During the lockdown for COVID-19,Angela Alaimo O’Donnelland her husband hunkered down in a small town just outside New York City. And she did what you might expect a poet to do. She wrote poems. She wrote her poems in an almost journal-like experience as she followed the trials and travails of the pandemic.
The result is Love in the Time of Coronavirus, a collection of 57 poems chronicling the advent of the virus, what happened, and how the lockdown conditions gradually eased. Like many poetry collections, this one is personal. Its title pays homage to the novel Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a story of another pandemic, another time, and another place.
Spencer, which may be a first or a last name, works in Singapore. He’s in his early 50s. His wife died some years before, and his children are grown and involved in their own careers. He’s more than restless; something is tugging him at the core of his being. Something that suggests there is more to life. Or should be.
He flies to Ireland, ostensibly to do some flyfishing, but more in the hope that he can get to the bottom of whatever it is that’s bothering him. Spencer will meet a number of good, kind people. He will meet a few villains, people out to rob him or who suspect his motives. And he will meet a dog named Shandy, an Irish terrier with a serious illness who escapes from his owner. Shandy has a job to do, and that job just may involve Spencer. For his part, Spencer feels compelled to find the dog, changing his travel plans and enlisting the help of a young food store clerk.
Douglas Solvie
My Irish Dog by Douglas Solvie begins slowly, but by about the third chapter, you’re hooked. The use of the planned robbery heightens the tension, and the plight of the sick Shandy (and an emotionally sick Spencer) opens the flow of empathy.
A native of Montana, Solvie has spent most of his adult life living and working in Japan. He currently lives in the state of Washington. My Irish Dog is his first novel, and is loosely based on Solvie’s personal experience, when he found a lost dog named Shandy during a flyfishing trip to Ireland.
Will the villains prevail in their robbery scheme? Will Spencer find Shandy? And will Spencer find himself? All becomes clear with this enchanting story of a man, a dog, and a bit of the Irish supernatural.
Some days, one reads what used to be called the news with a profound sense of sorrow and despair.
We had three years of alleged Russian collusion, which turned out to be what it was from the beginning – a disinformation campaign by the political opposition. (Consider that The New York Times and the Washington Postshared a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for national reporting on Russian collusion.) Then came 2020 and COVID-19, and anything a certain President said was immediately countered by our national news media, including the that the virus had escaped from the Chinese government lab in Wuhan. In retrospect, the reporting was so bad that The New York Times now admits that they blew it, and that a fundamental reassessment of media coverage needs to be undertaken. You think? Consider the possibility that Americans died because the national news media hated Donald Trump. Consider the proposition, too, that journalism is no longer practiced in the United States.
We live in strange academic times, times growing stranger daily. An English teacher celebrates the removal of Homer from her curriculum and Oxford’s Classics Department (Oxford!) considers removing Homer and Virgil. Now Princeton says you no longer need Greek or Latin to get a degree in Classics. We seem to be embracing the concept of a new Dark Ages, a time when a small handful of institutions will keep knowledge alive like their monastery predecessors.
It’s London, 1895. An Irish terrorist sets off a bomb at a dinner of Coldstream Guard officers at the Tower of London. Florence Nightingale arranges for several of her nurses to attend the victims in the hospital. She also arranges for Adelaide Carlyle West, now the mother of an infant daughter, to have a monitoring and administrative role. Adelaide is married to Matthew West, the curate at St. Dunstan’s Church in London’s East End. Her father is James Carlyle, the coroner at the London Hospital.
Detective John Jennings of Scotland Yard is investigating the bombing. The political pressure to find the terrorists is enormous. Jennings finds himself in the position of having to rely upon Adelaide and Matthew, not to mention James, for information, leads, and possible suspects. And one lead points clearly in the direction of an inside job – someone in the room may have planted the bomb.
David Field
And then, one by one, Nightingales, as the nurses are called, are being murdered. They’re all in the night shift. The newspapers begin to trumpet the possible return of Jack the Ripper, more to sell newspapers than because of any evidence. It takes a while for Jennings to understand, but Matthew and Adelaide finally convince him that there’s a connection between the bombing and the murders of the nurses.
Death Among the Nightingales by David Field is the fourth of four books in the Carlyle & West Victorian Mystery Series. The first is Interviewing the Dead, the second is Death Comes But Twice, and the third is Confronting the Invisible. Field has also written six historical novels set in Tudor England and eight novels in the Esther and Jack Enright Mystery Series. A native of Nottingham, England, he practiced and taught criminal law for his professional career. He now lives in Australia.
It’s an increasingly tense story, irrevocably building toward a dramatic climax. Adelaide and Matthew may get their villain, but the cost may be high.
Jean Toomer(1894-1967) was a writer bundled with a host of seeming contradictions. He was heralded as part of theHarlem Renaissancein the 1920s, but he never wanted to be considered a Black writer, preferring to be called an American writer. He changed his name at least twice; born Nathan Pinchback Toomer, his maternal grandfather called him Eugene after his father (also a Nathan) abandoned the family. When he began his writing career and for 20 years after, he used the name “Jean Toomer,” changing it again to Nathan Jean Toomer.
He wrote movingly of Black people, yet both of his parents were of mixed race. His mother’s family were free before the Civil War; his father was born into slavery but raised by his white grandfather. Toomer married twice, both wives were white. He seems never to have called himself either Black or white, saying that he was simply an American.
He wrote poetry, one work of fiction, and several non-fiction books, but it is his work of fiction for which he’s best known and remembered.
