Poetics and Ruminations: 5 entries from February 2007

From time to time we [the Portland, Maine, Public Library] invite a staff member or guest reader [in this case, Lewis Turco] to recommend a few books they have enjoyed and to write a few lines about them.

The Well of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde

is the third and latest book in a series of literary whodunits that began with The Eyre Affair and continued with Lost in a Good Book. The heroine of all three is Thursday Next, a Literary Detective member of SpecOps who goes spinning from one book to another, through time and space, attempting to put right all sorts of literary affairs, such as the finale of Jane Eyre, the erasure of her husband who no longer exists and perhaps never did, though he is the father of Next's unborn child, and putting in time with her pet dodo, Pickwick, aboard a derelict seaplane in an unpublished, cliché-filled mystery novel titled Caversham Heights buried in a sub-cellar of the library that contains every letter, sentence, plot, book and character ever conceived, and many that haven't yet been thought of. Confused? Somehow Fforde keeps all this literary madness crystal clear and our eyes glued to the shifting page. Really, this is all one fascinating story, so readers should begin with the first book and go through all three chronologically. It's well worth the trouble.
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Language Visible: Unraveling the Mystery of the Alphabet from A to Z by David Sacks

It is exceedingly hard to find a book that is so good to read you hate the thought of its ever ending. But one such, at least for me, is David Sacks Language Visible. It is such a good read that I have been limiting myself to digesting one chapter at a time, and there are only twenty-six, one for each letter of the alphabet. Sacks traces the evolution of each written letter from its earliest beginnings in Egypt around 2000 B. C. through its transmutations and adoptions by other languages throughout the ages, to its final resting place on the page in front of us. If this idea seems to be entirely too scholarly and boring, believe me when I say it is not! Sacks is as lively and entertaining a writer as he is a profound intellectual. A terrific book, on my honor!
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Rules of Hunger by Lois Roma-Deeley

Lois Roma-Deeley, Rules of Hunger, Star Cloud Press, 2004, ISBN 0-9651835-5-6, quality paperback, 104 pp.
— northSight, Singularity Press, 2006, ISBN 0-9765711-2-9, cloth, 90 pp.

When in 1990 he had seen the first issue of Bill Baer’s The Formalist, A Journal of Metrical Poetry (alas! no longer extant) Arthur Miller wrote, "I am sure I will not be the only one who will be grateful for it. Frankly, it was a shock to realize, as I looked through the first issue, that I had very nearly given up the idea of taking pleasure from poetry." That is the trouble with American poets nowadays, they have forgotten how to entertain the reader. The result is that almost none of the general public reads poetry anymore — it is no longer a pleasurable experience. That's why running across someone like Lois Roma-Deeley is so satisfying. Her first book of poetry, titled Rules of Hunger, is not only readable, it is enjoyable to read. She is a poet who often writes out of her Italian-American background, but not only that. She can conjure up that world in words. You don't believe me? Look at this from "The Apostle of Wax and Shine":

If St. Paul should ever lose his way
on this road that leads through 1959
to my seven-year-old self sitting on the front steps
staring into the nothingness that would become my future,
he would find a rag top convertible and my father
the Apostle of Wax and Shine.

Perfect!

And then she follows that book up two years later with another terrific collection, northSight, which is just as enjoyable to read as her first. She has continued to develop her talent for capturing the personality and character of an individual in a few absolutely solid, pinpoint-focused lines. Not to mention the milieu that her subject inhabits. She is able to pull a reader into her world by the nape of the neck and make him live there until she's done. Then, when you’re through reading, you want to thank her for the abduction.

And that's not all. She is no kind of metrician, but she has such an ear, and such a solid grasp of what the language can do that her experiments are sometimes amazing, like "Obligatory Sex," which doesn't have a sentence in it, just words: verbs in the first triplet; nouns in the second; adverbs in the third; nouns again in the fourth, adverbs and adjectives to end it, but it's one of the sexiest (maybe even one of the dirtiest) poems I've ever read. I suppose a teacher would have to tell students not to try to write like this, because the odds against its working are vast, but on the other hand we will be glad that Roma-Deeley probably never had a teacher who'd point that out to her.

Another thing about Ms. Roma-Deeley is that she is a fine narrator, and she can handle dialogue with the best fiction writers. Her brief four-poem series “Voices from the Aftermath: New York City Requiem” is the most affecting tribute to — and evocation of — the disaster of “9/11” that I have seen to date. These are monologues by people who were left behind, but who are forever trapped in the event: “Young Boy Running in the Street,” “Woman Standing at Ground Zero,” “Widow Waiting Outside the Station House,” “Father Among the Rescue Workers.” I will not quote from any of the poems because to do so would be grossly unfair to readers. However, I do not exaggerate when I say that these poems alone are worth the price of the book, and more than that.

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Zone of the Interior, A Memoir, 1942-1947 by Daniel Hoffman

Zone of the Interior, A Memoir, 1942-1947by Daniel Hoffman, a long-time summer resident of Cape Rosier, Maine, tells the unusual story of a serviceman who spent the war years on the home front learning how to be a technical writer, but winding up as one of the premier American poets of the last half-century. The war years come to life here, as does the youth of a man who has made a difference in the literature of his country.

"Four Reviews," from the "Guest Picks" Internet web page, May 2004, of the Portland, Maine, Public Library, 5 Monument Square, Portland Maine 04101, 207 871-1700, email: reference@portland.lib.me.us; expanded version of the Lois Roma-Deeley review published in and copyright, The Hollins Critic, xliii:5, December, 2006, pp. 18-19. All rights reserved.

"Never assume anything because to assume something is to make an ass out of u and me" - Benny Hill.

In an interview he conducted for Poets & Writers Magazine On-Line Only in December 2005 Daniel Nester asked me how it feels to know poets everywhere use The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics as a standard text on poetics and prosody.

I replied, "It's gratifying, of course, but writers seldom get a real sense of what something like that is like because we get very little direct feedback. Over the years, though, in the case of The Book of Forms, it's become slowly obvious to me that a lot of people use it, and a fair number write to me about it, asking questions, as you did."

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