Mary Oliver's A Poetry Handbook is a short (122 pp.) book, but useful to someone like me that hasn't really spent much time in poetry lately (or maybe ever). I picked it up to brush up on some poetry fundamentals for my writing forum and found it to be quite helpful, covering topics such as sound and its devices, form, the line, free verse, imagery, diction, tone, voice, and much more. My only complaint - not enough examples, especially in a book that seeks to cover the basic fundamentals.
Emma Bull's Territory was a nice surprise. It's somewhat a re-telling (or alternate history, if you will) of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, AZ, mixing fact with fantasy.
Drifter Jesse Fox and widow Mildred Benjamin discover that some strange (possibly magical) force seems to be dictating the goings-on in Tombstone, affecting Doc Holliday, the Earps, the Clantons, and themselves. In lesser hands, Territory could have been excruciatingly bad, but Bull is an excellent writer with a solid historical background. Plus she knows how to tell a great story. I should warn you, however, if you're expecting the O.K. Corral showdown, you'll have to wait until the sequel. I haven't heard when it comes out, but when it does, sign me up.
My first contact with Junot Diaz was in person. He and Ursula K. Le Guin were receiving an award (I think it was one of the PEN awards.) in Washington D.C. I thought Diaz's behavior (as well as the story he read) was flippant, vulgar and completely inappropriate. But when my good friend Kelly recommended the book, I thought I'd give it a try.
I guess you could safely say my opinion of Diaz has changed. This is an outstanding novel of humor, pain, loneliness, history, culture, hope and redemption. Oscar is Dominican, overweight, and an SF nerd who's written a four-volume SF saga. (Think of it as E.E. Doc Smith meets Tolkien.) He's also crazy about every woman he meets. The problem is he's repulsive to every female on the planet.
Diaz begins his tale with Oscar, then gives us a complete history of why Oscar is the way he is, touching on Dominican history, curses, politics, culture and much more. Each section reveals more and more of Oscar's ancestry and Dominican culture. There's a sense of fatalism, or maybe a predetermined curse, or maybe just bad luck surrounding Oscar. However you look at it, Oscar Wao is a great read.
3 comments:
I've heard nothing but good things about Oscar Wao, but I've never liked Junot Diaz's stories. He's one of those folks with lots of critical acclaim that I just don't get. I think I will check out Oscar, though.
And I like the Mary Oliver book a lot, too. Another good primer of sorts is Robert Pinsky's The Sound of Poetry. Another slender book that gets into how we hear poetry and how that should influence how we write it. My favorite, though, and a bit more comprehensive (read: much longer), is Kenneth Koch's Making Your Own Days.
Oscar Wao is definitely deserving of the praise its receiving. I actually experienced it on audio, which made all the Spanish words and phrases (and there are a lot of them) easier to digest.
I'll be sure to check out Pinsky and Koch.
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