Poetry and Prose

Andrew Motion, Coming In To Land (poems)

Adam Johnson, Fortune Smiles (stories)

I had an opportunity to travel to Santa Fe last week and to visit one of my favorite bookstores--it is intimate, has a tasteful but not overwhelming collection, possesses lots of cozy seating for reading, and a nice in-house coffee shop (de rigueur these days).  It reminds me of Politics and Prose, my old NW DC bookstore.  Of course I love Powell's in Portland and The Strand in New York, but those are different kinds of stores, ones where you need days to browse and where the overwhelming feeling one has is of one's own illiteracy. Collected Works, on the other hand, reminds me of small independent bookstores in cities like Chicago and New York and Paris--it's a reader's sanctuary. I passed an afternoon browsing and picked up two books that I read this week and wanted to recommend to readers of TR.

I'm embarrassed to admit that I had not read more than one or two poems by Andrew Motion, former poet laureate of the United Kingdom (1999-2009) until I found his selected poems, Coming In To Land, in Santa Fe. I grabbed a coffee and started reading, and was hooked after this poem:

Anne Frank Huis

Even now, after twice her lifetime of grief
and anger in the very place, whoever comes
to climb these narrow stairs, discovers how
the bookcase slides aside, then walks through
shadow into sunlit rooms, can never help

but break her secrecy again. Just listening
is a kind of guilt: the Westerkirk repeats
itself outside, as if all time worked round
towards her fear, and made each stroke
die down on guarded streets. Imagine it--

for years of whispering, and loneliness,
and plotting, day by day, the Allied line
in Europe with a yellow chalk. What hope
she had for ordinary love and interest
survives her here, displayed above the bed

as pictures of her family; some actors;
fashions chosen by Princess Elizabeth.
And those who stoop to see them find
not only patience missing its reward,
but one enduring wish for changes

like my own: to leave as simply
as I do, and walk at ease
up dusty tree-lined avenues, or watch
a silent barge come clear of bridges
setting their reflections in the blue canal.

Motion's poems rely on plain diction and ordinary meters to convey the richer meanings of things (e.g. "The Fence"), the hidden truths in everyday life ("A Pine Cone,"), or the inexorable facts of our existence--loss and sadness (as in the beautiful "Passing On.") Motion creates memorable lines in the midst of his poems without ever seeming studied or glib: "The hand of God/ is a burst of sun." He's also a marvelous ventriloquist, narrating his historical poems in the voices of dead or dying soldiers ("Home Front") or taking on the point of view of an animal with complete conviction ("The Fox Provides for Himself).  Motion writes compact lyrics as well as long, rambling narrative poems, always with an eye to the telling detail, the flash of meaning, that makes a poem about not only language, but the inquisitive eye of the poet himself--a record of consciousness.

I think that's Keats on the wall--a fitting image.

 ***

If you read, and you should, Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son (2012), you won't be surprised to learn that his recent story collection Fortune Smiles is imaginative, harrowing, and utterly engrossing. I don't like to make simplistic comparisons, but there is much in Johnson to remind one of Don DeLillo, especially the DeLillo of the earlier novels.  Both writers convey a sense of menace, of an emptiness at the heart of even the most ordinary of lives. Johnson is able to create a credible version of North Korean lives (in the title story of this collection for example), but he also has the ability to infuse what Daniel Mendelshon has called a "Blade Runner-esque" weirdness into the most banal existences imaginable.  The story I liked best--that's an understatement; I dreamed about it--is "George Orwell Was a Friend of Mine," a surreal recounting of the life of the warden of a Stasi torture prison after the Wall has come down and Germany has been unified.  The prison, just down the street from the narrator Prinz's ordinary bungalow, is, in post-Cold War Germany, the site of a museum of atrocities. Johnson has a gift for turning the horrors of recent history into memorials to our tendency to forget the past, or to reshape it to fit our naive view of the present.  Prinz interjects himself back into now "curated" prison (this word has taken on a new life in the age of Twitter--the collection and organizing of things best forgotten) with results that are both horrifying and enlightening. As I reread the story I not only relished the brilliance and economy of Johnson's story telling--every little piece fits, no image or encounter is wasted--but the profundity of the message. Orwell, it turns out, is a friend of us all.

"Hurricanes Anonymous" is the story of a FedEx driver in the wake of Katrina.  Check out these sentences: "Climbing the Lake Charles Bridge, None can see the muscles and elbows of the petrochemical plants, their vent stacks blowing off maroon-blue flame. Below are the driven edges of a brown tide, and everywhere is the open abdomen of Louisiana. At the top of the bridge, there is no sign of what happened here, not a sippy cup in the breakdown lane, not a little show. None looks out on the city. It looks like one of those end-times Bible paintings where everything is large and impressive, but when you look close, in all the corners, some major shit is befalling people."

Yup, major shit.  That's about it in the world of Johnson's stories, which is, minus just the tiniest bit of weirdness, our very own.

George Ovitt (2/21/18)