Illustration: Dante holding a copy of The Divine Comedy at the entrance of hell, with the terraces of Purgatory and the spheres of heaven. Fresco by Domenico di Michelino (1465).
I learned the song when I was a young child: “Yankee Doodle went to London / just to buy a pony, he stuck a feather in his cap / and called it macaroni.” It’s an old song, likely dating to the start of the American Revolution or colonial period. Historians know how it’s been used over the centuries, but it’s still a mystery as to where it came from.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose poetry figures in my novel Brookhaven, wrote the poem that is the most famous about the American Revolution, “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.” It was one of the stories included in Tales of a Wayside Inn, published in 1863, as another conflict ranged in America. We have Longfellow to thank for how we understand Paul Revere’s ride, and it happened slightly differently from how he romanticized it. Well, perhaps more than slightly. But it did happen. Kostya Kennedy at Time Magazine explains why the famous ride did indeed matter.
One of the most common headlines I’ve seen in the last 25 years is “Book publishing faces a crisis.” Book Publishing seems to stay in crisis these days, with the latest being what’s perceived as a dramatic drop-off in sales of non-fiction books. Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review looks at the data and asks, is the non-fiction book crisis for real?
I wasn’t quite prepared for Then Flew My Caw Away: Poems, the recently published collection by Mary Meriam. Many of the poems are about broken families or broken or lost relationships. They’re filled with a sharpness, a toughness, words wielded like a heavy blade. But every so often, something else breaks through, and it’s so tangible you can almost taste it.
That something is pain. In “Heron,” the collection’s first poem, she writes, “I need to live another way,/ somewhere, maybe Oakland, / leave my old broken oak tree / feels like my only friend.” Several of the poems suggest a mother figure who, intentionally or not, dominated the child. The words often ache. They don’t ask for pity; they simply seek to understand and explain.
When we were children, my brothers and I would sometimes be handed a snack that I thought had been invented by my mother. “Bread, butter, and sugar” was possibly our favorite treat. My mother was tickled that we saw it as a special dessert. It was only years later, when I visited her in a rehab center while she recovered from a broken hip bone, that she told me where it had come from.
She grew up in the Great Depression. Money was so tight that my aunt quit high school because she couldn’t pay the 25 cents for gym clothes. My mother, the fourth of six children, knew hunger. She said there were times when there was nothing to eat, so they’d go to bed hungry. The next day, my grandmother would prepare sandwiches for school, using the only ingredients she had – butter and sugar sandwiches. It was a poor child’s lunch in the 1930s, and her own children thought of it as a terrific treat.
Reading poet Erin Murphy’s new work, Mother as Conjunction, imagine my surprise to discover someone else who had the same experience as my mother, except it happened decades later.
