Some Wednesday Readings

Booknotes: Massacre at St. Louis – Civil War Books and Authors. 

Poet Laura: Chicken Dreams – Michelle Rinaldi Ortega at Tweetspeak Poetry. 

 

Beads and Buttons – poem by Renee Emerson at Story Warren. 

 

The ship that broke Wordsworth’s heart: UK government grants protection to wreck with connections to poet – Maev Kennedy at The Art Newspaper.

 

A Fan – Seth Lewis.

 

Live Like the Weasleys – Gracie Olmstead at Granola. 

 

A Mouldering Feast: The Dangers of Victimhood as Identity – Rebecca Brewster Stevenson at Mere Orthodoxy.

 

Traveling Through Civil War New York – Evan Portman at Emerging Civil War.

 

Winter Bed – poem by D.C.C. Randell at Society of Classical Poets.

 

Protect Good Reading from Bad Schooling – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.

 

One Rule for Frat Boys. Another for Violent Activists – Francesca Block at The Free Press.

 

Rosebery Topping, a Dark Teesside short story by Glenn McGoldrick, is free on Amazon today and tomorrow. I reviewed it here.

Painting: William Wordsworth (1770-1850).

"The Grave Tattoo" by Val McDermid

The Grave Tattoo by mystery novelist Val McDermid is one of the most unusual mysteries I’ve read in a very long time, perhaps the most unusual ever. The main narrative is based on a true story and a long-held rumor connected to that story. The actual crimes, when they occur, happen very late in the story. And while drawn very well and in great detail, it’s difficult to muster sympathy, or empathy, for any of the characters. 

That said, the story is so well done that you’ll read it to the end.

 

Jane Gresham is a university lecturer in London, specializing in William Wordsworth and the Romantic poets. Her parents and brother live in the Lake Country – Wordsworth county – and that’s where Jane grew up. A long-held belief by people in the area concerns Wordsworth and a fellow school classmate, Fletcher Christian, he of Mutiny on the Bounty fame. The legend is that Christian returned to England, made contact with Wordsworth, and Wordsworth wrote down Christian’s story and transformed it into a poem, one never found. 

 

Jane is ambitious; she’s seen a hint in a misfiled letter in the archives as the Wordsworth Museum in Grasmere, and she knows that if she can find it, her career is set. As it is, she has to hold down two jobs to make ends meet and live in a council house in London. She’s been “adopted” by a 13-year-old girl named Tennille who lives there as well; the girl hates school but loves poetry. Her mother is dead; she’s being raised by an aunt. Her father is rumored to be the gangster who runs all the illegal activities in the council housing project.

 

Then a “bog man” is discovered, a body found in the peat bogs common in the Lake country and preserved. This one is about 200 years old and bears tattoos common in the South Sea Islands. Jane, and others, think it may well be Fletcher Christian. She convinces her university boss to let her search for the Wordsworth manuscript and returns home. Then things get really interesting. Jane’s not the only one looking for the lost manuscript. And people begin to die.

 

Val McDermid

If there’s a characteristic common to all of the characters in the story, it’s ambition, and often unbridled ambition. Jane wants to make her name. Her brother Matthew wants to get some of the credit; he and Jane aren’t on good terms. Jane’s former boyfriend is deceitful. The forensic anthropologist investigating the bog man wants to make her name, too. No one really stops to wonder at the ruthlessness masked and sometimes shown to elderly people who might know something, or some the barely legal activities the characters engage in. Even 13-year-old Tennille is on the run for trying to cover up a crime. 

 

Yet The Grave Tattoo is so compelling that you continue to read on. Is there a manuscript? Will it be found? Is the bog man Fletcher Christian? And who’s killing people? Like I said, it’s an unusual mystery story.

 

A native of Scotland, McDermid attended St. Hilda’s College in Oxford and spent 14 years as a journalist in Devon, Glasgow, and Manchester. Her first novel was published in 1987, and she left her journalism career in 1991 to write full-time. Her crime novels have sold more than 16 million copies worldwide and been translated into 40 languages. She lives in Manchester and Edinburgh. The Grave Tattoo was originally published in 2006.

It Was a Marvelous Year: “The Making of Poetry” by Adam Nicholson

Adam Nicolson has written a story fully worthy of its famous protagonists. 

In June 1797, William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy rented a house for a year near Bristol in western England. After they had arrived at Alfoxton House, Samuel Taylor Coleridge found his way there (via a walking tour) for a visit. The visit would last a year; Coleridge rented a place nearby for himself and his family. The Wordsworths and Coleridge spent an enormous amount of time together, talking, inventing new poetic projects, and taking long walks through the Quantock Hills. 

What came out of that year was some of the most significant poetry in the English language: “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Christabel,” “Kubla Khan,” “Lyrical Ballads,” and “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.” Yet much more happened than the writing of great poems, astounding as they were (and are). The two poets emerged from that period with an understanding of themselves and of poetry as a vital force in life. By the fall of 1798, both Wordsworth and Coleridge would be set upon the courses that made them both famous.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

“Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey” by Frances Wilson

He was physically small, just under five feet tall. He was constantly in debt, hounded by his creditors, often shuttling between his family and an official sanctuary at Holyrood Abbey in Edinburgh. As a young man, he stalked William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He married well below his station, and while fathering nine children he would abandon his family for months at a time.

He was also one of the most brilliant men of his age – an age that specialized in producing brilliant men (and women). His essays are still considered among the best ever written. He created a literary sub-genre – the memoir of addiction. He invented a new kind of professional critic, creating the review-like essay (still a trademark of The New York Times Book Review, The London Review of Books, and numerous other publications).

He helped invent tabloid journalism. He had a direct influence on such authors as Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Dickens, Emily Bronte, Wilkie Collins, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Jorge Luis Borges, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Charles Baudelaire, Nikolai Gogol, William Burroughs, D.H. Lawrence, Oscar Wilde, George Orwell, Henrik Ibsen, Vladimir Nabokov, and Truman Capote, to mention a few. His influence even extended to the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) came of age in the Romantic era, was friends with Wordsworth and Coleridge and their families, and likely did more to shape the literary canon of the 19^th and 20^th centuries than any other writer. And he is the subject of a new biography, Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey, by Frances Wilson.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Painting: Thomas De Quincey, oil on canvas by Sir John Watson-Gordon (1846).

William Wordsworth: “The Prelude” and the Poetry of Revision

William Wordsworth’s long autobiographical poem The Prelude was written and developed over a period of 50 years. The final version was published when he died in 1850, and it is the version that American readers are most familiar with. But it is the 1805 version that British readers know, and apparently the reason is nothing more than personal preference. (Penguin has published a text that includes all four versions – 1798, 1799, 1805, and 1850.)

Wordsworth in old age

Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy moved to Dove Cottage in the Grasmere area of England’s Lake District in 1799. They actually walked the last several miles of their journey to arrive on foot – and give Wordsworth material and the experiences of wintertime in northern England for a poem (we don’t know what Dorothy may have truly thought about walking several miles in the snow).

This was the first home of their own that they actually lived in together. Orphaned as children, they and their brother John had been passed from family member to family member. If for no other reason, Dove Cottage was important to the Wordsworths as their own family home. And it was here that Wordsworth wrote a considerable portion of the poetry he’s famous for.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: Jerwood Centre at the Wordsworth Trust at Grasmere, in England’s Lake District.

William Wordsworth and the Language of the Common Man

I had studied some of William Wordsworth’s poems in high school, but it wasn’t until my English literature courses in college that I studied him seriously. Perhaps too seriously – our English lit professor for the period covering the Romantics through the Moderns had received her Ph.D. in the Romantic poets. Our tests and exams were often snippets of lines of poems – and we had to identify which poet had written them.

Wordsworth as a young man

When all else failed, I always guessed Wordsworth as the author; his poetry had been her particular passion. My guesses were about 85 percent right.

Perhaps it was that experience of studying him too closely that led me away (far away) from Wordsworth until just the past year. Studying the poetry of John Keats both before and after I participated in a Keats Walk in London led me back to Wordsworth.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: Dove Cottage in England’s Lake District, where Wordsworth lived from 1799 to 1808.