Mathias Svalina, _Wastoid_

 MAY AS WELL devote my 1001st pots to Mr. Svalina as well. I strongly suspect that people will still be reading him a hundred years from now—my Svalina collection (currently nine items) will be housed in the rare book room of a university library, their pages turned by gloved hands under soft lights…that is, if the humanities survive, if universities survive, if libraries survive, if reading survives, none of which I ought to take for granted. Maybe nothing will be left but, as with Sappho, a few priceless, cherished fragments.

Wastoid was published in 2014, but I wondered as I read whether some of the poems were composed during Svalina’s time here in Lincoln, Nebraska, in the middle 00’s. The poems refer to such local landmarks as Wilderness Park and the Sunken Gardens, and the volume’s title pays homage to a notable local band of the era, Wasteoid (with an “e,” n.b.). 

154 prose poems, each titled “Wastoid,” most with an opening sentence about love or “my lover” or “my beloved,” after which just about any topic at all might come up, much as in the dreams of the Dream Delivery Service. It’s as though the Songs of Songs was written by Oulipo.

My lover is so sincere. When he enters a room, fathers unpop their boys’ collars & conceal their comb-overs. Bad art hides from him. Each day is an elaborate eulogy. Everything he does or is deserves an encore. I am an unfinished statue of Atlas, the earth never added to my shoulders.

Hard to explain, and I am not going to try, how poems as random as these end by seeming funny, or poignant, or melancholy, or wise, or all four at once, but so they do.

The final poem in Wastoid ends with the sentence, “O my lover, cunning lover, feeble lover, do not fear, fire cannot burn you.”  The book’s publisher decided to put this sentence, all by itself, on the back of the book in a 17th-century-looking font. Much as I admire the sentence, I imagine people reading it, saying “Awww,” and buying the book only to be non-plussed by the references to GQ calendars, Vin Diesel, and Au Bon Pain. But maybe I underestimate them.

I am retired from teaching, but the book got me fantasizing about a course in which we began with Sappho and the Song of Songs, moved on to Rumi and Mirabai, took in Petrarch, Shakespeare, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, maybe Berryman, then maybe Margaret Millner’s Couplets, then this. 

Would they love it or want to lynch me? 

In a hundred years, they will love it.

Mathias Svalina, _America at Play_

 THIS IS MY 1000th post, I believe. So I am pleased to be writing about an excellent book by one of my favorite living poets, Mathias Svalina. 

The anodyne title of America at Play is perfectly chosen, given how unnerving, sometimes terrifying the book is. It's a handbook with instructions for playing several dozen invented games for children--not the old familiar ones, like "Red Rover, Red Rover" or "Freeze Tag," but "Everything Costs $20," "Bury the Shards of the Broken Light Bulb Where No One Will Ever Find Them,"  and "Massacre." 

The strength of the book lies, first, in its insight into the American assumption that even even childhood fun should be put to good purpose by incorporating valuable life lessons; second, in its insight into what life lessons would best prepare a child for its eventual entry into the devouring maw of capital. 

Take "Cat and Rat." Two children are chosen for the titular roles, and  the rest form a circle, doing everything they can to help the Rat and frustrate the Cat. "When the Cat catches the Rat it makes the children angry. No child likes the Cat. But one child must be the Cat." A lesson best learned early!

That, from p. 15, is dark enough, but eventually get to the "War Games," such as "World War," "for 6,600,000,000 players or more," in which "every child is at war with every other child."

Kudos to Trident Press of Boulder, Colorado, for bringing this out.

Catherine Grace Katz, _The Daughters of Yalta: The Churchills, Roosevelts, and Harrimans: A Story of Love and War_

 KATZ HAD A nice book idea here. The Yalta conference, as you probably know, was a summit meeting among the Allies in February 1945, an attempt to agree on certain questions about the final phases of the Second World War and plan for the post-war world. Stalin was present--on his home turf, as Yalta in on the Crimean peninsula (apparently he would not have agreed to any site that involved his leaving the USSR). FDR was there, even though he was in poor health (he died a couple of months later). Churchill was there. And a few other key players as well, e.g., Averell Harriman, US ambassador to the Soviet Union. And Alger Hiss--but that's another story.

Turns out the daughters of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Harriman were there, too, with non-negligible roles, as they were in close attendance on their fathers and serving as confidantes, sounding boards, assistants--not necessarily in official roles, but still close to the center of things.

The Yalta conference was historically important in a number of ways, but using the perspective of the daughters, who were outside and inside at the same time, so to speak, gives the book the grain of a novel, full of personal detail and the stuff of lived experience, at the same time that it tells the story of weighty and consequential high-level negotiations. 

The Yalta conference was not a great diplomatic success for the West. FDR was so keen on getting Stalin's promise of cooperation in the about-to-be-created United Nations that he gave Stalin much more leeway with Poland and eastern Europe than was wise, much to Churchill's dismay. Judging from the epilogue, the post-Yalta lives of the daughters were not so happy, either. 

The book is certainly a success, though--highly focused on a period about two weeks long, but deeply revealing of the era and of its epochal war.

Katherine Chen, _Joan_

 THIS WON'T DO, for me at least. I have a longtime fascination with Joan of Arc, so this novel caught my eye at the bookstore. The cover was off-putting--a glamorous model in a chainmail coif--but there was a ringingly positive blurb from Hilary Mantel, so it seemed worth a shot.

Turns out Chen is really interested in Joan only as a fighter and military tactician. Chen's Joan does not hear voices, for instance. She's pious, but not a mystic.

She is not particularly patriotic, either. She fights less for king and France than out of a desire to avenge an attack on her hometown (this did happen) and the rape of her sister (this, so far as anyone knows, did not happen).

Chen's novel effectively ends with Joan's capture--during which, according to Chen, she kills a few Burgundians and then bites the Duke of Burgundy (who was not present at her capture, actually). 

Joan's trial and martyrdom--in the course of which, it seems fair to say, she was at least as brave and strong as she was in any battle, and without the benefit of armor, weapon, or companions--is entirely omitted from the novel.

This is Joan? If you like the idea of Joan of Arc as Xena the Warrior Princess, maybe. 

Sanora Babb, _Whose Names Are Unknown_

AMAZING BACKSTORY TO this novel.

I assume you are familiar with John Steinbeck and his novel The Grapes of Wrath. I always thought of it as a good counter-example to regrettable appropriations like Jeanine Cummins's American Dirt. Steinbeck was not an Oklahoma hardscrabble farmer driven by dust storms to become an exploited migrant laborer in California, yet by telling that story in The Grapes of Wrath, he gripped the conscience of the nation and created an American classic. Everyone wins, right? But then I learned about Sanora Babb.

Sanora Babb was, indeed, from an Oklahoma farm family, and she did move to California in 1929. Later in the 1930s, she did volunteer work in a migrant labor camp, where she began collecting stories and making notes, with a view towards writing a book. The camp’s manager, Tom Collins, was so impressed by the notes that he asked her to make a copy of them for another writer who had been visiting the camp. That writer was John Steinbeck.

Babb did draft a novel and sent it to Random House in early 1939. They were interested, but before Babb could revise her book, Viking published The Grapes of Wrath, which instantly became a bestseller. Random House decided that the book-buying public would not go for two novels about Okies in California in the same year, and so turned down Babb’s book, despite their initial interest. She tried several other publishers, but without success. The lane, so to speak, was occupied. Her novel, titled Whose Names Are Unknown, was finally published in 2004, when she was 97. She died the next year.

 Is the novel any good? Actually, yes. It's very good. Convincing characters, effective evocations of place, excellent prose, swift pacing, moral urgency...it's excellent, even.

Is it as good as The Grapes of Wrath? Tough question. I would certainly say it has aged better than The Grapes of Wrath. The Tolstoyan ambition of Steinbeck's novel feels creaky these days, while Babb's novel, at just over 200 pages, feels just right. She keeps the exposition minimal and instead zooms in on a few crucial episodes. Steinbeck often seems to be observing the Joads from the outside, but Babb takes us right into the center of the Dunnes--we get a sense of their marriage, their relationship to their kids, their relationships with their friends. They seem real rather than an archetype. We get a lot more of women's perspectives in Babb than we do in Steinbeck, and even some of the Black workers' perspective when the strike comes (I can't remember whether Steinbeck addressed this at all--Babb knows that the crackdown on the strikers is going to fall heaviest on the black workers.) It provides much more explanation of what caused the Dust Bowl than Steinbeck does, and gives a much more immediate sense of living with an environmental disaster.

All in all, if I were to choose just one of these novels for a syllabus, I would go with Babb. In a lot of ways, it seems like it could have been written recently. It's not a classic, of course--but I could see it becoming one.

Timothy Donnelly, _Chariot_

 I REVIEWED THIS for a blog of much greater legitimacy than this one, so I will be brief: Donnelly is four books in after twenty years, and not a dud yet. I'm not prepared to say this is actually better than The Problem of the Many, but it may be, and as an extended exploration of a closed form (every poem, save one adaptation from the Irish, is in five four-line stanzas) it is unique in Donnelly's oeuvre. 

Besides being a thorough exploration of form, the book continues the engagement with public and political concerns that we saw in The Problem of the Many. The first of two poems titled "Chariot" hits upon a Donne-worthy conceit that captures the book's mindful relation to both poetry and the world: the poem is the chair that carries the world as the world is the chair that carries the poem. 

New books from Donnelly and Robyn Schiff in the same year? Hail, 2023, for bringing us these gifts amongst the lumps of tsuris.

P. G. Wodehouse, _Life with Jeeves_

 THIS SOLID PENGUIN volume from 1981 brings together The Inimitable Jeeves (1923), Very Good, Jeeves! (1930), and Right Ho, Jeeves (1934), all from right in the sweet spot of the Jeeves novels. In the post-WW II Jeeves novels, the unreality and anachronism of Bertie-world is so pronounced that not even Jeeves quite redeems things. The Jeeves novels of the 1920s and 1930s are unreal and anachronistic enough, God knows--no shell-shocked WWI veterans, no General Strike, no Slump, no rise of fascism (though The Code of the Woosters has a telling satire on Oswald Mosley)--but Bertie Wooster's circumstances and problems do not seem quite as far-fetched in the interwar novels as they do in the postwar novels.

Summary is pointless--in each novel, the obtuse upper-class twit par excellence Bertie Wooster blunders his way into some sticky mess from which he is extricated by the masterly intelligence and voluminous knowledge of his valet, Jeeves. Bertie, whose intelligence and knowledge are relatively circumscribed, nonetheless makes an excellent narrator, vivid and hilarious, with an unmistakable stylistic verve.

I found myself wondering whether anyone had thought to apply Hegel's master-slave dialectic to Bertie and Jeeves. It turns out at least one person has: Kirby Olson in "Bertie and Jeeves at the End of History: P. G. Wodehouse as Political Scientist," published in the journal Humor in 1996. Beneath the hilarity, Kirby writes in his abstract, "lurks a sustained political thinking which has surprising similarities with  leftist social theory." Wodehouse does not get much credit as a member of the revolutionary literary vanguard, but it is high time he did. W