EXTRAORDINARILY FITTING THAT this strange and beautiful book has such strange and beautiful illustrations--the "grid poems" of Hrabanus Maurus (c. 780-856 CE). And thank you, New Directions, for including Mary Wellesley's note.
The angels and saints of Weinberger's new book seem worlds away from the dispatches from Trump-land he has been publishing in the London Review of Books in recent years, but they share a kind of deliberate dryness, a willingness to let things speak for themselves.
For instance, this from the LRB of June 4, 2020:
On his first trip in many weeks, the president flies to Arizona to inspect a Honeywell plant manufacturing masks, which he tours not wearing a mask while loudspeakers on the factory floor blare "Live and Let Die" by Guns N' Roses.
And this from the new book:
Eskil
(Sweden, d. c. 1038)
East of the village of Tuna, he disrupted a blood sacrifice, urging them to repent, and they stoned him to death.
That's the Weinbergian note--perfect abstention from commentary, while the right words are dropped in so well-suited an arrangement that commentary would be superfluous.
Now and then a high-frequency irony is just about audible (in the lives of Magdalena of the Cross, Philomena, and Thérèse of Lisieux, for instance), but by and large we are at some degree zero exactly equidistant from both G. K. Chesterton and Voltaire.
How does he do it?
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