Paul Muldoon, _Howdie-Skelp_

AS DID EVERY previous Muldoon collection, Howdie-Skelp ends with a long poem. "Plaguey Hill" is a heroic crown of sonnets no less, mainly, but not exclusively, about COVID and the lockdown of spring 2020 (as "Encheiresin Naturae," the heroic crown of sonnets in Muldoon's previous collection, Frolic and Detour, was mainly, but not exclusively, about the 1916 Easter Rising). 

That's not the only long poem here, though. Howdie-Skelp's generous 176 page count includes three other poems longer than ten pages, all of them bristling with classic Muldoonian earmarks: formal ingenuity, bone-dry wit, a boatload of allusions, and slow-building emotional charge.

If one was a boy in the 1950s, as Muldoon and I were, one devoted a good deal of one's attention and imaginative energy to Westerns, so I enjoyed the way cowboys, "Indians," and the landscape of Monument Valley circulated through "American Standard," which not only revives the Muldoon aleatory picaresque of such early poems as "The More a Man Has, The More a Man Wants" but also seems to be spoof-celebrating the centenary of Eliot's The Waste Land ("Shanty. Shanty. Shanty.").

"23 Banned Poems" might not count as a long poem, comprised as  it is of twenty-tree short ones, but their thematic cohesion could be said to give it a single identity. Perhaps in response to the conservatives around the USA who are storming school boards insisting that all books with sexual content  be removed from school libraries, each of the twenty-three poems describes an Old Master painting in which sexuality is well to the foreground (lots of paintings of Susanna and the peeping elders) or going on in a corner somewhere (Bosch) or perhaps in the eye of the beholder (a few paintings of the Last Supper). Have your phone handy so you can inspect the paintings before or while reading the poems. Muldoon is at his saltiest now that he has passed 70, a bit like the Yeats of "Words for Music Perhaps" or the "Three Bushes" poems.

"The Triumph" is a 9-section elegy in terza rima (lots of terza rima in this volume) for the late Irish poet Ciaran Carson. As befits an Ulsterman's tribute to another Ulsterman, emotions are kept on a short leash here, but as the memories and Irish phrases cycle through, the emotions begin to mount nonetheless, going all the deeper for not being directly said.

That's the thing about Muldoon. Virtually every page reveals his fascination (obsession?) with poetic form, and we tend (lazily) to associate devotion to form to emotional dryness, chilliness, sterility. Not in Muldoon. Just try "Salonica," the poem in which the word "howdie-skelp" occurs (the dust jacket flap helpfully glosses "howdie-skelp" as "the slap in the face a midwife gives a newborn").  It's about passing the scene of an auto accident--"That young woman's body sprawled by the side of the road" is how it begins--and it's a kind of villanelle on steroids. But dry? Chilly? Sterile? No. As with the Carson elegy, it's tightly cinched but devastating.

Juan Rulfo, _Pedro Páramo_, translated by Douglas J. Weatherford

BLURBS FROM BORGES, García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Susan Sontag...how is it I have not already read this? Well, now I have, and it's easy to see why it has the reputation it does. First published in 1955, it predates the famous Boom by a decade or so, but it has the earmarks of that renaissance: the grit of actuality somehow combined with the otherness of a dream, the atmosphere of a myth grounded firmly in history.

The unnamed narrator is looking for his father, Pedro Páramo, who like the senior Hamlet, is dead but seems to be still in charge. We get glimpses of moments in his rise from hardscrabble urchin to village boss as the narrator collects information. Páramo's rise coincides with the era of Porfirio Diaz, and there are hints that the Mexican Revolution has a hand in his toppling, but the prevailing hallucinatory, even supernatural atmosphere kept me from being altogether certain about any detail.

I read most of this short book (120-some pages in this new translation published in 2023) one night when I couldn't get to sleep, which turned out to be ideal circumstances in which to read it. As I read, the sun felt hot, the ground underfoot hard, but I was moving in a ghost world, vivid but intangible, the tale unrolling with the inevitability of a dream. An eerie, one of a kind fiction.

Kate Briggs, _The Long Form_ (3)

 IF ANYONE EVER asks me what I think is the best 21st century novel so far, I may well go with this one.

What I wrote about this novel back in December still goes, to wit:

(1) As its title suggests, it is a novel that reflects deeply and insightfully on the form of the novel itself. It connects to the modern novel of a century ago by being set in a single day, like Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway, and to the novel of two-and-a-half centuries ago through protagonist Helen’s reading of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, another novel that devotes much space to the topic of the form to which it belongs. Briggs knows her narrative theory—she has translated Barthes—and spreads it on generously, but the novel’s frequent infusions of theory never seem pretentious or gratuitous; rather, they are consistently fresh, illuminating, and attuned to fictional context in which they occur. 

(2) That The Long Form is interested in what novels do and how they do it feels right because it does something novels have not done with great frequency: depict the relationship of mother and infant daughter. Compared to the father-son relationship, minutely scrutinized in Oedipus, Hamlet, Ulysses, Infinite Jest, and a few thousand other classics, the mother-daughter relationship has gone relatively under-described. The undisputed classics (Sense and Sensibility, Little Women) tend to be more from the perspective of the daughters than that of the mother. Morrison’s Beloved and Emecheta’s Joys of Motherhood memorably take that perspective, but it’s still a short shelf. The Long Form could be the beginning of a redressing of the balance. 

Although The Long Form does briefly and bravely take the perspective of the six-week-old Rose (drawing on some suggestions from D. W. Winnicott), for most of its 400-some pages it adheres closely to the point of view of new mother Helen as she nurses Rose, takes her out to the park in a stroller, assembles a mobile, and performs similar new mother activities. And I kept thinking: why have I never read about this in a novel before? Mothering a newborn is one of humankind’s oldest and most universal activities—why are literary depictions relatively scarce,  and why do they leave out as much as they do? As the novel shows again and again, the mother and a newborn are a complex and dynamic world, worthy an epic or two. And in some respects they are even a world sufficient unto themselves—Helen gets some welcome help from friend Rebba, but we never find out who Rose’s father is, and no thought of him crosses Helen’s mind.

(3) The Long Form scarcely has a plot and nimbly demonstrates what a dead weight plot usually is. If, on Helen’s walk with Rose in the park, she notices a strange man, that man does not turn out to be a stalker, or a murderer, or in possession of a flashdrive he is going to pass to a spy or a journalist, or any of the other possibilities engineered to keep people turning pages. In The Long Form, any number of Chekhovian guns never get fired. And is just that fidelity to plain, familiar experience that kept me turning pages, wanting more. The plain and familiar has a fascination and glory all its own, its own revelations and transfigurations, exemplified here by Rose’s first smile.

A big basket of kudos to the Dorothy Project for publishing this and for everything else they do.

Haruki Murakami, _A Wild Sheep Chase_, trans. Alfred Birnbaum

I WAS GIVEN this by two different people sixteen years apart, which seems a strong hint from the universe that I ought to read it. I had already read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and enjoyed it...so why not?

Back in 2012, the New York Times Book Review published a cartoon titled "Haruki Murakami Bingo," in which the player could claim a square whenever an item like "mysterious woman" or "ear fetish" or "old jazz record" turned up in a Murakami novel. As the friend who was the second person to give me the book as a present  remarked, A Wild Sheep Chase would make one a quick winner in Haruki Murakami Bingo. It has everything.

It's 1970. A Tokyo advertising man in his later 20s is adrift--his marriage is breaking up, he is weary of his career, he is suffering from a vague anomie--when it is unexpectedly given an assignment he must fulfill, or else: find a sheep born with a black star on its hindquarters. 

Joining forces with a mysterious woman with beautiful ears with whom he has frequent and robust sex (three squares right there), he pursues a series of leads to the northernmost regions of Japan's northernmost island, Hokkaido, where he...

...well, let's just say it works out. The details of the plot seem less important, less Murakami-esque, than the atmosphere of surreal noir dread peppered with Japanese historical and cultural references.

Another friend once remarked to me that the Japanese have a predilection for re-creating the creations of other cultures (Chinese poetry, Scotch whiskey, American noir), and the re-creations moreover and mysteriously both achieve uncanny fidelity and remain resolutely and unmistakably Japanese. It's a neat trick, and Murakami is a master of it.

A. M. Homes, The Unfolding_

BLURBS FROM GARY Shytengart, Nathan Hill, Michael Chabon, Salman Rushdie, Phil Klay, and Jonathan Lethem--we are obviously dealing with a "writer's writer" here, but it would be a boost for the republic for this novel to find a wider audience. It's a perceptive analysis of our current malaise. 

The Unfolding presents itself as the view from Bohemian Grove, where the very wealthy hang out with the very powerful and kick around ideas about how to keep the wealth and the power under their capable management.

The novel's main character (last name is Hitchens but typically referred to in the novel simply as the Big Guy) is present at a special party for major McCain donors on the night of the 2008 election, and is so shocked and dismayed at the outcome that he decides he has to do something. He assembles a group of like-minded and similarly wealthy and influential men, their object "to get back to our roots, to what makes us strong." As one of them puts it, "America is in the crapper and we need to do something about it. We're not going to stand by and wait to see what happens; we're going to make something happen and we need someone to put that idea out there in front of people." The novel ends on Inauguration Day, 2009, with a big dinner at which the group, now named the "Forever Men," is officially launched.

The novel's great insight, I'd say, is that while Propertied White Men (PWM) love to praise the Constitution and the founding fathers, they do so out of a sense  that the Constitution was drafted to preserve and protect the interests of PWM. When the Constitution turns out, in the fullness of time, to have the potential of constraining those interests or taking into account other interests, the PWM begin to see the Constitution as broken, no longer doing its job, in need of "extraordinary measures," as one of them puts it.  "It will look like a natural occurrence, a call for security, a return  to our core values. That's our sweet spot," as another one says.

Serious as it is, the novel also has some outrageous satirical humor (reminiscent of Dr. Stangelove in that regard), a lot of it about male posturing--from that angle, the many scenes of the Forever Men's meetings are as hilarious as they are scary. 

We also get a deep look, thanks to the Big Guy's interactions with his wife (at the Betty Ford Center) and daughter (at a tony finishing school in northern Virginia) that gender can make a big difference in how white privilege works. The "M" in PWM is always under scrutiny in  the novel, and among the novel's slier touches is that one of the Forever Men, a "confirmed bachelor," in in the closet.

The bone-deep anxieties within white privilege may be the novel's other core insight. It presents the election of Obama as a psychic disturbance in the GOP that could boil up into a major breakdown, which maybe it has. Would MAGA have happened without the election of Obama? 

Michael Palmer, _Sun_

 ANYONE OUT THERE remember the golden age of the North Point Press in the middle-to-late 1980s? Evan Connell, Guy Davenport, James Salter…it ran out of gas about 1990, but what a run, including this collection from Michael Palmer. I recently ran across some praise of this, and now I can’t remember where, but it sounded worth searching for, and lo and behold, when the interlibrary loan item arrived it was from the library of my alma mater. A good sign.

I had encountered poems by Palmer before in Douglas Messerli’s anthology From the Other Side of the Century and Paul Hoover’s Norton anthology Postmodern American Poetry without their especially registering on me, but this collection definitely worked for me.

Here is a good short excerpt from “Baudelaire Series”:

The secret remains in the book
It is a palace
It is a double house 

It is a book you lost
It is a place from which you watch
the burning of your house 

I have swallowed this blank
this libel of shores
nights that like the book are lost

The secret seems both securely contained—in a book that is like a palace or house, or inside us, our having swallowed it—but also vanished—the book lost, the house burned. We have it and we have lost it. The poem has a relatively definite referent—the secret— but of course we don’t know what it is, so the word “secret” points candidly and unambiguously into a borderless mist. The poem hollows out its assertions even as it makes them.

Most of the book is like that—something is happening here, but we don’t know what it is, do we, Mr. Jones? The vertigo of such gestures is exactly what my friends who don’t like poetry don’t like about it, but it’s exactly what I go to poetry for. 

Something about what Palmer pays attention and finds worth mentioning, something about the unspoken, unfathomable logic with image follows image works for me. So thank you, whoever it was who praised Michael Palmer's Sun.

Jeff Sharlet, _The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War_

 I DIDN'T READ all of this, but I did read its longest chapter, also titled "The Undertow," which at 120 pages amounts to a substantial portion of the book.

In this chapter, Sharlet goes to Sacramento to attend and report on a memorial rally for Ashli Babbitt, the military veteran and Q-Anon enthusiast who was among those attacking the Capitol on January 6 and was shot and killed by a member of the Capitol Police. Sharlet collects some straight biographical information on Babbitt but is perhaps more interested in how MAGA forces went about shaping her into a martyr, even though the raw material was not that promising. This part of the chapter kept making me think of Horst Wessel.

The larger part of the chapter, though, is about Sharlet's drive back to the East Coast, a long highway journey with frequent stops to talk to people about our deepening national polarization, cultural and political. As a journalist, Sharlet is automatically suspect in the eyes of most of the people he talks to, but he seems genuinely to want to know where they are coming from and to report of them fairly--even those that seem definitely around the bend, like  the preacher who is convinced Hillary Clinton was put to death years ago.

The most compelling aspect of the  chapter, I'd say, is its "road movie" quality. The highway system is rendered as a region of its own--inside the United States, part of the United States, but semi-autonomous, a republic within the republic, deeply American but ticking to its own clock, living by its own code. To be on the highways for days on end is to become unmoored, and that unmooring becomes part of Sharlet's account. We no longer have our familiar bearings, no longer have much certainty about what the truth is. We're tethered to reality still--Sharlet needs to get back to Boston to get his heart medicine prescription refilled--but lightly tethered, and a gust of wind might slip the cord and land us in an America where everyone we meet is a Flannery O'Connor character in a Trump t-shirt...and they are in charge.