The Perfect Gift for the E-Reader Owner Who Wants to Experience Poetry (Wait! Really! It can be done!)

Even though my own attempts to write poetry have convinced me that I am a prose writer who should stick to what she does best, I often long to be able to write poetry. I envy a poet's ability to make language sing. I feel as Flaubert did when he complained that all he was capable of doing was banging on cracked pots when what he longed to do was to move the stars. So, while April is the cruelest month up here in northern New York, I  love April's tribute to poetry.

For those who are not familiar with poetry, this book is a perfect amuse-bouche or several for the neophyte to curl up with. And, for the veteran fan of poetry, it's a wonderful collection of some of poetry's brightest stars' greatest hits. I would consider teaching this book in one of my writing courses. I have started having students in my "writing for magazines' course read a collection of poetry each semester, because I want to make certain that I produce students who will feel comfortable reviewing poetry collections, and to affirm for the poets among the group that I think the genre is deserving of being taken as seriously as we take prose. Perhaps even more so.

What makes ESSENTIAL POEMS so wonderful is that the publishing company, Open Road Integrated Media, has unlocked the key that allows a poem on an electronic reading device look like a poem  that you would see in a paper book. Poets lay out their words in a particular way for serious, not-to-be-messed with reasons. It would be frustrating if one were to open a book of poetry to find the words scattered or jumbled on the page or a sonnet that looks like a prose poem instead of its distinct shape. What a shame it would be if Robin Morgan's "Arraignment" were not to be in the shape of a voice gaining courage as it declares its "J'accuse!" against Ted Hughes?

How can
I accuse
Ted Hughes
of what the entire British and American
literary and critical establishment
has been at great lengths to deny,
without ever saying it in so many words, of course:
the murder of Sylvia Plath
?

Whether one thinks Morgan's accusations against Hughes to be unfair, or if one sees him as the husband who drove his wife to suicide, the ability to read the poem as it was intended allows the reader to notice the build-up of Morgan's voice.

Or the incomparable May Sarton, who taught us about solitude. Her lines are presented as she intended.

Read between the lines.
Then meet me in the silence if you can,
The long silence of winter when I shall
Make poems out of nothing, out of loss,
And at times hear your healing laughter.
Or the anguish conveyed in the poem without punctuation as "No Goodbyes" by the too-soon gone Paul Monette:

for hours at the end I kissed your temple stroked
your hair and sniffed it it smelled so clean we'd
washed it Saturday night when the fever broke
as if there was always the perfect thing to do
to be alive for years I'd breathe your hair
when I came to bed late it was such pure you

and so on, until he breaks our heart:

my darling one last graze in the meadow
of you and please let your final dream be
a man not quite your size losing the whole
world but still here combing combing
singing your secret names till the night's gone

This book should be a great gift for the new e-reader owner. Perhaps a chance to appreciate that poetry can be read on the new technology without losing any of its magic will make even the most ardent tech head make room for the poet in his or her collection.

We Regret to Inform You that communication is hard for the characters in Tim Fredrick's collection

Tim Fredrick proves himself to be a risk-taker as a writer. In his collection of short stories, WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU, Fredrick tackles a number of character voices and a variety of short fiction styles, but the theme that runs through many of these tales is a sense of just how difficult it is for Joe Everyman to express himself.

"We regret to inform you" might have come from a number of his characters' mouths.  In each case, the act of speaking is itself an act of regret. In "By the Stream on Moving Day," his protagonist feels the ache implicit in the definition of nostalgia when he meets up with his childhood best friend, Henry, who, on their last day together as kids, put his toe in the water, testing whether what Henry felt was sexual love. When the narrator, who may be named "Buddy," hears Henry admit that this may have been the moment when he realized he was gay, Buddy chokes on a piece of ice, incapable of revealing whether he felt the same way. In "Egg and Spoon," Jim seeks a Guinness World Record and his brother's affection by carrying an egg in a spoon around and around the local high school track. And in "Thawed," my favourite story, Fredrick imagines that while hundred-year old corpses brought back from being cryogenically frozen may be cured of the disease that would have killed them, the process can do nothing to cure the prejudices they went into suspended animation with.

Fredrick plays with second person narration in "A Tale of Five Thousand Erections," which is great, unless the you being addressed is female. "This One Night in the Bar Where I Work's" stream-of-consciouness narration feels shallow, until you realize that the fight at the center of it is itself banal.

Overall, Fredrick shows terrific promise as a storyteller, and I'm curious to see where his writing takes him next. One thing is for sure, Fredrick is not limited by the boundaries of gender and sexuality. He tries on different writing styles as one does clothes--some of the pieces are not all that flattering, but at the end of the day, there's an eclectic wardrobe filling the shelf.

THE LENS OF WAR: Still foggy after all these years

Books of photographs occupy a strange position in the average American's house. Many of them are marketed as "coffee table" books; their very existence a testament to  the taste, the intellect, and the personality of the owner of said coffee table. LENS OF WAR (University of Georgia)  is most definitely not a coffee table book, although perhaps it should be, as the photographs and the commentaries upon them would be certain to provoke discussions.

As someone who was not born in the United States, but went through the American educational system from kindergarten to graduate school, I'm aware of the unique position that the Civil War occupies in the popular imagination. Photography books are not cheap to produce, but University of Georgia press is probably not wrong in banking on this collection making a profit for its publishers. Its drop date of April 15, 2015 is conspicuous, being the sesquicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's death from an assassin's bullet the night before.

The premise behind the book seems simple enough. The book's editors--J. Mathew Gallman and Gary W. Gallagher--contacted a number of Civil War historians and asked them to each pick a favorite photograph from the war, along with an essay that explained the significance of the photo.

Most of the writers respond with remarkable candor. For those who think that all historians engage in parching prose best used as a sleeping pill, prepare to be surprised. Writers use colorful language in presenting these black-and-white images. And the choice of photograph reveals as much about the historian as his or her biography in the back of the book.

The book opens with a series of portraits of some of the "great men" of the war: Lincoln, Lee, Grant, Stonewall Jackson, and Sherman. On at least two of the occasions, historians proclaim that it was the portrait of the great man that caused them, at a young age, to "fall in love" with the Civil War, statements that I find troubling. While accepting that perhaps they are referring to their child selves who saw in the romanticism of the portraits the same window into an adventurous time that others experienced looking at portraits of the Tudors--Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, in particular. I admit to reading every book that I could lay hands on about the Tudor court between 1509 and 1603; the Holbein portraits creating larger than life images sure to capture the attention of an eight-year old girl.

But falling in love with a war strikes me as insensitive, given that portraits of great men were not far removed from the famous battleground images of the war's dead. It is not surprising, therefore, that the historians who chose portraits of great men possessed different attitudes toward the war than those who chose some of the more graphic images of suffering, deprivation, and destruction that followed in the remaining sections.

If you pay attention to the stories told by the historians, one gains a view into where each historian sits in the range of theories of the war. Whether identifying themselves as members of the "Lost Cause" school of thought to the newer theories of the "Destructive War," one finds a number of occasions where professors, many of them affiliated with southern colleges, painting the Union armies as punishing and blood thirsty. In an example of sloppy scholarship, Joan Waugh, writing about U.S. Grant says, "without attribution," "The battles of the six-week Overland Campaign, where Grant's and Lee's armies fought to bloody stalemate across Virginia's countryside, gave rise to the nickname of "butcher," for the general-in-chief whose main strategy seemed to be throwing bodies at the enemy."

LENS OF WAR is a great book to add to any Civil War student's collection. Photographs are not objective documents that simply record what is there. In some cases, what is there was stage-managed by the photographer who sought to drive home a point with his newspaper audiences. In some cases, the analysis of the photographs turns the lens upon the historian as much as the war itself.

As we approach the 150th anniversary of the official end of the Civil War, LENS OF WAR does a great job of illustrating William Faulkner's observation of history itself. "The past is never dead," he wrote, in REQUIEM FOR A NUN "It's not even past."

Lorraine's Reading Salon is opening its doors

Years ago, when I stood at the trailhead and looked at the sign, I knew I wanted to follow the trail that would take me to that place where I would recognize that I had become a writer, that I had earned that title. I have broken into the clearing and those of you who want to read me can do so in a number of places. You may have followed me here from there, which is great. And while I am a firm believer (ask my students) that if you want to write, you must read, this is not going to be the place where you'll see the sorts of political posts that once garnered me attention.

Here, I want to talk about one of my great loves: books. I'll tell you about what I'm reading, what I'm thinking about reading, what I put down and couldn't read and which book kept me from blogging because I couldn't lift my eyes off its pages.

So in the coming days, look for my thoughts on books. I haven't yet decided what the inaugural book I discuss will be. But I hope you'll come back and talk about books with me. My only rule about posting comments is that you can't be a troll. This is a no troll zone, and violaters will be booted. You're in a literary salon, not hanging out in the parking lot of a strip club. Don't take a dump on my carpet. Feel free to offer thoughts about a book or books that that are contrary to mine. I will love that. We'll be having a discussion, a conversation, an exchange of ideas. Sometimes, I get lonely when I feel as if I'm the only one who has read a particular book. That's why I'm welcoming you to my salon. The furniture is comfy and we're casual, so go ahead and put your feet up.

Stay a while.