Larger Bodies Than Mine
by Marianne Worthington. Part of the New Women's Voices Series. Finishing Line Press. 2006.
With aching tenderness and an impressive mastery of lyrical language, Worthington digs through the scraps of her memory to piece together something warm and comforting to protect her from the underlying knowledge she has of the transitory nature of all things. Just as in the gardens, fields, and woods mentioned so often in her poems, she remembers seasons of bloom and seasons of decay.
In spite of the darkness present in some of these poems, many of the artifacts of her American childhood stir our own memories.Her well wrougt poems ask us to consider our own lives, our familes, and what we value most.
Though an awareness of death (and perhaps a deep fear of it) drives these poems, in the end, it is the poet's acceptance of such things as part of the natural order that redeems them. Marianne Worthington is an accomplished poet who uses skillful restraint when dealing with intensely emotional moments. In spite of the down-home atmosphere that showcases these poems. They are definitely not sentimental or cliche. They are strong in both message and craft.
Larger
Bodies Than Mine is a memorable first book written by
a poet who will make you eager to hear what else she has to say. [Marianne
Worthington is a member of the Guild's Board of Directors.]
--Carole B.
Harvest
by Catherine Landis.
New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St.
Martin’s
Press, 2004. $23.95 cloth. 338 pages.
Knoxville author Catherine Landis's second novel, Harvest, is a convincing and sophisticated story about Appalachian identity, land conservation, the disappearance of family farming, the corporate greed associated with suburban sprawl, and the displacement and demise of an Appalachian family. Without preaching or proselytizing , Landis skillfully comments on these heady subjects while giving readers a memorable and mature character study.
The novel opens near Norris, Tennessee, in 1933 as the Tennessee Valley Authority is preparing to build a dam. Six-year-old Arliss Greene is helping his immediate and extended families prepare for the forced move from their community (ironically called New Hope) to a new farm in northern Knox County, Tennessee. He leaves New Hope “riding backwards on top of a loaded wagon,” visualizing his birthplace underwater: “He imagined fish swimming in and out of the gaping windows of the house, . . . pictured tree limbs bending to river currents instead of the wind.”
By age 14, Arliss has assumed the grinding labor of cattle farmer and the sole responsibility of his family’s new farm. Arliss marries but his two sons have no interest in or respect for farm work. The youngest son, Daniel, dismisses his father as ignorant and wrong-headed. He abhors farming and works hard at shedding his own “farm boy” image around other kids. The older son escapes to Atlanta and becomes a land developer, a profession that figures ominously at the end of this story.
Daniel becomes
a literature teacher but eventually abandons his students, his writing
projects, and his family. Daniel’s wife, Leda, becomes Arliss’s
unlikely farm hand when he shows up on her porch one day and asks, “Can
you help me for a minute?” Slowing learning the intricate details
of successful
farming and finding enfranchisement in steady, hard labor, Leda comes
to understand a heritage Daniel denies, a belief articulated in the
beginning of the novel by Arliss’s father: “At least when
you’ve got land, you’re the one to say what’s what.”
Unfortunately, in the end, Leda does not become the one to say what’s what, and like Arliss before her, is displaced and uprooted. The Greene’s rural farm on Bearpen Lane in northern Knox County is steadily assaulted with the constant roar of machinery cutting trees and roads for subdivisions, the “red, muddy scars of earth never meant to be laid open, and the thin boards of cheap houses piling up like litter.” Worse, a Wal-Mart can be seen from the farm. The oldest Greene son calls it a “booming, happening part of town,” with its “fast-food restaurants and sit-down restaurants with clever names and gas stations and movie theaters and home improvement stores and home furnishing stores and office supply stores and real estate offices and bank branches and copying stores and eyeglasses stores and shoe stores and dry cleaners and newly-widened roads already jammed with traffic.” It’s the saddest part of this novel.
Although Leda experiences personal growth and learns the power of heritage and memory, her journey is solitary. She never gets any help from the Greene family. On those occasions when Leda does ask Arliss about the memories of his mountain heritage, she is met only with stubborn silence. Arliss Greene buries his emotional losses with the same finality that the man-made lake at Norris buried over 40,000 acres.
In Harvest, Catherine Landis delivers a complicated, compelling, character- driven novel and a meditative mourning on one rural East Tennessee family farm that becomes “an island in an asphalt sea.”
-Marianne W., Cumberland College
Roy
Kesey's book Nothing in the World tells the story of Josko
Banovic, a schooboy turned soldier when fighting breaks out between
Serbia and Josko's native Croatia. Along the way, Josko becomes a sniper,
war hero, but eventually is severally injured. Kesey's debut book is
a moving story about a young soldier who goes in search for his sister
despite his severe injury in order to rescue her from the horrors of
war. An eerie, surrealistic tale that I won't soon forget.
http://nothingintheworld.com/
--Barry S.
I
am reading (almost done) with Ireland, by Frank Delaney.
It is a story within a story, filled with Irish history and geography,
and a portrayal of the Irish culture and spirit, as only the Irish can
do. It is riveting, entertaining, educational, and delightful, with
its fictionalized history spun into a tale that only a truly gifted
storyteller can accomplish without losing his audience. Good for all
ages.
--Diane H.
As I put Billy
Collins' THE TROUBLE WITH POETRY on the highest shelf, along with its
sister books, SAILING ALONE AROUND the ROOM and NINE HORSES, I wondered
which of the poems would make itself at home in my unconscious. It turned
out to be the hauntingly beautiful "In the Moment." The line,
[A]nd so the priceless moments of the day/were squandered one by one--"
like an old familiar mantra, brought me back to this poem again and
again. What was the context? How did Collins conclude? Like the layers
of an onion, one must unwrap each spiritually entangling line to the
core that makes the poem work. In verse four, we find the question to
which the above mentioned line is an answer:
"I could feel the day offering itself to me,/ and I wanted nothing
more/ than to be in the moment--but which moment?/ Not that one, or
that one, or that one."
No reference to
"carpe diem" is necessary. We are pulled into the domestic
imagery where all moments spent reading this poem create a sense of
the sacred, which is appropriate for a poem exploring the relationship
between the sacred and time.
Nancy R.
I've just finished
Jeanette Winterson's Lighthousekeeping. The
book begins with Winterson 's first-person narrator, Silver, having
been banished with her unwed mother so far to the limins of society
as to be literally hanging off of a cliff in a sloping house on the
edge of Cape Wrath, an island where evolution seems to have been suspended.
This fairy-tale-like introduction is countered by shrewd particulars
and the reality of setting. Winterson has placed the story in a real
locale: the lighthouse on the island is one which was indeed built by
the family of Robert Louis Stevenson. Winterson's tale evokes characters
from Stevenson's Treasure Island through her own characters named Silver
and Blind Pew. Winterson's character Babel Dark is presented as Robert
Louis Stevenson's model for The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde. Stevenson and Charles Darwin make cameo appearances in
the novel. As the author merges the historical figures with the quirky
reality of the narrator's experience, we see Winterson's craft at work,
a sort of mythical realism in which personas familiar take on epic qualities,
but they also live in the mundane reality of cold breakfasts, abuse
and neglect, and other human realities. Winterson brings them all into
the context of Silver's experience, much as a true lover of storytelling
becomes a part of this larger universe of books and things literary.
Winterson has made a very enjoyable novel about the nature of stories,
about storytellers, and about the love and pains of the craft.
Rose R.
Did you hear me laugh out loud last Thursday night about 11:30pm? I was re-reading David Sedaris’ book Me Talk Pretty One Day, and my bedroom window was open. If you were out walking your dog that late, you probably heard my guffaw loud and clear. Sedaris (did I mention he is Greek-American?) can’t write fast enough for me to discover more of his strange life experiences and quirky family. If you haven’t read any of his books, here’s a list that will make you laugh…OUTLOUD!
Me
Talk Pretty One Day
Naked
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
Barrel Fever
Holidays on Ice
Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules: An Anthology of Outstanding
Stories
If you are REALLY into Sedaris’ brand of humor, here is a list of his own choices for reading:
Random
Family by Adrian Nicole Le Blanc
Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware
Among the Thugs by Bill Buford
An Obedient Father by Akhil Sharma
Jenny and the Jaws of Life by Jincy Willett
Guess Again by Bernard Cooper
Take the Cannoli by Sarah Vowell
Fraud by David Rakoff
And if you’d like to hear Sedaris read from some of his stories, visit this site: http://www.npr.org/programs/specials/lists/sedaris/
More
about David Sedaris:
http://www.barclayagency.com/sedaris.html
-Jo Ann