oh, no. more rhyming poetry and about love too. at times this reminded me of marilyn hacker except that hacker has something that minot does not: certainty? only two poems were truly memorable to me (“Bulbs” and “Dawn in a Chilmark Barn”) and otherwise the themes of places and lovers seemed uninspired. maybe her voice isn’t concrete or dynamic enough. there’s nothing weighing her words down for me.

the book does have a note on the type (monotype dante) though, and i love those.

directly after reading an alice munro book and the fantastic murakami collection, a moderately good group of short stories unfortunately suffers from comparative disappointment. this book had been recommended to me, and i just read and enjoyed jasmine a few weeks ago, but most of the stories here have a painful lack of development. the stories tend to rest too much on “comic” interactions between characters, which lack the necessary depth to feel like the stories go anywhere rather than sounding natural and lighthearted. everything ends up feeling very stagnant from start to finish. Mukherjee has wonderful insight on the lives in immigrants in the US, but sometimes this focus seems forced so that in the end her characters and narrative don’t breathe. also the book was published in 1988 and has a little too much of a pop culture feel as most of the stories sound dated in a brittle manner.

the last story, “the management of grief,” is almost an exception. from the viewpoint of a woman who has just lost her husband and two sons in a plane crash that appears to have been caused by a bomb, it follows her slow easing out of the shock of losing her family and, in many ways, her future. there’s this great part about her drug-induced calm:

I wonder if pills alone explain this calm. Not peace, just a deadening quiet. I was always controlled, but never repressed. Sound can reach me, but my body is tensed, ready to scream.

maybe i’ve overdone it with reading so many short stories at once, but i believe it’s time to get into a nice, thick novel.

hmm. i don’t really have anything to say about this, except that i’m really not into rhyming poetry. sometimes i wonder if i’d like poetry better if it were read out loud.

alice munro’s short stories are always so well-contained—rich with detail but no unnecessary words. as a collection, these stories are less linked than others of hers, but the stories have common themes to keep them together, most preditably relationships. munro’s style is so careful, subtly stunning. most times “nothing really happens,” but there’s so much going on. every so often there is a moment of such breathtaking vision into her characters but otherwise it’s possible to take for granted how well-crafted each one is.

i noticed this time that her stories are usually set in a somewhat archaic, but not very distant past—never quite “present.” only once in this did i feel that the story was painfully short and almost truncated. it’s basically constructed as a fragment with teasing references to what happens afterwards. but someone i was still able to accept it and feel satisfied.

ellipses create a whole different kind of space and cadence… not to mention this uncertainty of what might have been left out. there are two sections in this: “night winds” focuses on various people who have tried to make change; “daytrippers” follows the path of love. there the liberal use of ellipses makes the verse even more hesitant and charged.

i’ve been kind of hesitant on murakami—partially a wariness of the “genius” label often partnered with him. also because the few books i’ve read (Norwegian Wood and Sputnik Sweetheart) had these weird female characters that creeped me out. friends of mine who had read other works by him related having similar responses, so i didn’t go out of my way to read much of his work. though last summer i read Underground, his nonfiction book about the Tokyo gas attacks where i found even some of his commentary of interviewees gave me that aversion reaction. recently though, The New Yorker printed a story of his, Ice Man, which is a great story and absent of any creepy-feelings-inducing aspects. so i was excited to find this collection of six short stories, all with the common theme of the Kobe earthquake of 1995. now i’m wondering if i just happened to stumble upon the books with odd characters that made a pattern of creepiness, as i didn’t find any of that here. in fact, i was again endangering my proper subway disembarking and was very sad to be finished with the book. (even if the last story ended on a kind of over-sentimental note. though it does make sense in context.)

this showed up in the mail from amanda one day, totally unexpectedly. i had mentioned wanting to read a certain book of short stories by her that someone else recommended to me. this is a novel that apparently has the same themes of lives of exiles and immigrants living in the us. at first i couldn’t believe i was reading another totally non-linear novel, but halfway through i hit that point that not every book has. suddenly i couldn’t stop reading and was in danger of missing subway stops. the last half went so fast and then just ended—exactly how i’d been hoping it would end. i was so convinced it wouldn’t end in a way that would leave me satisfied that even though it ended how i was hoping it would, i still felt unsatisfied. so vague, but i’m not giving anything away. i’m so bad at ruining stories. and then i found The Middleman and Other Stories at the library today, somehow five or six copies have been hiding out away from the library since the summertime.

for poetry from the early ’70s, it’s nice how undated this book feels (aside for “Elegy” written for Janis Joplin after her death). perhaps because the copy i read had an amazingly early ’70s cover design, i kept thinking about this.

the perspectives make sense to me, and i like how the five sections are subtlely distinct, like five eras of a larger period time collected together but still vaguely divided. there’s a poem called “Waiting” which i attached on to as it has a lot to do with mail and a more obvious bit of humor than the rest of the book while retaining this sense of melancholy. i’m such a sucker for mail themes and cynical jokes.

(out of print, the isbn link is for a coming collection of her early poems.)