"I shan't publish it. The journals will think it barbarous.”

Another review of Ron Hansen's Exiles, this one in Godspy.

Though Hopkins scrupled over his love of nature-infused poetry (wondering whether the art was suspect for its worldliness and emphasis on delights of the senses), his instincts were correct. As Hans Urs van Balthasar wrote in Seeing the Form, “The resurrection of the flesh vindicates the poets in a definitive sense: the aesthetic scheme of things, which allows us to possess the infinite within the finitude of form (however it is seen, understood, or grasped spiritually), is right.”

Hmm. That's awfully confident.

Poem in October

A supremely beautiful poem. The best thing is to hear Dylan Thomas himself reading it.

It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.

Father Foster explains it all...

...to Bill Maher. (Listen here on NPR, if you can stand the smarminess. I honestly found it amusing.) While filming his silly anti-religion movie, Maher went to the Vatican and ran into none other than... Reggie Foster, everyone's favorite Latin Lover! Fr. Foster took him up to his office, all the while making scandalous comments and telling "bad jokes in Latin." What really made me laugh was that Bill Maher carried away the impression that all the Vatican clergy are like Fr. Foster! (What a thought.)

Happy Birthday, Virgil!

I am reading the Aeneid from the beginning, and I'm on Book Three now. Sorry, Virgil, but I'm glad you weren't able to burn it.

Dappled Things is out.

I truly believe writing saves the world. Books saved my life when I was drinking: I’m not sure I would have survived if not through what was basically my only connection to reality: literature. - Heather King

Get it right here! I particularly recommend the interview with Heather King. It's like morning air and dew on the grass. Very clear and real. As for poetry, J.B. Toner's sonnet, "Drinking with Lucifer," is blackly funny and has a few great lines: "The absinthe of an abdicated will," oooo... Another sonnet, "That My Kitchen is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Extinguisher," is a highly alarming peek into a bachelor's kitchen, alarmingly bespattered with alliteration and other Hopkinsian flourishes. Joseph O'Brien's "Our Father" is a wonderful sketch of fatherhood as embodied in an Irish cop from Jersey City. And there is a villanelle by Amamda Griswold about the Gaderene demoniac which packs a punch. There's a lot of passion in this issue! Watch out for "The Game of Sean McTeague," though; it made me seasick. Eleanor Donlon took her usual Benson-esque melodrama and grafted it onto "Darby O'Gill and the Little People." The result is utterly ridiculous.

The Anti-Muses

A.E. Stallings is on to them.

Like the Muses, they are attracted to talent and promising projects, and the presence of several at once probably means you are on to something big. Still, they can frustrate or even destroy the most inspired tender new poem, and send the poet into despair, alcoholism, or flash fiction. The more we know about them, the better.

My favorites are Tripsichore (She of two left feet) and Hyperbole, goddess of blurbs. May they be far from me!

In Which a General is Kidnapped and Some Horace is Recited.

From Andrew Cusack's blog, a nice interview with Patrick Leigh Fermor - a most romantic figure and still writing, at the age of 93, about his opulent adventures. I am fond of the escapade where he kidnapped a German general on Crete:

In Leigh Fermor’s own account of the abduction of General Kreipe, the climax comes not as the general’s staff car is stopped at night by a British SOE partly dressed in stolen German uniforms, nor as the Cretan partisans help smuggle the general into the highlands and hence to a waiting British submarine; but instead as ‘a brilliant dawn was breaking over the crest of Mount Ida’.

‘We were all three lying smoking in silence, when the general, half to himself, slowly said, “Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte”. It was the opening of one of the few Horace odes I knew by heart. I went on reciting where he had broken off… The general’s blue eyes swivelled away from the mountain top to mine - and when I’d finished, after a long silence, he said: “Ach so, Herr Major!” It was very strange. “Ja, Herr General.” As though for a moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before; and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.’

It is an archetypal Leigh Fermor anecdote: fabulously erudite and romantic, and just a little showy. For his greatest virtues as a writer are also his greatest vices: his incantational love of great waterfalls of words, combined with the wild scholarly enthusiasms of a brilliant autodidact. On the rare occasions he gets it wrong, Leigh Fermor has been responsible for some of the most brightly coloured purple passages in travel literature. But at his best he is sublime, unbeatable.

At the recommendation of Andrew, I purchased A Time of Gifts and gave it to my father. I keep reading it in snatches - you can open it anywhere; it's like a Persian carpet - and I think I've read most of it. The brilliantly purple bits are a guilty pleasure, as I am a sometime member of the purple school myself. The 19-year old Fermor is an intellectual glutton, willing to lose himself in wonder at anything rich and strange, and, despite his wide-eyed wonder and his taste for aesthetic sweets, an unnerving escape artist and resourceful bandit, able and willing to mix with anyone and fiddle with any language. But I can't help but compare A Time of Gifts to Belloc's Path to Rome, which I'm afraid does beat it.