crazy-like-a-fox Sister Monica Joan; bustling, foul-mouthed Sister Evangelina; saintly Sister Julienne. Worth's exact recounting of dialogue, and her detailed descriptions of scenes that were only told to her by others (and decades ago at that), feel suspiciously detailed. But if she has recreated, it all feels apt; everything in this book is vividly believable, and often gripping.  Even the appendix on cockney dialect was no exception; I began to read it dutifully but finished it wishing for more. It will surely be appreciated by any American who's tried to fight through an episode of Eastenders.

A great success in England, this book deserves just as much appreciation on the west side of the pond. Jennifer Worth's tales of a half century ago lose nothing with transplantation to modern times; society really hasn't changed all that much. And they will resonate with anyone who ever had a heart.

In the hands of a great craftsperson, a humble volume of story and prayer may be re-conceived as a priceless illuminated masterpiece. Witness the Sarajevo Haggadah, a centuries-old volume now counted as one of the most valuable books in the world.

Similarly, in the hands of a fine writer, a slim set of facts about an unusual object can become a powerful and absorbing historical novel. Witness People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March.

The dramatic history of the Sarajevo Haggadah rivals the beauty of its illuminations. Produced in Spain in the 14th century by an unknown artisan, the Haggadah somehow survived the book-burnings of the Inquisition, and was eventually spirited to the thriving Jewish community of Venice. From there, it found its way to Vienna, where, in the 19th century, it was rebound.

Eventually it came to rest to Sarajevo, where (thanks to a brave librarian) it survived Nazi pillaging and now holds pride of place as one of the Bosnian capital's great treasures. But although careful study has revealed much about the Haggadah's provenance, it continues to hold many secrets. From these facts and these secrets, Brooks has woven a fascinating, richly imagined fiction.

Her new novel, People of the Book, works backwards in history. To carry the Haggadah through the centuries, she creates a series of plausibly imagined heroes and scenarios, starting with the horrors of the Holocaust and reaching, finally, all the way back to a beautifully imagined tale of the book's creation.

Framing and setting up the historical sections of the novel is the story of a modern-day book conservator who is pursuing a series of clues, each from a different episode in the Haggadah's odyssey. Hanna Heath's life is something of a soap opera itself. Her adventures in scholarship lead her to international intrigue, romance, and even a secret-princess revelation worthy of a fairy tale.

As Hanna turns into a modest and reluctant action hero, the book as a whole begins to resemble a cross between James Michener's The Source and an Indiana Jones adventure. And I mean both of those in the best possible way.

Hanna's globe-trotting pursuit of the Haggadah's secrets works well as a framing device, but it is in the historical sections that Brooks' storytelling ripens from merely good to transcendent. Each section evokes a colorful, thoroughly believable, emotionally convincing world peopled by complex human beings bathed in vices, diseases, and emotions – all in the space of a short story.

Brooks' writing transports us into these worlds almost as completely as her invented 15th century scribe, David Ben Shoushan, is transported by the marvelous pictures he is incorporating into the Haggadah.

It was in the still of the early hours, when the stars blazed in the black sky, that it happened. His fasting, the chill, the brilliant flare of the lamp: suddenly the letters lifted and swirled into a glorious wheel. His hand flew across the parchment. Every letter was afire. Each character raised itself and danced spinning in the void. And then the letters merged into one great fire, out of which emerged just four, blazing with the glory of the Almighty's holy name. The power and the sweetness of it were too much for Ben Shoushan, and he fainted.

Hanna's own revelations, the personal and the professional, aren't as mystical as that. But she's good company, as Brooks spirits us through the ages on this most excellent adventure.

What to do with the weight of expectations? The French novelist J. M. G. Le Clézio is not well known in the English-speaking world, and many of us might never have heard of him had he not been awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature. Now we have had the pleasure of that introduction, but because of the prize, we also feel the burden of expecting greatness.

Greatness probably can't be ascribed to any author based on the reading of one fairly short book. Nonetheless, Le Clézio's 2004 novel Wandering Star is unquestionably a work of power and beauty even in this suboptimal translation.

It tells the story of Esther/Hélène, a girl from a secular Jewish family forced by the Nazi invasion to flee their home in Nice. In the countryside, in a small village, under the dubious protection of the less-murderous Italian military, she comes of age.

Eventually Esther reaches Israel, where she encounters Nejma, a Palestinian refugee her own age. We read Nejma's story in a separate section, but the contrast between the trajectories of the two lives is clear, and crushing.

Having borne many trials but escaped the full horror of the Final Solution, Esther has arrived at her promised land. Israel's War for Independence is raging, and it seems life for her is an endless whirl of destruction, yet she is a survivor. But in order for the Jewish refugees to establish their homeland, another people – Nejma's – is uprooted and transformed into refugees themselves, persecuted in their turn not by murderous armies bent on genocide – though plenty die in battle – but by starvation and disease. Though the two girls meet but once, their dual stories comprise a singular tale of the nightmare of war, and the promise – and tragedy – of human migrations.

The translation has problems. Not having the original French in front of me, I don't know to what extent the translator, C. Dickson, has adhered to Le Clézio's French sentence constructions. But whether from too-literal rendering, or carelessness, or some other reason, too many sentences must be read twice. The reason is nonstandard punctuation, primarily the use of commas to create run-on sentences, and other careless constructions: "Elizabeth had followed her into the bushes, she caught up with her on the bank of the river, breathless, her legs scratched from the brambles."

The poetry of the writing blasts through nonetheless, even in passages such as the above. It burns down like the desert heat beating down on Nejma as she passes her days in a refugee camp at what feels like the end of the world. In the following passage, Nejma, who has grown up by the sea but now languishes in the dry, dusty camp, has just witnessed a young pregnant woman being bathed, her "long braids twirled around on her back like wet snakes."

Outside the sun was still dazzling. The camp was heavy with dust, with silence. Before nightfall, I was up on top of the hill, my ears filled with the sounds of water and the droning voice of the old woman. Perhaps I had stopped seeing the camp through the same eyes. It was as if everything had changed, as if I had just arrived, as if I were unfamiliar with the stones, the dark houses, the horizon obstructed by the hills, the dried-up valley scattered with scorched trees where the sea never comes.

Through Esther's life story and Nejma's, Le Clézio bathes even the muddy or humdrum moments in muted light like this. Yet the girls' suffering is almost palpable, both Nejma's physical destitution and Esther's literal and psychological displacement. Esther lives on, a survivor; Nejma's fate remains cloudy. But having read their stories, so different and so similar, we are left with one rock-solid truth: there is no simple right or wrong.

And there is a second truth, this one buried in the author's way of telling itself.  It's Keats's youthful truth, that beauty is truth and truth beauty. This truth, carried to us on the wings of great art and literature, can survive the worst of times – however unexpectedly.

Capote in Kansas is newly available in paperback, and I jumped at the chance to read it because it’s about Truman Capote, one of my favorite writers, and his friendship with Harper Lee, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of To Kill a Mockingbird.

In the novel, Kim Powers starts with some basic facts and incidents in the lives of the two great writers and constructs a fictional, fantastical tale of what might have transpired between them during Capote’s last days. Unfortunately, what might have been a lovely and haunting story collapses under the double-team pressure of mawkishness and bad writing.

It’s well known that the two writers spent summers together as children and that in her masterwork To Kill a Mockingbird Lee based the character, Dill Harris, on Capote. What may be a little less well known is that Lee accompanied Truman when he traveled to Kansas to research the horrendous Clutter murders for his groundbreaking true-crime book, In Cold Blood. Combining facts, speculation, and his own inventions, Powers weaves a tale of ghostly visitations, strange obsessions, long-nursed grudges, long-distance communication, and the secret dreams and nightmares of great but frustrated writers.

It’s rich material to work with, but lazy writing and sloppy thinking sabotage Powers’ efforts. What is one to make of a paragraph like this, which begins with a pleasing poetic image but then explodes into an incomprehensible mess:

[The p]hotos [were] so gruesome she had tried to turn their reality into vague, abstract shapes: turn pools of blood into fluid circles on a field of black and white, turn bodies and faces into geometry, not people whose names she now knew, who had been spared no dignity in death – and no further dignity as she and Truman bore witness to the last, and most intimate, moment of their lives.

Powers also have an annoying habit of trying to draw cheap dramatic effect from piling on one-sentence paragraphs:

     The coroner had to admit he had never been shot to death, so couldn’t honestly describe how it felt.
     And that’s what Truman wanted: honesty.
     That thing in death, their deaths, that he had never had in his life.

It this was a story about fictional characters, I might have been able to overlook some of its stylistic failings; one can forgive flawed writing when it’s employed in the service of a ripping yarn. But Powers is writing about two monumental figures of 20th-century American prose, and while we don’t demand that a writer giving us a version of such people should be able to match their abilities, we should at least be reminded of why we love their work – and reminded by evocation, not sad comparison.

Book reviews can be a joy to write especially if the book left you with more than you entered with, however, some people struggle with putting the words together for a book review/report and that’s where sites such as collegepaperworld.com come in handy for them and their writing woes.

Amid the sprawl of the crime fiction genre, Tana French has mapped out a subcategory in which the detectives get emotionally involved in their cases and things blow up in their faces. In French's Ireland, just as in the real one, the cops may get their man, and they may not; a good yarn is a good yarn either way.

In The Likeness, just as in her first book, In the Woods, the particulars of an unusual murder draw a detective in so closely that solving the case becomes far trickier than the police might have imagined. Here, our heroine and narrator is Cassie Maddox, erstwhile partner of the last book's Detective Rob Ryan. In the aftermath of that book's harrowing events, Cassie is off the Murder squad and working Domestic Violence. (The traumatized Rob is out of the picture). But Cassie's old line of work beckons when the body of a young woman turns up – a woman who not only looks just like Cassie, but had adopted the identity of Lexie Madison, a fictional junkie Cassie had "played" during an undercover operation years before.

Cooking up a story that the victim actually survived her stabbing, Cassie's manipulative former Undercover boss convinces her (with the very reluctant OK of her Murder-squad boyfriend, the devoted Sam) to enter the bosom of the "Lexie"'s old life, specifically the academic circle of her eccentric housemates, and pretend to be the recovering victim while trying to suss out what happened to the murdered imposter.

Preposterous? Pretty much. But once we've bought in to the premise (and plowed through a rather too long set-up), French delivers a giddy, suspenseful ride. Is one of the housemates the killer, and if so, how much danger is Cassie in? What will happen if her cover is blown? What weird bond holds the housemates almost cultishly together? Might the killer be one of the locals, whose resentment of Whitethorn House and its owners goes back generations? Or could it be the disappointed relation who wished to inherit the house and turn the property into condos?

Real estate plays a significant role in the plots of both of French's mysteries to date, and that's not a coincidence. She's a keen observer of Ireland's dizzyingly rapid modernization and the painful conflicts that arise between traditional interests and those fueled by the country's economic boom.

Both books also delve into the complex psychology and procedure of police work.

The cold fact is that every murder I've worked was about the killer. The victim… was just the person who happened to wander into the sights when the gun was loaded and cocked. The control freak was always going to kill his wife the first time she refused to follow orders; your daughter happened to be the one who married him. The mugger was hanging around the alleyway with a knife, and your husband happened to be the next person who walked by… if we can figure out the exact point where someone walked into those crosshairs, we can go to work with our dark, stained geometries and draw a line straight back to the barrel of the gun.

Most readers, myself included, won't know enough about police work to tell whether all of Cassie's observations ring true, but French makes them feel real as rain. And she's good with noirish metaphors. "The words sent a slim knife of something like homesickness straight through me." "Lexie blew down the grass like a silver shower of wind, she rocked in the hawthorn trees and balanced light as a leaf on the wall beside me, she slipped along my shoulder and blazed down my back like fox fire." The dead Lexie, who wasn't even Lexie, comes to creepy life as brightly as any of the living characters in Cassie's intrigued and eventually obsessed mind.

But in spite of its unlikely plot, this is a more satisfying book than In the Woods (which you needn't read before this one, though it is enjoyable and would provide a bit of context). The Likeness has more richly drawn characters, a more satisfying conclusion, and most important, a more sympathetic and believably complex narrator. Maybe with Cassie Maddox the author has found her muse; maybe she'll move on to another lead investigator next time. Either way, she's raised her bar.

This highly regarded mystery, now released as a trade paperback, marks a strong beginning for first-time novelist Tana French. Set in the suburbs of Dublin, In the Woods is a multilayered story that combines the gritty worldliness of a police procedural with the eerie chills of a psychological thriller.

Detective Rob Ryan and his partner, Cassie Maddox, must find a child-killer who has done his dirty work in the same woods where Ryan, twenty years before, was the sole survivor of a bloody incident that left him with a blanked-out memory. Looming on the horizon: the obliteration of the crime scene by a new highway.

Is the new murder related to the earlier disappearances? Are the anti-highway protesters involved? Will pursuing the case unlock Ryan's memory – and does he really want it unlocked? With both his sanity and his job on the line, this is much more than just another murder case for him, and French artfully maintains the dual layers of suspense.

In Detective Ryan's first-person narration, I detected hints that the author hadn't quite mastered the kind of literary voice one expects of a strapping male heterosexual policeman. There's no reason a sensitive guy can't also be a tough murder detective, but I found some of Ryan's observations and feelings – some of his adjectives, to be precise – a little on the feminine side. Reflecting on himself as a boy, Ryan observes, "that relentless child had never stopped spinning in crazy circles on a tire swing, scrambling over a wall after Peter's bright head, vanishing into the wood in a flash of brown legs and laughter."

However, the psychological depth and observational detail of French's writing bring the story vividly to life. Touches of humor keep the darkness at bay, too. Speaking of Cassie's arrival on the mostly-male murder squad, Ryan observes, "When she finally arrived, she was actually sort of an anticlimax. The lavishness of the rumors had left me with a mental picture of someone on the same TV-drama scale, with legs up to here and shampoo-ad hair and possibly a catsuit."

Cassie turns out to be nothing of the sort, but much more interesting, and the same is true of the book. A traditional mystery in some ways, it's also a thoroughly modern take on the genre, with memorable characters and settings, emotional highs and lows, and a climax that satisfies on some levels while leaving you frustrated on others. Any imperfections in the plot are more than balanced by the fine writing, especially considering this is a first novel. I'm looking forward to French's next book.

[Note: this article has also been published at Blogcritics.org and syndicated to Boston.com.]

Over a long and fruitful career John Ashbery has proven what many wouldn't have dared suggest: it is possible for a poet to work in abstractions and also maintain a distinct and resonant voice. Just as an art aficionado knows a Pollock or a Rothko without being told, so does a reader of poetry know an Ashbery without needing to see the name on the cover – or, for that matter, understanding what the poem is about.

"About" is the wrong word anyway. This volume of selected poems (and prose poems) from the nine books Ashbery has published over the past two decades shows that age certainly hasn't slowed this octogenarian's pen; rather, time has broadened his palette, expanding the acreage of his peculiar subject matter. "Of" is a better word than "about" – "of" as in "made of."

What is a poem like "Finnish Rhapsody" made of? In this instance the answer is easy – it's made of two-phrased lines in which the second phrase restates the first.

Don't fix it if it works, tinker not with that which runs apace,
Otherwise the wind might get it, the breeze waft it away.
There is no time for anything like chance, no spare moment for the aleatory,
Because the closing of our day is business, the bottom line already here.

Another "easy" one is "Hotel Lautréamont," which is written in an obscure form called a pantoum, where lines repeat at specific intervals from stanza to stanza. These exceptions still go to prove the rule of Ashberian uniqueness. Their playful tricks suggest the fecund phraseology of ancient epic poetry without taking any specific epic form. We scent a dialogue with Shakespeare, a reflection of ee cummings, a Yeatsian echo, but each poem is never anything less than an Ashbery, though some may be said to be more distinguished than others.

"Offshore Breeze" demonstrates the poet's method succinctly. The first and second stanzas talk of an "I" and a "you" and some things, but no "he." Yet here is the third and final stanza:

What happens is you get the unreconstructed story,
An offshore breeze pushing one gently away,
Not far away. And the leggings of those meeting to
See about it are a sunset,
Brilliant and disordered, and sharp
As a word held in the mouth too long.
And he spat out the pit.

In that sharp last line, and not until then, perspective and metaphor are twisted into a completely new direction. It's startling and moving, without being "about." As Alan Brown put it in the Sunday Times, "Ashbery is still exuberantly dedicated to the truthful rendering of experience as a flow of sensations that defy interpretation."

"The Big Cloud," an exceptionally beautiful lyric that's also from 1987's April Galleons, seems at first to be "about" something. "For ages man has labored to put his dreams in order. Look at the result. / Once an idea like the correct time has been elucidated / It must fade or spread…" Yes, that feels true, philosophically at least. But as the poem delves deeper into the idea, abstractions pile up – "Last words are uttered, and first love / Ascends to its truly majestic position unimpaired." And then, in the final stanza, concrete images elucidate particular lives – "Letters were strewn across the floor, / Singing the joyful song of how no one was ever going to read them." As happens repeatedly in Ashbery's work, objects and ideas take on flesh and personality. The poem ends elegaically:

It was existence again in all its tautness,
Playing its adolescent joke, its pictures
Teasing our notion of fragility with their monumental permanence.
But life was never the same again. Something faltered,
Something went away.

That's about as sentimental as Ashbery gets. Contrast the above with the opening of the title poem, from 1992: "A yak is a prehistoric cabbage: of that, at least, we may be sure." This immediately undercuts any sense of groundedness we may have brought to our reading of the poem. "Still Life with Stranger," from the same volume, ends: "The whole cast of characters is imaginary / now, but up ahead, in shadow, the past waits." This boldly states what is usually unsaid: that these words are not meant as a direct reflection of any reality. A later poem, "The Green Mummies," begins with another perfect example: "Avuncular and teeming, the kind luggage / hosed down the original site."

Always playing, Ashbery writes inexplicable sentences in utterly graceful English. We extract meaning from them a little like we abstract it from music or sculpture. He presents facts and interpretations in tones of great seriousness, but with the subjects drained out. And somehow he makes this weird narrative flow work over the long haul, even through some very lengthy poems. The title poem of 1994's And the Stars Were Shining is like a short story or a movie set in an alien yet familiar universe. The narrator leaps through hoops of images, then pauses to reflect on the creative spirit:

…Some people have an idea a day,
others millions, still others are condemned
to spend their life inside an idea, like a
bubble chamber.

And in the final section comes close to stating a philosophy of art: "It's as though we've come refreshed / from another planet, and spied immediately what was lacking in this one: / an orange, fresh linens, ink, a pen." "The Problem of Anxiety," from 1995's Can You Hear, Bird, asks, "Suppose this poem were about you–would you / put in the things I've carefully left out: / descriptions of pain, and sex, and how shiftily / people behave toward each other?"

Sometimes when Ashbery starts to make too much sense, his poems lose force, as in some of the selections from Can You Hear, Bird. "…By an Earthquake" breaks out of this tendency with its playful form, a series of disconnected vignettes like these: "Albert has a dream, or an unusual experience, psychic or otherwise, which enables him to conquer a serious character weakness and become successful in his new narrative, 'Boris Karloff,'" and "Too many passengers have piled onto a cable car in San Francisco; the conductor is obliged to push some of them off." And the long poem "Tuesday Evening" is made of sometimes Shakespearean rhyming quatrains: "…It's getting late; the pageant / oozes forward, act four is yet to come, and so is dusk." The dada-esque prose poem "The Bobinski Brother," from Your Name Here (2000), could hardly be more different. "'Her name is Liz, and I need her in my biz,' I hummed wantonly. A band of clouds all slanted in the same direction drifted across the hairline horizon like a tribe of adults and children, all hastening toward some unknown destination." And so on.

The visual asserts its importance with the book-length poem "Girls on the Run," inscribed "after Henry Darger," the reclusive folk artist. "…The droplets made diagonal streaks in the air / where pterodactyls had been." But in the final volume represented here, 2005's Where Shall I Wander, Ashbery seems to be looking at politics and war, though, as always, in a skewed way. The prose poem "Heavy Home" closes: "For the time being the disputed enclave is yours. But its cadence is elsewhere." Finally, the short poem "Annuals and Perennials" begins with a discussion of "…this America, home of the free, / colored ashes smeared on the base / or pedestal that flourishes ways of doubting / to be graceful…" and ends with this devastating one-line stanza:

"We have shapes but no power."

By contrast, Ashbery's poems – certainly the best of them, as selected in this volume – come in many shapes, and bear masses of cutting, jostling power.

Jennifer S. Davis’s first collection of short stories won the Iowa Short Fiction Award five years ago. It’s been a wait, but fans of the first book won’t be disappointed with the follow-up.

The stories in Our Former Lives in Art shine floodlights on Southern folks in various walks of life. Davis has the gift of unfolding both a setting and the nature of a character – and sometimes of a couple – in few words, while zeroing in on a turning-point moment in the life of a protagonist.

She’s highly aware of the artifice of her work. In “Rapture,” a no-longer-young housewife “invites women over to talk about books with female characters who do similar things until one day their lives are changed by this or that.” In “Pilgrimage in Georgia,” a famous but blocked writer moves to a small town seeking authenticity, only to find that what appears “real” isn’t necessarily what it seems. Often when I start reading a piece of fiction and encounter characters who are writers, I get turned right off, but that didn’t happen here. A protagonist’s profession or educational level doesn’t matter; in these stories, failure and frustration are equal-opportunity employers. Moments of transcendence, rare though they may be, don’t discriminate either.

Often the turning points that quicken these stories involve trust, or the failure thereof. In “Blue Moon,” a young woman named Eva has such trouble facing her feelings that she’s developed an annoying habit of expressing herself in song lyrics. “‘Henry,’ I’d said as he was packing his things. I gave him my mournful stare – the look he’d loved when we still wanted each other bad enough to lie about who we really were. ‘We can’t go on together with suspicious minds.'” When her best friend Misty finds religion and drifts away, Eva reaches a turning point. Interestingly, we don’t find out whether she decides to give Henry another chance. What matters is that we’ve come to know the character, and we’ve witnessed her important moment.

In “Ava Bean,” a home care worker who has lost custody of her daughter reflects on trust: “Until Lucy, Charlotte didn’t understand anything about how the world works, about how one person can shape the course of another’s life as much by absence as anything else, how a stranger’s trust might be the closest thing to salvation you’re ever offered.” Usually Davis gives her characters just the right amount of that sort of rumination. She shows the important stuff, while telling just enough.

Trust is also the main point of “Lily,” in which a social program pairs up a rebellious and cocky teenage girl with a lonely retired man. When Lily asks Alfred what he did before he got sick, he replies, “I reckon the same that I do now. Sit at home and wish I’d done something different.” Davis sums up Lily’s parents’ relationship in another marvel of concision, one among quite a few in the book: “Both of her parents like barbecues, cold beer, Neil Diamond, and bingo. Some stretch this into a marriage, and they did, and then they didn’t.”

Lily’s progression toward trusting Alfred may come a little faster than one might have realistically expected, but the opening story, “Giving Up the Ghost,” is the only one I found unfulfilling. Its premise feels contrived, and I didn’t buy some of the dialogue.

Except for that near-miss, these stories are right on target. They leave one not only admiring the author’s pinpoint writing style but also feeling that one’s understanding of humanity has deepened a bit.

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