I’m Reading

DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP BY WILLA CATHER

I read Cather’s novel across July and August (I read so slowly). I actively miss it. There are two mules in it, named Contento and Angelica; like the main characters, Father Latour and Father Vaillant, they spend their lives together (though in the end the human characters go their separate, destined ways).

Nothing happens, but everything happens, as the two priests live out their mission and their friendship in the new American New Mexico Territory, which of course is the old Indigenous Southwest:

They stopped just west of the pueblo a little before sunset…two large communal houses, shaped like pyramids, gold-colored in the afternoon light, with the purple mountain lying just behind them. Gold-colored men in white burnouses came out on the stairlike flights of roofs, and stood still as statues, apparently watching the changing light on the mountain. There was a religious silence over the place; no sound at all but the bleating of goats coming home through clouds of golden dust.

Honestly I nearly cried when I was done. Every description like a setting sun. Passage after passage like folded drape, unfolding. As in a very old theater, when the velvet cloth falls.

FROM “LIFE STUDIES: SEARCHING FOR LOWELL AND HARDWICK IN MAINE” BY ZACHARY FINE, IN THE POINT, MARCH 2021

Reading Hardwick is like walking in a gilded, smoke-filled room, the light barely revealing the furniture. With Lowell, it’s all clarity and suddenness—a succession of bright images.

I thought that maybe if I read them slowly, lines consumed one clause at a time, rolled around in the mouth, some written down and memorized, that maybe I could be pulled into the particular mood and logic of their writing, that by the time I reached Maine, I would already be there—in Hardwick and Lowell’s Maine.

In his poems, Maine is a place of essences and purities, where things are more than they are. Water is more than water, white is more than white, salt is more than salt.

Here too in Maine things bend to the wind forever.
After two years away, one must get used
to the painted soft wood staying bright and clean,
to the air blasting an all-white wall whiter,
as it blows through curtain and screen
touched with salt and evergreen

In Hardwick’s writing, it is a place of attractive surfaces—sun-dappled houses and spires and sloops—that conceal a dark inner core: loss, devastation and brutal cold. The winter behind everything.

“Here, in Maine, every stone is a skull and you live close to your own death. Where, you ask yourself, where indeed will I be buried?”

ANOTHER LAND OF MY BODY BY RODNEY TERICH LEONARD

Last spring I had the pleasure of listening to Rodney Terich Leonard. Four Way Books published his Another Land of My Body in March, 2024.

There’s ample praise out there for Leonard’s language and imagery—”searing and caring,” per Dorothea Lasky.

But what arrests me most about these poems is their stops and starts. The whole collection has a paratactic, listening  nature, especially as read aloud by the poet (Leonard’s a brilliant reader who knows how to herd an audience into the sounds and silences of his work). But that also holds up beautifully in print, steering the reader down the page.

My favorite poem in the book is “Poverty,” a mostly very literally paratactic poem with a last line that really did stop my world for a long minute. I won’t give it away here. But from the  late middle:

You know what they say about each tub’s bottom.
Every child wonders why, but why?
Maw rhymes with claw—
My name rhymes with X
And the xylophone I play.

If Rodney Leonard is reading anywhere near you, make time. Go.

THE LOWLAND BY JHUMPA LAHIRI

In April, in New York, I went into a bookstore on Orchard Street on the Lower East Side and picked up Lahiri’s second novel (in a handsome, somehow perfectly dimensioned paperback edition) and stood there and read the opening sentences:

East of the Tolly Club, after Deshapran Sashmal Road splits in two, there is a small mosque. A turn leads to a quiet enclave. A warren of narrow lanes and modest middle-class homes.

Once, within this enclave, there were two ponds, oblong, side by side. Behind them was a lowland spanning a few acres.

After the monsoon, the ponds would rise so that the embankment built between them could not be seen. The lowland also filled with rain, three or four feet deep, the water remaining for a portion of the year.

I bought the book. I can remember nodding and thinking O yes in response to these sentences—it is their sober calm, maybe; the quality they have that’s somehow akin to beats on a resting line. I think I once told a tableful of students that reading Lahiri was like driving through ice cream; that is what I meant. Reading The Lowland I learned things—about the Naxalite movement in India, parenthood, and philosophy. But what’s most beautifully arresting  to me is the way it holds onto and surrounds the central image introduced here.

(The bookstore I wandered into was P&T Knitwear. The publisher of The Lowland in this edition is Vintage [2014]. I also bought a postcard of Jodie Foster in a red dress.)