2019 was a challenging year—deaths, health scares, creative dysfunction—but as ever, reading sustained me. I finally read Juan Rulfo‘s classic Pedro Páramo—one of those books that makes me wonder why I waited so long. It’s a visceral, phantasmagorical novel with all the psychic force of Greek tragedy. I knew that it is widely considered the first fully-realized instance of magical realism, and I can see how unlikely it would be for us to have One Hundred Years of Solitude without Rulfo’s influence.
Then there was Ted Hughes‘s Selected Translations (see Ann Skea’s review here), offering a taste of texts ancient and modern, from Ovid, Aeschylus, and The Tibetan Book of the Dead to the great Yehuda Amichai, Paul Éluard, and Vasko Popa.
There was also a poet completely new to me: Oregon’s Poet Laureate emerita Paulann Petersen. I was lucky enough to read with both Paulann and another extraordinary poet, Andrea Hollander, at a poetry salon organized by Ce Rosenow, a distant cousin of mine and until recently the publisher of Mountains and Rivers Press books. (Ce also co-edited, with Bob Arnold, the beautiful selected poems of Cid Corman called The Next One Thousand Years.) I have to say I have been completely bowled over by Paulann’s work, which ranges from syncopated, imagistically etched poems full of canny wordplay and closely observed details to more expansive narratives drawing on family and personal history. What a privilege to discover her both in person and on the page!
One last recommendation—part cautionary, part celebratory. I finished out the year with Daisy Dunn‘s Catullus’ Bedspread: The Life of Rome’s Most Erotic Poet, although I had to skip her translations of the great bad boy of Roman lyric poetry in favor of roving back and forth between her book and Peter Green‘s delicious translations in The Poems of Catullus. Green has the audacity and skills necessary to match, or come quite close to, the various meters Catullus used in his work; Dunn’s versions arrive in a kind of listless free-verse English that might make any reader wonder why we still bother to read Catullus. Dunn also has a tendency to pad the story with “Catullus must have known…” and “Caesar surely felt…” and other kinds of speculation. All that aside, her book does a good job of fleshing out the social, political, poetical, and familial milieus in which Catullus lived out his 30 years on Earth.
Well, that’s enough. Here is the full list of my reading adventures last year. Only a few aren’t shown and only because they were so dreadful that—intrepid though I am—I simply had to lay them aside.
First Name | Last Name | Title | Category | Publisher | ISBN |
Adonis | Songs of Mihyar the Damascene | Poetry | New Directions | 9780811227650 | |
César | Aira | The Linden Tree | Fiction | New Directions | 9780811219082 |
Grossman Halliday |
Allen Mark |
The Sighted Singer: Two Works on Poetry for Readers and Writers | Critical Theory | Johns Hopkins U Pr | 0-8018-4242-5 |
Anon. | Beowulf (trans. Seamus Heaney) | Poetry | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 9780374111197 | |
Chloe | Aridjis | Book of Clouds | Fiction | Grove/Atlantic | 9780802170569 |
Bob | Arnold | Woodlanders | Poetry | Longhouse | 9781929048564 |
John | Banville | Ghosts | Fiction | Knopf | 9780679405191 |
Sherwin | Bitsui | Dissolve | Poetry | Copper Canyon | 9781556595455 |
Robert | Bly | Collected Poems | Poetry | W. W. Norton | 9780393652444 |
Robert | Bly | More Than True | Nonfiction | Henry Holt | 9781250158192 |
Jonah | Bornstein | Mortar | Poetry | Wolff Street Poetry | 9781930835238 |
John | Brandi | Weeding the Cosmos | Poetry | La Alameda Press | 963190911 |
Angela | Carter | Wise Children | Fiction | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 9780374291334 |
Gaius Valerius | Catullus | The Poems of Catullus | Poetry | University of California Press | 9780520242647 |
Robert | Cooperman | That Summer | Poetry | Main Street Rag | 9781599487250 |
Julio | Cortázar | A Certain Lucas | Fiction | Knopf | 394507232 |
Julio | Cortázar | Diary of Andrés Fava | Fiction | Archipelago Books | 974968064 |
Carol Ann | Duffy | Feminine Gospels | Poetry | Faber and Faber | 9780571211876 |
Daisy | Dunn | Catullus’ Bedspread: The Life of Rome’s Most Erotic Poet | Critical Biography | Harper Perennial | 9780062317032 |
Percival | Everett | Erasure | Fiction | Graywolf Press | 9781555975999 |
Myriam | Fraga | Purifications or the S0ng of Retaliation | Poetry | White Pine Press | 9781945680076 |
Juan | Gelman | Dark Times Filled with Light | Poetry | Open Letters | 9781934824689 |
David | Giannini | Mayhap: Selected Brief Poems | Poetry | Dos Madres | 9781948017510 |
David | Giannini | In a Moment We May Be Strangely Blended | Poetry | Dos Madres | 9781948017305 |
David | Giannini | The Rainbow Prepares the Rain: A Travel Sampler in Southern Italia | Poetry | New Feral Press | N/A |
Yvan | Goll | The Inner Trees: Selected Poems of Yvan Goll | Poetry | White Pine Press | 9781945680250 |
Linda | Gregg | Things and Flesh | Poetry | Graywolf Press | 9781555972936 |
Allen | Grossman | Decartes’ Loneliness | Poetry | New Directions | 9780811217118 |
Allen | Grossman | Sweet Youth: Poems by a Young Man and an Old Man Old and New 1953-2001 | Poetry | New Directions | 9780811215220 |
Joy | Harjo | An American Sunrise | Poetry | W. W. Norton | 9781324003861 |
Terrence | Hayes | Lighthead | Poetry | Penguin Books | 9780143116967 |
Ernest | Hemingway | True at First Light: A Fictional Memoir | Fiction | Scribner | 684849216 |
Andrea | Hollander | Blue Mistaken for Sky | Poetry | Autumn House Press | 9781938769337 |
Ted | Hughes | Ted Hughes: Selected Translations | Poetry | Faber and Faber | 9780571221400 |
Siri | Hustvedt | The Blindfold | Fiction | Holder & Stoughton | 340579021 |
Solomon | Ibn Gabirol | Vulture in a Cage | Poetry | Archipelago Books | 9780914671558 |
Ilya | Kaminsky | Deaf Republic | Poetry | Graywolf Press | 9781555978310 |
Robert | King | Rodin & Co. | Poetry | Grayson Books | 9780978538293 |
Ryszard | Krynicki | Our Life Grows | Poetry | New York Review Books | 9781681371603 |
John | Levy | Silence Like Another Name | Poetry | Otata’s Bookshelf | 9780359961931 |
Ada | Limón | Bright Dead Things | Poetry | Milkweed Editions | 9781571314710 |
Ada | Limón | The Carrying | Poetry | Graywolf Press | 9781571315120 |
Dennis | Maloney | The Faces of Guan Yin | Poetry | Folded Word | 9781610192453 |
C.M. | Mayo | Meteor | Poetry | Gival Press | 9781940724164 |
Heather | McHugh | The Father of the Predicaments | Poetry | Wesleyan U Press | 9780819563750 |
Duya | Mikhail | In Her Feminine Sign | Poetry | New Directions | 9780811228763 |
Tom | Montag | Seventy at Seventy | Poetry | MWPH Books | 9780974649986 |
Jim | Murdoch | The More Things Change | Fiction | Fandango Virtual | 9781908815088 |
Vera | Pavlova | Album for the Young (and Old) | Poetry | Knopf | 9780451494788 |
Paulann | Petersen | Kindle | Poetry | Mountains and Rivers Press | 979320410 |
Paulann | Petersen | Polar Flight | Poetry | Mountains and Rivers Press | N/A |
Paulann | Petersen | The Voluptuary | Poetry | Lost Horse Press | 9780984451036 |
Paulann | Petersen | One Small Sun | Poetry | SalmonPoetry | 9781912561483 |
Adélia | Prado | The Alphabet in the Park: Seleted Poems of Adélia Prado | Poetry | Wesleyan U Press | 819511773 |
Gary | Reilly | Ticket to Hollywood | Fiction | Running Meter Press | 9780984786015 |
Rodrigo | Rey Rosa | The African Shore | Fiction | Yale University Press | 9780300196108 |
Rodrigo | Rey Rosa | Severina | Fiction | Yale University Press | 9780300196092 |
Juan | Rulfo | Pedro Páramo | Fiction | Grove Press | 9780802133908 |
Juan José | Saer | The Clouds | Fiction | Open Letters | 9781940953342 |
Hiroaki | Sato | On Haiku | Nonfiction | New Directions | 9780811227414 |
Naomi Shihab | Nye | The Tiny Journalist | Poetry | BOA Editions | 9781942683728 |
Louis | Simpson | Struggling Times | Poetry | BOA Editions | 9781934414194 |
Jared | Smith | That’s How It Is | Poetry | Stubborn Mule Press | 9781950380473 |
Kim | Stafford | Wild Honey, Tough Salt | Poetry | Red Hen Press | 9781597098960 |
Theocritus | The Idylls | Poetry | Carcanet | 856357111 | |
Mark | Twain | Life on the Mississippi | Memoir | Harper and Brothers | N/A |
Ko | Un | Maninbo: Peace & War | Poetry | Bloodaxe Books | 9781780372426 |
Kurt | Vonnegut | The Sirens of Titan (in Novels & Stories 1950-1962) | Fiction | Library of America | 9781598531503 |
Walt | Whitman | Walt Whitman Speaks | Nonfiction | Library of America | 9781598536140 |