Yesterday, I received I Gave You My Silence, the new novel by Nobel Prizewinner Mario Vargas Llosa. Vargas Llosa died last year; this is his final work, published posthumously.
When I saw the notice that it was being published. My mind moved back in time, some 40 years, to 1986. I was in a master of liberal arts program at Washington University in St. Louis, and I signed up for a fall seminar – The Latin American Novel. We would be reading novels by Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa, Manuel Puig (Kiss of the Spider Woman), and Carlos Fuentes, among others. The reading syllabus was challenging.
I don’t recall why I signed up for that particular course; others were available. My total reading experience in the Latin American novel was limited to one book – One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Perhaps that was the reason; Latin America has a vast literature, and I’d read very little of it.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.
Poetry is often associated with the young. We think of the fire of the Romantics, or the young T.S. Eliot upending traditional poetry with modernism with The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. But even younger poets age, banking the fire and passion as they become tempered by experience and understanding.
Two of my favorite contemporary poets are Luci Shaw (1928-2025) and Rhina Espaillat (b. 1932). It’s something of a coincidence, or perhaps it isn’t, that both reached their 90s. Shaw died last December, just shy of her 95th birthday. Espaillat tuns 94 this year. Theirs is not the poetry of youth but instead the poetry of long lives lived – and lived well. It’s also the poetry of understanding and affection for people, in all our wild and crazy humanity.
For Instance, the new poetry collection by Espaillat, demonstrates this understanding and affection.
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.
