Review of A Woman in the Polar Night

I'm on Goodreads (Are you?) but I never blog my reviews. I don't know why not. But I love this book. Definitely one of the best and most surprising books I read last year. So I thought I'd splash it in this space, too. I wrote the review mid-read, but I still felt wonderful about it when I finished. In fact, I really really loved the ending. Quiet, deep close to a quiet, deep book. It never went out of print in Germany. I'm on a personal quest to revive stateside interest in it. Read it! Read it!

***

Why had I not heard of this book? I saw it in Tin House, in a feature on forgotten great books, and was skeptical, but got it from the library.

From sentence one, I've been hooked. It's nonfiction, written in the 1950s by an Austrian woman who followed her husband to the Arctic to stay with him in a hunting hut for a year. Her descriptions of travel and the scenery are stunning without being melodramatic. And she's causing me to have the deepest thoughts I've probably ever had on what it means to do housework, to be a housewife, a role she steps into with humor (cleaning bearded seal entrails from your doorstep, anyone?) and a stunning and almost unbelievable acceptance. Don't get me wrong: it's not a book that's ABOUT housewifery (yes, that's a word, says me), but that's what it's causing me to think of: the roles we step into, the roles we want or think we want to step into, and what it means when you strip away absolutely everything else and focus those roles and the attendant relationships down to a 10 X 10 hut in the middle of nowhere.

The writing is gorgeous. (Even my husband, who is the pickiest man alive when it comes to books, read the first few pages (I wouldn't let him have it for longer than that ...) and said it was clearly very good writing and made for good reading.) It feels like it's been awhile since I've had a book I longed for all through the day while I attended to less charming tasks, but this is a book like that. I want to stop people on the street and tell them to read it--it's that good, so far.

A Poem by Ms. Millay

EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY [1892–1950]

Wild Swans

I looked in my heart while the wild swans went over.
And what did I see I had not seen before?
Only a question less or a question more;
Nothing to match the flight of wild birds flying.
Tiresome heart, forever living and dying,
House without air, I leave you and lock your door.
Wild swans, come over the town, come over
The town again, trailing your legs and crying!

This is lovely.

Am perhaps beginning a love affair with TED, as in TED Talks. 

The whole talk by Elizabeth Gilbert is great, but this was particularly lovely:

"I had this encounter recently where I met the extraordinary American poet Ruth Stone, who's now in her 90s, but she's been a poet her entire life and she told me that when she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields, and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. And she said it was like a thunderous train of air. And it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And she felt it coming, because it would shake the earth under her feet. She knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, "run like hell." And she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. And other times she wouldn't be fast enough, so she'd be running and running and running, and she wouldn't get to the house and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it and she said it would continue on across the landscape, looking, as she put it "for another poet." And then there were these times -- this is the piece I never forgot -- she said that there were moments where she would almost miss it, right? So, she's running to the house and she's looking for the paper and the poem passes through her, and she grabs a pencil just as it's going through her, and then she said, it was like she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it. She would catch the poem by its tail, and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. And in these instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact but backwards, from the last word to the first."

Poem for Today, in Regards to Observation as a Form of Prayer

I've been meaning and meaning to post something about blossoms here, but my camera and I are still negotiating the easiest way to get pictures from it to me, so I'm stalled. In the meantime, here's a lovely little one by Mary Oliver which is in regards to summer, not spring, but nevertheless reflects how I feel lately, and how I want to feel. Hat tip to Poetry 180.

The Summer Day
Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

A Wee Green Poem for a Green Day

from Kay Ryan

(i had to read it three times. then it made me feel weepy.)


Green Behind the Ears

I was still slightly
fuzzy in shady spots
and the tenderest lime.
It was lovely, as I
look back, but not
at the time. For it is
hard to be green and
take your turn as flesh.
So much freshness
to unlearn.



Google book link: here.

Oh My Beautiful

I read a lot for this new job. Not all of it pleasant, but some of it is.

Just came across the most lovely, moving story. David Means' The Secret Goldfish. Read it, if you have a spare moment and want to read something deliciously good, if sad.

(Someday I want to write a post about sad stuff--novels, stories--and try to figure out why I like it, why it doesn't make me sad, why it makes the heart swell instead. But that's another post. Note: this story isn't TOO sad, I don't think.)

P.S. Just unprivatized. Other blog will follow soon, I suspect. But I'll start here.

Alone in a Good Way

I keep meaning to post this bit of business from Kay Ryan, U.S. Poet Laureate and very smart lady. I bought an anthology called Poem in Your Pocket, put out by Academy of American Poets, edited by Elaine Beakley, with an introduction by Kay Ryan. The book's concept is sort of cool: the pages are held together at the top like a notepad so you can tear the poems out easily and carry them around with you. In, like, your pocket. Get it?!

Okay, anyway, maybe it's a touch heavy-handed or cute, but I dig it. And the truth is, although there are some good poems here, I bought the book because of Ryan's short, delicious intro, which says this astonishing thing. I read it in the bookstore, and stood at the table holding the book, jaw dropped and the room ever-so-slightly buzzing and spinning with the truth of it:

"On some level poems can, of course, do good works and bind us together. Everybody will tell you that, but I'm never very interested. I'm convinced, rather, that poems bind us apart. They disconnect us from that pestering illusion that we are almost connecting to the world.

Oh, what can that mean? Well, we are alone, and poems make us feel more alone. But wait, I don't mean "alone" in the bad way, what we feel when we know that spending all the money in the world isn't going to keep the shimmer on life; I mean "alone" in the good way.

Alone in the sense of experiencing inside yourself a cascading series of exquisite discriminations and connections which leave you in the fullest possible possession of your self while simultaneously providing the most intimate escape from self, as though the twisted double helixes of your secret code got some blessed breathing room from each other for a minute.

And strangely enough, it is during the private murmured conversation between the poem and the reader, both agreeing that the world cannot be known or contacted, that it is."

Truly.

What I Told My Students About Reading

In my syllabus, for the Into to Lit course I'm teaching. I think I'm going to expand it into a longer sort of lecture and handout, but I was pleased with what I said so far. I prayed before I started working on it, and I think He helped me say what I meant, what I've been trying to say since I started teaching. Not that this is particularly profound, but it's what I mean.


A Note on Reading: Reading is hard work. One of my hopes for the class is that you’ll enjoy it, but the best way to enjoy it is to work hard at it. All semester we’ll be practicing reading slowly and carefully with the idea that these habits will rub off on the way you read in general. Take notes in the margins, ask questions, get in the habit of putting yourself in the character’s shoes, be both generous and critical when you evaluate their choices, laugh when it’s funny, cry when it’s sad (if you’re the crying sort), pay attention to the feeling you get when something is beautiful or true. For me that feels like a literal, small swelling of the heart.