Tongue & Groove

My friend Laban thought I would love this book.  He gave me a copy ages ago, and I've only just gotten to it over the holiday weekend.  He was right.  I do love it. 

It's so exciting to find a new writer you like.  In this book, I love the lush language, the precise verbs, the way the stanzas build and push and gesture toward something beyond themselves.  It's a beautiful book, and for me, it was refreshing.  After drafting a chapter a day on this forward-rushing novel I'm writing, I loved the chance to slow down and linger on language that's so rich, dense with image, and thoughtfully selected.

I'll confide:  I even did this weird thing I do sometimes with work I really like.  I got out my notebook and pen and went through the whole book, copying down all the words and phrases that really grabbed me, arranging them in columns and loops on the page.  It was a pleasant hour dedicated to nothing more and nothing less than the pure love of language. 

(I once spent days copying out all the introductory paragraphs from Maeve Brennan's story collection The Rose Garden.  And, as you'll see if you check out the first few pages of that book in the preview available on Amazon, that's a feat only a true fanatic would attempt.)

I don't know exactly where the compulsion comes from to feel the words of others unspooling under my own hand, but it's irresistible.  And Stephen Cramer's moving poems have so much lovely, carefully chosen language, that to do so was pure self-indulgence. 

Maybe because the book I'm working on is a kind of love-letter to New Orleans, cities have been on my mind lately, so this excerpt from "Wheels" caught my eye: 

(& let's not pretend--oh yes,
    it's coming:  there's something out there
with our names on it):  & we all

need a song that says mercy.  Song

that says O veiled & fathomless
    city, strangely bejeweled by such
sundered & dazzling creatures,
hear our simple pleas . . .

Cities have been on poet Judith Vollmer's mind lately, too, as she explained in a recent interview in The Writer's Chronicle.  More soon on that.