Poetry Friday: How to Mend a Broken Vase

At an early meeting of my writing group, a member shared the Frank O'Hara poem "Why I Am Not a Painter".  It was photocopied from a book, and it was prefaced by this suggestion: "Make a title beginning with 'How' or 'Three Ways That...' or some such implied promise, and then in your poem that follows break or defy the promise, or complicate it."

The poem that follows was my effort to respond to that prompt.  This is a second draft, changed using some of the group's criticisms.


How to Mend a Broken Vase

First, gather up the shards.
Don’t forget that the shattering sent them in all directions;
There’s one, under the fridge,
And over there is another.
You’ll probably be finding pieces for quite a while.

Once you have them all picked up,
Put them in a pile,
And stare at them.

Think about whatever possessed you
To pick up that vase full of dead flowers
With butter on your hands
And scold yourself roundly.

When you’re ready, get to work with the glue.
Make a smeary mess.
Peel glue off your fingers and try again.
Cut yourself on pieces of glass,
Drop some on the ground and step on them,
Generally fail to mend the broken vase.

Give up.

Leave the pile where it is
And get irritated with it every time you see it.

Start enjoying the way the slivers of glass
Shine and sparkle as the light hits them.
Think about what you could add
To make a mosaic.

If, by chance,
It is your heart instead of a vase that you have carelessly
Allowed to get broken,
The same procedure will work.

Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com


 Karen Edmisten has the roundup for this week.

Poetry Friday: Love, by Classic Authors, and by Me

This week, in honor of Valentine's Day, that festival of hormones and sugar, I read love poetry with my eighth graders.  I chose some classic poems to share with them, and I made the point every day that people throughout history have had some of the same experiences and emotions as we do now, even though their technology and surroundings were very different.  On Monday we read Michael Drayton's "Since there's no help," on Tuesday "The Constant Lover," by John Suckling, on Wednesday "To Lucasta, On Going to the Wars," by Richard Lovelace, and on Thursday, Ezra Pound's "The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter." 

I framed "Since there's no help" as "a break-up poem," and taught the word ambivalent to discuss the difference between Drayton's claim: "And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart, /That thus so cleanly I myself can free" and then his wistful suggestion in the couplet at the end that his girlfriend might be able to make their love recover, even at this point.  We also talked about the amazing metaphor of their relationship as a patient in a hospital bed.  Here's the poem, or you can read this photo I took of my handout, on the floor, with footprints on it.

(By the way, I really think ambivalent is a highly useful vocabulary word, no matter how old you are, and I was reinforced in this belief by the delighted response of a girl in the front row as I explained that you could feel both that you loved someone and that you hated that person, or both happy and sad, and that was called ambivalence: "Hey!  That's how I feel!")

Tuesday's poem, "The Constant Lover," was a chance to talk about how it feels to have crushes on lots of people at once.  I taught the word constant (used ironically in the poem), and we evaluated the idea that if this girl Suckling is currently in love with were any less wonderful than she is, he'd have loved a dozen dozen others during the three days he's loved her.  How much is a dozen dozen?  (Someone always says twenty-four, but then we figure out that it's...well, look at what my white board said.)  Here's Suckling's poem.

On Wednesday, with "To Lucasta, Going to the Wars," we looked at the idea of going off to war, from the point of view of the guy who's leaving, and from the point of view of the girl who's getting left behind.  And that fabulous line: "I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honour more."  Here's that poem.  I just about jumped for joy today when an eighth grader turned in a response from Lucasta.

And then on Thursday, with "The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter," we talked about arranged marriages and falling in love with someone you're already committed to, the opposite of the way we think of it today in the culture we live in.  Being married at fourteen to someone your parents picked for you?  Ew!  (Although one boy remarked, "Well, it depends who it is.")  But missing someone you love?  They have all experienced that.  Here's that poem.

I absolutely love all these poems, and you probably already know (especially if you're a teacher) that the students aren't quite as enthusiastic about them as I am.  But still, we have fun.  Yes, we do!

For my own love, I wrote a sonnet as my Valentine's gift, and he was very pleased with it and gave me permission to share it here.  You will probably recognize my opening couplet as a borrowing from William Shakespeare.  My husband and I were in a seminar together in college where we read all of Shakespeare's sonnets.  (We met in college, when I was still a teenager, and got married when I was twenty-one.)


Valentine for my Husband

“Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come.”

In all these years of Monday - Friday weeks
Our hair’s grown grayer, happy days and glum
Have been and gone.  Our fortunes rise and fall,
We’re sick, then well, our children quickly grow,
And still our love abides, and through it all
We learn some more of what we need to know.

It’s thirty years since we first read those lines.
Back then we thought we understood how time
Would reinforce our love, how Valentines,
Poems, and roses would endure, sublime.
Earthquakes of life we didn’t then foresee,
And yet, here we still are, my love and me.

by Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com

Here's today's roundup.

Poetry Friday: Waiting

On Tuesday morning I was listening to the radio, and I heard a Syrian refugee talk about his journey to the US, interrupted by the travel ban but then completed when the ban was lifted.  It struck me that this is the story of humanity: ordinary people's lives getting altered by what people with power decide to do, and how those ordinary people make the best of it.  What I heard turned into this poem.

 Image from  https://www.lonelyplanet.com/turkey/istanbul 

Waiting, February 2017


The voice on the radio, according to the interpreter, says:
“I waited very long in Istanbul.”

I wonder how many times in history
This exact phrase has been used:

“I waited very long in Istanbul.”

And before that:

“I waited very long in Constantinople.”

And before that:

“I waited very long in Byzantium.”

For three thousand years,
People have waited,
Observing the vagaries of empire, war, and power,
Without being able to do much about them.

Meanwhile,
There’s baklava,
Turkish tea and coffee,
A cruise down the Bosphorus,
A Turkish bath.

I wonder how many of these things
And the other delights of Turkey
Came into being
To entertain those who were waiting,
Waiting
Waiting
Waiting very long in Istanbul.

Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com



When I shared this poem with my writing group, one of the members played this song:

I did some research on Istanbul for the poem, and now I really want to go.  Check out this link on fifty things to do there.

Here's today's roundup.

Reading Update

So far in 2017, I've finished five books.  Here they are, with brief reviews.

Book 1 of 2017 was Heart of the Matter: Daily Reflections for Changing Hearts and Lives, from New Growth Press.  This was a devotional book I downloaded last January and finished in the first week of this January.  The daily entries were written by people associated with the Christian Counseling & Educational Foundation, and the book was overall helpful and worth reading.

Book 2 was The Wisdom of Stability: Rooting Faith in a Mobile Culture, by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove.  I had had this on my Kindle for a while, and it seemed to go well with my OLW for the year (ROOTED), so I decided to read it.  I recommend it highly.  As Wilson-Hartgrove puts it in the first sentence of his introduction: "This is a book about staying put and paying attention."  Here's a taste: "Stability is a commitment to trust God not in an ideal world, but in the battered and bruised world we know.  If real life with God can happen anywhere at all, then it can happen here among the people whose troubles are already evident to us."  With my background of multicultural living and frequent moves, this is profoundly against the grain stuff for me some days.  I don't want to invest in people and their lives because they always, always leave.  I want to hide away and protect myself from being hurt again.  If you're like me, read this book.

Book 3 was Sins of the Fathers, by Susan Howatch.  Fans of the Starbridge books will recognize a lot of the same themes in this earlier Howatch book: multiple points of view, deeply broken characters, multi-generational drama.  The Starbridge books, written after Howatch's conversion to Christianity, add the element of deep spiritual understanding and quest.

Book 4 was The Cruelest Month, by Louise Penny.  So far I'm not hugely taken with this series, the Chief Inspector Gamache Mysteries, but I hear Penny hits her stride in book four, so I'll read at least that one before I give up.

Book 5 was The Invention of Wings, by Sue Monk Kidd.  The last book I read by this author, The Mermaid Chair, did not impress me.  (I must have read it before I started putting everything I read on this blog.)  This one, though, is wonderful.  It's the fictionalized story of the Grimké sisters, growing up in Charleston, South Carolina at the height of slavery.  Sarah Grimké receives a slave girl, Handful, as a gift for her eleventh birthday, and the chapters alternate between Sarah's and Handful's points of view.  While it's at times hard to read, I really appreciated that this book made no effort to romanticize the relationship between the two girls.  Slavery was and is always brutal, and Charleston was a particularly horrifying, dystopic place for African Americans at this time.   Eventually the Grimkés, Sarah and Angelina, became well-known (and notorious) for opposing slavery and for their early feminism.  Highly recommended.

This post is linked to the Saturday Review of Books for February 4th at Semicolon.

Poetry Friday: Refugees and Bright Wings

I have a little collection of things to share today on this first Poetry Friday in February, three pieces I read this week that helped me deal with the world as it is.

First of all, here's a poem written this week called "Odysseus at O'Hare."   Odysseus compares the hospitality he received among people who fear the gods in ancient times with the welcome he's getting at the airport in Chicago in 2017.

On Thursday I finished the verse novel I was reading with my seventh graders, Inside Out and Back Again.  This is the story of Hà and her family, living in Saigon in 1975, as the Viet Cong move closer and closer to the city.  Eventually the family is forced to flee, and even at the end of their harrowing journey, when they wind up in Alabama, things aren't easy for them.  Hà says at one point:

"No one would believe me
but at times
I would choose
wartime in Saigon
over
peacetime in Alabama."

I have been using this book with my seventh graders for several years now, and certainly couldn't have anticipated that refugees would fill the news this year as we read it.  It provided a great springboard for discussion of what refugees go through at every stage of their odyssey.  Hà, at ten, is younger than most of the protagonists of books my kids enjoy, and the novel could definitely be used with younger students than mine.  To me, the most poignant scene in the book is the one where Hà's teacher, in a well-meaning effort to inform the other kids about Vietnam, shows the class war photos.  Hà, instead of appreciating the teacher's gesture, is angry and sad that her beloved country has been represented as a place of only war and suffering.  Some of my students could relate to this, remembering going to the US after the earthquake, and having their classmates know nothing about their country except for the destruction they were seeing on the news.

Lastly, I want to share "God's Grandeur," a poem which a friend left as a comment on my Facebook page this week.  It's filled with the hope I need, because I believe that God's grandeur is also part of the world as it is.


God's Grandeur
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast with ah! bright wings!



The roundup is here today.

What's Saving My Life Right Now

Anne Bogel at Modern Mrs. Darcy invited us to share what's saving our life right now.  She reflected that this is the midpoint of winter, but I don't deal with cold weather or Seasonal Affective Disorder where I live.  Like others, however, I have been struggling with the mess in the world and in my own passport country, the United States.  After a long and brutal election season there and in the country where I live (the one in the US was more brutal, but the one here in Haiti went on longer, with postponements and even a redo), the political news didn't quiet down, but instead got louder and more insistent.

When I stopped to reflect on Anne's question (originally from Barbara Brown Taylor's memoir Leaving Church), I realized that the answers all have to do with my OLW for the year, ROOTED.  The things that are saving my life right now involve focusing on where I am and on situations where I can have some impact.

The people around me are saving my life.  My husband, my children (one here, one via Skype from college, and yes, that still counts as "where I am," since my heart is with her as much as it is here), my extended family and household, my friends, my colleagues, my students, my church family.  The people in my life.  The people I love.

My writing group is saving my life.  I've wanted to be in a writing group for years, and now that I finally am, I'm finding it a rich experience.  Even if I don't get much done in the two weeks between meetings, I love the conversation.  We start with a piece by another writer (not one of us), and then we talk about what we've all submitted.  We drink tea and laugh and swap ideas and act all English-majory, and it's wonderful - like being back in grad school but without the competitive angst I used to writhe in back then.  Writing saves my life; it's one of the things that reliably makes me feel better, but it takes a lot of effort, and often when I feel the worst, I have the least motivation to make myself write.  The writing group helps with that, giving me the extra oomph to work and to know that I'll have sympathetic, smart readers.

Taking photos is saving my life.  I started a photography project at the beginning of this year, in which I'm taking photos every day, and posting one a day on Facebook in response to prompts from http://captureyour365.com/. It's making me look around my world more closely, finding what's beautiful and what's ugly and what's worth capturing.  Some days I'm happy with my photo and some days I'm not.  Some days lots of my friends pay attention, and other days hardly anyone seems to notice.  All of that is all right.  It's a way of grounding myself, of being exactly where and when and who I am. 

Reading always saves my life, and it continues to do that.  I read to relax, to reflect, to learn, to grow, to escape, to live other lives.  I know that doesn't sound like being rooted, but it is.  It's being rooted in who I really am, and always have been since I learned to read when I was four, and even before then when my parents read to me.  I am a reader, a book person.  I am so blessed to have a job that lets me be a book person and encourage others to join me.  And it's also saving my life to be a Book person, a person who reads the Bible in the morning before I read my news feed, to orient myself with ancient wisdom and love before plunging into whatever awful thing just happened.  (I still plunge - I don't see how I can close myself off to it - but I have a more eternal perspective.)

How about you?  What's saving your life right now?

This post is linked to Modern Mrs. Darcy's roundup.

Poetry Friday: Mending Wall

Mending Wall

by Robert Frost

 

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing:

I have come after them and made repair

Where they have left not one stone on a stone,

But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,

To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

We have to use a spell to make them balance:

"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Oh, just another kind of out-door game,

One on a side. It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours."

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

"Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,

But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather

He said it for himself. I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father's saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, "Good fences make good neighbours."


Here's today's roundup.

Poetry Friday: How Long Does it Take?

Almost a year ago, I read this post where Margaret linked us to "How Long Peace Takes," by Naomi Shihab Nye.  Margaret and her students had written poems inspired by Nye's idea.  Margaret's was called "How Long Healing Takes."  The day I read the post, I decided to write a poem on the same idea, and this past week, I finally did.  I started out thinking about healing in general, but given the time of year and the place my mind had been, I ended up writing about the Haiti earthquake.  I feel as though I should apologize for writing about it so much, but since not everyone is in my head all the time the way I am, maybe it doesn't seem as frequent a topic to you as it does to me.

There are two of us in my writing group who were here in Haiti when the earthquake happened in 2010.  This week we talked about it.  She reported having a difficult, painful anniversary.  This year it all seemed a little more distant to me, as though healing might finally be coming to my heart.



How Long Healing Takes in Port-au-Prince


As long as fault lines.

As long as a crack stretches on a concrete wall.

As long as the date January 12th
And the time 4:53
Make your stomach hurt,
And then a little more.

As long as rain falls on unmarked graves.

As long as a row of tents fades in the sun.

As long as the flamboyant tree is bare of red blossoms,
And then until it blooms again,
But maybe not this year or next or the next.

As long as someone remembers before and during and after.

As long as the earth moves every day somewhere,
Even if it isn’t here.

And longer
If it’s here again.

Ruth, thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com



Healing takes as long as it takes, and I hope that whatever wounds you're experiencing now or healing from, you'll have hope today.  A good place to start is Violet's roundup today, where she has some very hopeful words, plus links to everybody else's Poetry Friday offerings.   

Poetry Friday: Memento Mori

I'm writing this post on Thursday night, January 12th, the seventh anniversary of the earthquake in Haiti.  The poem I'm sharing today is one I wrote in the fall and read to my writing group.  One of the other members said that although he wasn't in Haiti on that day, he has read so many earthquake accounts that he feels he was.  Like me, he is a writing teacher.  I, too, have read countless earthquake stories.  I never assign them as a topic, but I do encourage kids to write about what happened to them if they feel ready to.  Each time someone entrusts an earthquake story to me, I accept it as an honor, a holy moment. 

Even though it has been seven years, some things haven't faded.  (If you want to read what I wrote at the time, you can find many posts in my archives.)  This poem is about those ordinary days, not anniversaries, when suddenly I am visited by vivid earthquake memories.  


Memento Mori

Sometimes when I sit in my living room
My mind superimposes an image on what my eyes see,
The giant bookcase on the ground,
Sent there by the shaking of the earth
The rocking chair where I nursed my son, crushed,
Books scattered all over the floor.

And sometimes when I worship in the chapel at school
I see us in there on the night of the earthquake
Trying to sing and pray, but frightened by aftershocks,
Bodies thrumming with adrenaline in the cold evening air.

And sometimes there are kids playing hard on the soccer field
And I suddenly see people huddled on the ground,
Spending the night under the sky instead of under a concrete roof
Since so many concrete roofs have crushed so many bodies
Only hours before.

In the middle of life we are in death,
And sometimes I know it with all my being,
Conscious of how fragile that chair, that chapel, that roof,
Aware of the skull beneath the skin,
From dust we came and to dust we shall return.

Ruth, thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com

Here's the roundup.

Seven Years Ago

This day seven years ago was a completely normal one, until 4:53 in the afternoon, when everything changed.   I had left my classroom that afternoon to walk home, with my lesson plans on my desk for the next day, and it was six months before I taught again.  The earth shook, and many died - even seven years later, nobody knows exactly how many.

I never knew before seven years ago how common earthquakes are.  They happen all the time.  The earth is not solid, not stable; it can move, and everything you counted on can be different in a moment.  I can't look away from earthquake stories.  And I can't read one without remembering that night on the soccer field, those terrifying aftershocks, those hours and days filled with fear, grief, and adrenaline.

This day, January 12th, will always be full of emotion.  We mourn for those who were lost.  We remember.  We will never forget.

Poetry Friday: Roots

On New Year's Eve, we all shared our words for the year.  Mine is ROOTED.  My daughter immediately went in search of the Hopkins book, and read me this poem.

She is a big Hopkins fan, even using Gerard's photo as her profile picture, and a big reason for that is the way he expresses depression, frustration, futility.   In this poem, nothing that he tries is successful.  He looks around and it's spring; everything else is blooming.  The birds are hard at work at their nests. But he's stuck in a sterile, monastic existence, with nothing to show for it.   He doesn't know what to do about it, except pour it out on paper, and then that last line: "Send my roots rain."

I'm hoping, and praying, for rain this year, too.


'Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend'
by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Justus quidem tu es, Domine, si disputem tecum; verumtamen
justa loquar ad te: Quare via impiorum prosperatur? &c. 

Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must
Disappointment all I endeavour end?
    Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,
How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust
Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,
Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes
Now, leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again
With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes
Them; birds build – but not I build; no, but strain,
Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.


It's also Epiphany today, so here's a bonus poem, one with more hope:  "Where the Map Begins" at Painted Prayerbook.

Linda has the roundup today, this first one of 2017.

My Photography Project for 2017

In 2016, I did photo-a-day challenges in Lent and Advent, and I found that responding to those prompts each day was an experience I enjoyed.  I went looking for a way to continue the photo-a-day habit, because it makes me feel rooted and grounded in my everyday life, finding things that are beautiful and meaningful in what I see around me all the time.  I discovered Capture Your 365, and at least for now, those are the prompts I'll be following.

I'm posting my photos on Facebook, but I may share some here, too.  I decided that if there's a photo I've already taken in the past, I can use it if it fits with the prompt; it doesn't have to be one I took in the past 24 hours.  (For my Lent and Advent challenges, I even used some photos I didn't take - with attribution, of course - but I haven't 100% decided whether that's going to be OK for CY365.)  However, part of the assignment I've set myself is that I must take at least one photo every day of the year. 

My first photo for 2017; the prompt was "Happy New Year," and I posted the traditional New Year's food here in Haiti, pumpkin soup.  

I think that in Lent and Advent, I'll use prompts similar to those I used this year (from Rethink Church and Alive Magazine), but I haven't decided if I'll double up and still use the CY365 prompts, or not.

So there you have it, my half-baked plan for the year, with more "I haven't decided" statements than definites.  We'll see how it goes.

OLW 2017

In 2016, my One Little Word was LOVED.  2016 was a rough year for my family and me, but it was a year with many beautiful moments, anyway.  I knew myself beloved.

This year, I thought about SEE, to remind myself to focus on those beautiful moments.  I thought about HERE, because the best moments are when I am fully present where I am, not the past or the future, and not elsewhere on this planet.  I ended up choosing the word ROOTED, for the way it combines those ideas.

Roots are a complicated concept to a transplant like me.  I've lived in many places around the world, and change is a constant in my life.  People move on; that's just the way it is.  Here's the Bible verse I cling to, and the other reason why I love this year's OLW: "And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge--that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God" (Ephesians 3:17-19).  My roots are not necessarily in an individual place, from where I could be uprooted in a moment.  My roots are in love.

This year I will seek to be fully present exactly where I am, and I will also sink my roots deeper into God's love and the love of the people in my life.

Last week when we were at the beach, a family walk brought us to the tree in the photos.  My son, having no idea of the word I had been thinking about, commented, "Wow, that is a tree that knows how to adapt itself to its circumstances.  It's just laying down roots everywhere."

I may be uprooted this year from my physical surroundings.  People I count on may disappear from my life.  But I will lay down roots anyway.  In 2017, I will be ROOTED.

What I Read in 2016

I had a great reading year.  For one thing, I read a LOT, and for another, I read some wonderful books.  I'll start this post with the last few books I completed this year, and then link you to the other Reading Update posts I did.  (And if I finish any more books today, well then, I'll just add them!)

Book #135 of 2016 was The Night Watch, by Sarah Waters.  This is the story of several relationships (mostly lesbian) in World War II in London.  The interesting twist is that the story moves backwards; the first section is set in 1947, the second in 1944, and the third in 1941.

Book #136 was My Name is Lucy Barton, by Elizabeth Strout.  This was a pretty uneventful book, and yet I couldn't put it down.

Book #137 was All Roads Lead to Austen: A Yearlong Journey with Jane, by Amy Elizabeth Smith.  This was so much fun, a travel book slash Jane Austen book.  Smith spends a year traveling in Latin America, setting up Jane Austen discussion groups in each country she visits.  Highly entertaining to Jane Austen loving expat like myself.

Book #138 was Do You See What I See?: Exploring the Christmas of Every Day, by Ross Parsley.  This was a quick Christmas read.

Book #139 was Ordinary People, by Judith Guest.  I thought this one was good.  Now I want to see the movie.

I read book #140 at the beach, and it was my first Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie book, and also her first novel, Purple Hibiscus.  This was a gift from my daughter.  Now I'm going to read all her other books as soon as possible.

Book #141 was Writing Day In and Day Out: Living a Practice of Words, by Andi Cumbo-Floyd, a fun read with some useful writing advice included.

Here are the other books I read this year:

Books 1 to 7
Books 8 to 12
Books 13 to 23
Books 24 to 35
Books 36 to 40
Books 41 to 51
Books 52 to 55
Books 56 to 75
Books 76 to 84
Books 85 to 91
Books 92 to 100
Books 101 to 109
Books 110 to 117
Books 118 to 125
Books 126 to 128
Books 129 to 134 (and this post includes three books that I've been rereading this year)

What did you read this year that you particularly enjoyed, and that I should add to my list?  Here's to another year of wonderful books!

Poetry Friday

I've missed three weeks of Poetry Friday, and I really can't miss another one.  I just got back from the beach, where I've been writing, but nothing I'm ready to share.  This poem is really for tomorrow, not today, but the idea of ducking as 2017 heads our way seems prudent. 

Tonight’s December thirty-first,
Something is about to burst.
The clock is crouching, dark and small,
Like a time bomb in the hall.
Hark, it's midnight, children dear.
Duck! Here comes another year!

Ogden Nash

Here's today's roundup.

Poetry Sunday

I'm up in the early hours of Christmas morning, listening to the loud, discordant music in my neighborhood.  It's not a silent night in my part of the world.  Seems like a perfect time to get caught up on the Poetry Friday roundup that I missed again this week!  Merry Christmas to you!

Poetry Saturday

Another crazy Friday, culminating in my daughter getting home for Christmas break (hooray!), and I missed another Poetry Friday.  But once again, others did better.  Here's the roundup.

Poetry Friday

My students' final writing pieces were due today, plus unexpected chaos happened.  It ended up being a not-so-good day, in fact, and I didn't get a post written.  But fortunately, other people were more successful.  Here's the roundup.

Poetry Friday: The Next Poem

The Next Poem

 by Dana Gioia

How much better it seems now
than when it is finally done–
the unforgettable first line,
the cunning way the stanzas run.

The rhymes soft-spoken and suggestive
are barely audible at first,
an appetite not yet acknowledged
like the inkling of a thirst.

While gradually the form appears
as each line is coaxed aloud–
the architecture of a room
seen from the middle of a crowd.

The music that of common speech
but slanted so that each detail
sounds unexpected as a sharp
inserted in a simple scale.

No jumble box of imagery
dumped glumly in the reader’s lap
or elegantly packaged junk
the unsuspecting must unwrap.

But words that could direct a friend
precisely to an unknown place,
those few unshakeable details
that no confusion can erase.

And the real subject left unspoken
but unmistakable to those
who don’t expect a jungle parrot
in the black and white of prose.

How much better it seems now
than when it is finally written.
How hungrily one waits to feel
the bright lure seized, the old hook

                                              bitten.

 

Bridget has the roundup here.  

Reading Update (plus three books I keep re-reading)

Book #129 of the year was Code Name Verity, by Elizabeth Wein.  This is riveting World War II spy fiction with twists you won't see coming.

I can't link you to book #130, because it isn't yet published.  Little Flower was written by a friend, Ted Oswald (here's his Amazon author page).  Ted is in my writing group, and he shared the beginning of this book with us a few weeks ago.  We wanted more, so he sent us the manuscript.  The story is set in Calcutta, and, to quote Sister Immaculata, one of the Missionaries of Charity living there, it is "a mystery, simple yet boggling: Of untold Joy wrapped in staggering Sadness; Of Weak Lions and Crafty Lambs; Of Miracles - approximately 141.  I mean, 142; Of Deaths - approximately 5, few natural; Of the Sacred and Profane laying down side by side, often several times a night, always for a pittance."  As soon as this is available, I'll update this post with a link so you can get it, but in the meantime, read some of Ted's other work.  Most of his books are about Haiti, and they are atmospheric and full of the experience he's gained from living in this country.  (Update: You can now buy the book, Little Flower, here, so go buy it!)

Book #131 was Emma: A Modern Retelling, by Alexander McCall Smith.  If you're a regular reader of my blog, you know I can't resist Jane Austen retellings, sequels, and all forms of fan fic.  They are pretty well always a bit of a disappointment, but I can't stop reading them anyway.  This was just okay.

Book #132 was A Watershed Year, by Susan Schoenberger, a touching read about loss and healing.

Book #133 was the third of historical romance novels published by a grad school friend.  Tempting the Earl, by Rachael Miles, contains some of the same characters from the previous two novels, Jilting the Duke and Chasing the Heiress.  All three books have independent-minded, entertaining heroines, and twists and turns galore.  There's a lot going on in these stories, and it's fun to read Miles' author notes at the end detailing some of the research that went into them.  Her blog is also very interesting.

Book #134 was The Solitude of Prime Numbers, by Paolo Giordano, the story of the friendship of Mattia and Alice, both of whom have suffered trauma in childhood.  None of the characters is very likeable, but somehow I found this book compelling, and the lives of quiet desperation it describes believable.

My reading speed has, of course, slowed down considerably in the fall, now that I am back teaching full time.  Part of the reason I've been reading less is that I have been re-reading some books.  Here are three of them:

Life of the Beloved, by Henri Nouwen, was book #8 of the year.  I reviewed it here.  I received a recommendation for this book in a blog comment, and since I read it that first time, I've probably read it five or six more.  It has been a huge gift to me in the struggles I've faced this year.  Nouwen says that "Becoming the Beloved is the great spiritual journey we have to make."  He discusses four words: "taken," "blessed," "broken," and "given," to explain how we can learn to live in the truth of our belovedness and believe that we are beloved by God even when we are rejected by human beings.

How to Be Here: A Guide to Creating a Life Worth Living, by Rob Bell has been another touchstone this year.  I know that Rob Bell is controversial, but there's something about the way he writes that has spoken to me deeply.  It was book #34 of the year, and what I wrote about it then wasn't so much a review as an expression of my intention to re-read it.  I've done that at least three times, plus dipped into it several more without reading the whole thing.  I don't know that there's anything brand new in the book, but for whatever reason, it has kept me going many times when I wanted to stand still.

How to Survive a Shipwreck, by Jonathan Martin, got a bit better treatment from me when I first read it back in October - my review is in this post.  It was book #128 of the year, and I'm only on my second time through it, but I know not the last.  This is so beautifully written and so very accurate in its depiction of what it's like to go through crisis.  Like both of the other re-reads, this book reminds me again and again that the answer to difficult times is to go on, to be in this present moment and do the next thing.

"God can only be known and experienced in this moment - right here, right now," Martin writes.  "If we will attend to this moment, God will attend to us.  Trying to find a way to attend to the moment myself, in that season where every step in every direction felt excruciating, I wrote this prayer as a way of tethering myself to the grace of this moment.  I hope it can help you find the grace in whatever moment you're in right now:  
I do not ask 
for some future bread.
I do not ask
for some lofty thing.
I ask for nothing more,
I ask for nothing less,
than primal provision.
For this, and this - only this.
I do not ask for then.
I do not ask for there.
I do not ask for that.
Only this meal - this moment.
For this day, only
for this, and this - only this."