A year in reading: John Lee Clark
When I moved to Montreal last August to start doctoral studies, I gave myself a personal assignment to pass through Canadian literature. Elizabeth Hay2006 novel Late at the end of the night Stopped me, just like the way a voice on the radio stops a character named Gwen:
“Her relaxed, gravelly and conversational voice was so familiar that a decade of time moved away and she was back in a more lively place than the present. As it was rare, she thought, to hear someone on the radio that was not Glib or arrogant or to impress you.”
It was a surprise to realize how rare it is to come across a good book like Hay’s. Many books succeed or fail to be tall. The Hay has no such attempt. His is an inheritance novel, a memory, not to be sold.
Robertson DaviesFiction is the most entertaining, but The Happy HeartA gathering of his speeches and his fugitive pieces, moved me. It was so useful to return to the basics with him through a pair of conferences entitled “Reading” and “Writing”. He encouraged his audience to locate at least a good anthology of poetry, because “there will be times when nothing other than poetry will satisfy your appetite, and you must have poetry easily at hand.” His lawyer continues to be more precise:
“Perhaps you like to follow what young poets do, and it’s admirable, but I also urge you to read a poetry that has been tested by time, and that does things that Moderns do not seek to do, or perhaps – I say it almost in an excuse – cannot do.”
As a “modern” poet myself, this passage made me win. But I take the pang that I think I say that Davies’ observation functions for me as a spur to continue to grop.
This is why it was a comfort to read The portable Emerson again this year, the 1946 Malcolm Cowley And Carl Bode edition. Emerson is a master tremor, groped in dazzling darkness.
Kay Ryan‘s Synthesis of gravity: selected prose,, Max Bearbohm“An ecclesiastical” of “an ecclesiastical”, Winston Churchill“The dream” of “The Dream”, Agnes repliertests on many collections, Ernest HemingwayMemory A mobile party,, Chinua finished‘s Home and exileAnd GK Chesterton‘s Poems From 1916 are some of the joys of this year. But Edna Worthley Underwood1930 The Taste of Honey: The Note Book of a linguist is an astonishment. She discusses many books that I will never read because they are not available in translation in English and because I will not learn as many languages as it has done. For a taste of her disposable writing: she arrived in the seller for the first time at night. There was, she wrote,
“No dazzling of the electric lamps. There were small dark lamps swinging in front of fabulous facades, sometimes painted. There was not his except the whistling of our long black oars against darker water. I almost lost my senses to beauty and strangeness – this divine and dead city which seemed to move away, to the point of disappearing forever, under the water of the Adriatic. ”.
More than a year in 2024 reading
