Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

I’m not even sure exactly how this one got on my list. But I guess that is what happens when you have something like 300 books on your list that have accumulated over the course of nearly ten years from a variety of sources.

Kitchen is the first novel by Japanese author Banana Yoshimoto (pen name for Mahoko Yoshimoto), written in 1988. It is a fairly short novella, delightfully compact, and achingly bittersweet. Paired with this, in the English translation from 1993, is Yoshimoto’s debut short story, “Moonlight Shadow,” which is also lovely. 

Both the novel and the short story are about grief, loss, and love. In each case, the narrator, a young woman starting out in the world, loses a person close to her, and then must navigate both the trauma of the loss and complicated feelings of love. 

In Kitchen, Mikage Sakurai already lost both parents when she was very young. She was raised by her grandmother, who dies early in the story. She is essentially taken in by a friend and his mother. Except that this is no ordinary family. Yuichi Tanabe is a pretty normal young man, but his situation is unusual. His mother died of cancer a number of years back. After that, his father came to terms with his gender identity, and now lives as a woman. (Sorry about the pronouns, I couldn’t make it make sense otherwise.) So, as Yuichi says, “I’d never lived with anyone but Eriko, she was my mother, my father. Because she was always just Eriko.” 

Eriko is a kind person, with a sense of humor, and takes in Mikage as part of the family. Eventually, Mikage gets a job as a chef (hence the name), and moves out. It is devastating when she learns that Eriko has been murdered by someone who resents his attraction to a transgender woman. 

Both Mikage and Yuichi are devastated, but unsure how to grieve, how to process things. And, to top it off, they are in love with each other, but can’t even admit it to themselves. 

The high point of the novel is a midnight delivery of katsudon as a declaration of love. It’s a fantastic scene, deliciously written. 

The book is so self-contained, so delicately written, it’s a polished gem. It feels very Japanese to me, although I’m probably not much of an expert on that. The emotions are handled with care, with perception, and with grace. It really is a lovely read. 

I want to mention a couple more lines. After Eriko’s death, Mikage comes over to Yuichi’s house, and sends him out with a shopping list so she can cook for him. (That’s both her coping mechanism and part of her bond with Eriko.) 

I heard the door close, and when I was alone I realized I was dead tired. The room was so unearthly quiet, I lost all sense of time being divided into seconds. I felt that I was the only person alive and moving in a world brought to a stop. 

Houses always feel like that after someone has died. 

 And then this one, a reflection by Mikage about her co-workers and their lives. 

Those women lived their lives happily. They had been taught, probably by caring parents, not to exceed the boundaries of their happiness regardless of what they were doing. But therefore they could never know real joy. Which is better? Who can say? Everyone lives the way she knows best. What I mean by “their happiness” is living a life untouched as much as possible by the knowledge that we are really, all of us, alone. That’s not a bad thing. Dressed in their aprons, their smiling faces like flowers, learning to cook, absorbed in their little troubles and perplexities, they fall in love and marry. I think that’s great. I wouldn’t mind that kind of life. Me, when I’m utterly exhausted by it all, when my skin breaks out, on those lonely evenings when I call my friends again and again and nobody’s home, then I despise my own life -- my birth, my upbringing, everything. I feel only regret for the whole thing. 

The catharsis of the ending feels so gratifying because of these earlier moments of raw grief and existential despair. 

“Moonlight Shadow” is a bit different, although it starts with a loss. Satsuki is reeling from the death of her long-time boyfriend. He died in a car crash along with his brother’s girlfriend. (Nothing scandalous about it - he was just giving her a ride.) Satsuki and the brother, Hiiragi, deal with their grief in different ways. Hiiragi wears his girlfriend’s school uniform everywhere. Satsuki takes up running (and probably anorexia as well.) Things change when Satsuki meets a mysterious woman, Urara, at the bridge where she and her boyfriend used to meet. Urara brings her to the bridge again at a certain time where they see a mystical phenomenon, and Urara, Hiiragi, and Satsuki are able to say goodbye to their beloveds. It isn’t as deep (or nearly as long) as Kitchen, but it shares the polished, bittersweet loveliness. It is possible, perhaps, to see “Moonlight Shadow” as a first draft of the themes which Kitchen would explore in more detail. 

I very much enjoyed this book, and can definitely recommend it as worth the time. Only a handful of Banana Yoshimoto’s books have been translated into English, but I may have to seek them out. 

The Dunio Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke

Source of book: I own this

Rilke had a resurgence in popularity during the so-called New Age Movement - along with Rumi. His often ambiguous, vaguely spiritual, and introspective poems seemed to fit with an ethos of “spirituality” and inspirational self help. It is rather a shame that this happened - for Rumi too, honestly. I believe that in both cases, the poets were more misunderstood than not. Essentially, their works functioned much the way that science works for snake-oil-alternative medicine: as a nice gloss to make hippie consumerism and hucksters seem deep and grounded. And, just as woo in the biological realm continually makes elementary-school level errors about science, woo in the psychological and spiritual realm makes elementary mistakes about mysticism and art. But, that is my opinion. Your mileage may vary. 

But leaving aside the fact that most people will first encounter Rilke and Rumi in less than ideal places, there is actually much to love about their poetry. (You can read my post on Rumi here, if you like.) For someone like me, who has long felt a connection to the more mystical side of Christianity, and who greatly enjoys poetry, poets like Rumi and Rilke and Tagore touch a part of me that resonates with the more universally human search for the Divine - for transcendence. Thus, poets who express spiritual ideas and experiences in a form that isn’t didactic but rooted in those “groanings which cannot be uttered” speak to me in a deeply personal way. This applies across a broad range. So, for example, the poetic parts of the Old Testament I find to be breathtaking. (Isaiah in particular is pure art.) I find certain expressly Christian poets to be wonderful. Milton, Donne, Herbert, Hopkins, and especially Rossetti come to mind. But there are others who do not share the specifics of my own faith tradition but who I find to be equally inspired, so to speak. (It is the epitome of arrogance to believe that somehow the Only True Faith™ somehow was revealed to white European and American theologians in the 16th through 19th Centuries - and that nobody else in history or geography had truth revealed to them. It seems more likely that God didn’t in fact love white people more than anyone else, and that there are visions of the truth - “through a glass, darkly” - that have appeared to many around the world and throughout history.) So, for me, I find Sufi Muslim Rumi’s exploration of truth and search for the Divine to be valuable as well. Ditto for the “song offerings” by the Hindu Rabindranath Tagore. 

And then there is Rilke, who was raised Catholic, but whose spirituality was…complicated to say the least. He had a rather unpleasant childhood. His mother was obsessed with his older sister, who died when she was a week old. His mother apparently saw him as a replacement for her, and dressed and treated him like a little girl for years. In a possibly related development, his parents’ marriage broke up eventually. Rilke left the Catholic church for a while and explored the Eastern Orthodox experience while traveling in Russia. One result of this journey was The Book of Hours, which is one of my all time favorite poetry collections. (Particularly in the luminous translation by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy.) 

Later, Rilke would continue to identify as Catholic, but he didn’t really participate in religious observance, and wrote much more like a mystic. In some ways, I feel closer to that sort of a journey these days, having left organized religion. Although I probably have a different overall viewpoint than Rilke, I would say - and closest to that of Tagore, perhaps? 

Anyway, the Dunio Elegies are usually considered, along with the Sonnets to Orpheus, to be Rilke’s greatest works. I found them quite intriguing, although I think The Book of Hours is still my favorite. 

An elegy is often defined as “a poem of serious reflection, usually a lament for the dead,” but that rather misstates the idea in my experience. For example, Donne’s elegies are not always serious, and are far more expansive than a lament for the dead. Likewise, Rilke’s elegies are indeed serious, but are more about contemplation of life, the universe, and everything, than a reflection on any specific dead person. Mortality is certainly a central theme. But the poems are directed toward the living and the question of how we live with our knowledge of our mortality. 

A central figure in the poem is an angel. Although it seems mostly metaphoric and functions as an outsider to the human experience. It is in a sense a messenger from the Divine (a very Christian idea) but not in the literal sense those of us raised in the Evangelical tradition would think of an angel. But as a metaphor for the boundary between beings living in eternity and those living in spacetime, it works quite well. Which is, I think, Rilke’s intent. Again, this is poetry, not theology. The truth lies in the spaces between the literal meaning of the words. 

I’m kind of unsure how to describe the poems themselves beyond that. They are written in a far freer verse than the more traditional Book of Hours. My particular edition contains the original German and the English translation on facing pages - which is really handy for comparing the poetic form. (My German is limited to performance instructions in Wagner and Mahler, so I can only sort of get the meaning once in a while.) Stephen Mitchell was the translator in my edition, and I thought his work was good. 

Since the elegies are all fairly long, I won’t quote any in full. However, there are individual lines which stood out. 

The opening lines of the first elegy are breathtaking - and an excellent portent of what is to follow:

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ 

hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me

suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed

in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing

but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,

and we are so awed because it serenely disdains

to annihilate us.

Rilke plays with the idea that we mortal humans have one difference with the rest of nature: we are aware of our own mortality and fail to become one with the Divine because of our fear and alienation from the rest of creation. Within the world of the poem cycle, this is Rilke’s view of “salvation.” It is wholeness with creation and a return to communion with the Divine. It is a psychological and spiritual healing. It is a light burden, an easy yoke; not rigid beliefs clung to in order to avoid hellfire. Obviously, this idea is anathema to modern Evangelicals - they are wedded to salvation as a legal transaction whereby God commits a brutal human sacrifice so that he can avoid eternally torturing all the flawed humans he made - now he’ll just eternally torture most of them. This is not, to be clear, the view of Christianity in general or the primary historical view. Rather, it is a way of looking at what Saint Paul called a “mystery” that appealed to some influential white European males during the Protestant Reformation. Many of us feel that, however satisfying it was 500 years ago, it rings really hollow now, and seems to reduce what is arguably the most shocking event in religious teaching (god becomes human, and, rather than come in triumph, suffers and is brutally murdered by humans) into a mere transaction. While also sidelining all the references to restoration, healing, the establishment of a kingdom which looks nothing like earthly power, and so on. 

I am not claiming here that Rilke is a theologian or that he has the pure truth here. Rather, he is expressing a mystical vision of union with the Divine and the salvation of humankind that is a powerful way of looking at things. Once you stop insisting on taking everything literally, you can see such an expansive and holistic vision. To use another metaphor, once you stop insisting on black and white, you can see in color. 

Moving on in the first elegy, here is another line that I loved. 

Oh and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite space

gnaws at our faces.

So many times, I have stood out at night and watched the stars. I have stood on a mountain near midnight at 11,000 feet and watched the Perseids fall. I have felt the wind gnaw at my face there. And in the desert on a winter night. Good lord, that is a great line. 

How about the opening to the fourth elegy? 

O trees of life, when does your winter come?

We are not in harmony, our blood does not forewarn us

like migratory birds’. Late, overtaken’

we force ourselves abruptly onto the wind

and fall to earth at some iced-over lake.

Flowering and fading come to us both at once.

And somewhere lions still roam and never know,

in their majestic power, of any weakness.

The fifth elegy was inspired by a painting by Picasso: Les Saltimbanques. The poem addresses itself to each of the characters in the painting - while still focusing on the overarching theme. I won’t quote from it, because it really needs to be read as a unit. Here is the picture, though, because it is a great example from Picasso’s “rose period.” 

This next quote, from the ninth elegy, fascinates me as well. 

Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely

in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all

other green, with tiny waves on the edges

of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze)--: why then

have to be human--and escaping from fate, keep longing for fate? . . .

            Oh not because happiness exists,

that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.

Not out of curiosity, not as practice for the heart, which 

would exist in the laurel too . . . 

But because truly being here is so much; because everything here

apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way

keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all. 

Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And wee too,

just once. And never again. But to have been

this once, completely, even if only once:

to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

I particularly like the bit about happiness as “too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.” That’s a great line that I might have to steal. 

The tenth elegy is probably my favorite, with its personification of Lament as a race of miners who have fallen out of favor in our modern times when only “happy” emotions are socially acceptable. There are several outstanding lines in this one. This is my favorite passage. 

But how alien, alas, are the streets of the city of grief,

where, in the false silence formed of continual uproar,

the figure cast from the mold of emptiness stoutly

swaggers: the gilded noise, the bursting memorial.

Oh how completely an angel would stamp out their market of solace,

bounded by the church with its ready-made consolations:

clean and disenchanted and shut as a post-office on Sunday.

Farther out, though, the city’s edges are curling with carnival.

Swings of freedom! Divers and jugglers of zeal!

And the shooting-gallery’s targets of prettified happiness,

which jump and kick back with a tinny sound

when hit by some better marksman. From cheers to chance

he goes staggering on, as booths with all sorts of attractions

are wooing, drumming, and bawling. For adults only

there is something special to see: how money multiplies, naked, 

right there on stage, money’s genitals, nothing concealed,

the whole action--, educational, and guaranteed 

to increase your potency . . . . . . . . . 

Hot dang. That’s quite the indictment of capitalist consumer culture. And also an inconvenient truth about organized religion: it has “ready-made consolations” - empty platitudes ready to be whipped out whenever the harsh realities of life bump up against trite dogma. It is one of many reasons that religion is irrelevant for many of my children’s generation. Rilke is one hundred percent correct to link trite religious platitudes with consumer culture too. Also marvelous: describing “prettified happiness” as a carnival game. It’s hard to believe he lived a century before social media “influencers.” And what else? The linking of pornography with the pursuit of wealth is fantastic. The culture of wealth (as exemplified best/worst by the Trump family) is absolutely about “hand” measuring contests and toxic masculinity. As I said, this is my favorite poem in the collection. I encourage you to read the whole thing. 

In my book, the Dunio Elegies also includes a few additional poems in an appendix. The first is a fragment of an elegy that was never published. While it is obviously incomplete, it is pretty good. I like this line:

Once poets resounded over the battlefield; what voice

can outshout the rattle of this metallic age

that is struggling on toward its careening future?

While I don’t think war ever was glorious, poetry about war certainly has been. And Rilke (who was traumatized by WWI) certainly foresaw the brutal impersonality of modern warfare - and indeed the industrial age. 

There is also an early version of the tenth elegy - which is clearly inferior to the later version, although it does contain some interesting ideas which were dropped from the final version. Finally, there is a short poem entitled “Antistrophes,” which is kind of a sexist ode to women. Not Rilke’s best work, to say the least. 

But the elegies themselves are beautiful, moving, and insightful. 

***

Note on the name: 

Rilke started writing the elgies in 1912, while he was the guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis at Dunio Castle, on the coast at Trieste. The term “castle” is no longer particularly accurate. There was once a castle on the site, built in the 11th Century - the ruins of that building stand next to the current building. The current castle was initially built in the 14th Century and modified periodically thereafter. In its current form, it has far too many outward facing windows to be considered a proper fortress. But the location is, shall we say, spectacular. 

 Rilke didn’t finish the elegies at Dunio. World War One intervened, and the trauma from that experience affected his ability to write. He finally finished them in 1922. 

Sing To It by Amy Hempel

Source of book: Borrowed from the library.

One of those recent quiz things made its rounds in a book-related facebook group I am part of. A particular question asked who tended to blow up your “To Be Read” list. Well, that would be me. I keep undermining my own reading plans by bringing home random books from the library. Particularly ones from the New Books shelf. This was one of those. 

I hadn’t read any Amy Hempel before, although I was familiar with the name. Her short stories have been published in a variety of magazines and so forth. This is her latest collection, and consists of a couple of regular short stories, a bunch of vignette length stories (one or two pages), and a longer story that is not quite big enough to be a novella, but longer than the typical short story. 

That particular story, “Cloudland,” is a haunting tale of a woman who gave birth in an unwed mothers home, only to learn later that they didn’t adopt out all the babies: they allowed some to starve to death and secretly buried them in the apple orchard. 

Other stories which stood out were the opening one “The Orphan Lamb” which is a mere four paragraphs long, but gives a striking and disturbing picture of a bad sexual relationship, and “A Full-Service Shelter,” a story about working in an animal shelter. 

Most of the stories are more haunting than pleasant, about bad relationships, affairs, loneliness, grief. The characters are all damaged, but seeking to move forward anyway. 

Hempel is a good writer, and the stories have the virtue of seeming just a little too short rather than a little too long. The book itself is also less than 150 double-spaced pages, so it is a super quick read. It was a good contrast to some of the longer books I am working on right now, and of a totally different style. (Although some of the themes do correspond, so that’s an interesting link.) 

I didn’t really take notes on this one, just read it through in a few days, and enjoyed the writing. It’s worth a read, and I intend to seek out some of her older collections. 

The Collected Sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay

Source of book: I own this. 

I picked this book up used from the library - a random find that cost next to nothing. I will confess that I hadn’t read anything by Edna St. Vincent Millay since my high school days, and I didn’t remember that much about the experience. In retrospect, I think it is likely that I was given one of her “safe” poems, one that tends to get picked by literature courses, rather than her more dangerous and radical ones.

In any event, I was immediately taken by this collection - it is fantastic. It was one of the more pleasant surprises in this year’s reading. I am a great lover of sonnets anyway. The form itself speaks to me (and indeed, my pathetic attempts at poetry during high school were often in sonnet form), and hers are some of the best I have read. 

 Edna St. Vincent Millay was a fascinating character. Living and writing mostly during the first half of the 20th Century, she refused to adhere to convention. She was raised by a divorced mother, whose poverty was in contrast to her dedication to introducing her daughters to classic literature. All three daughters were infamous at school for speaking their minds. Edna herself insisted in being called by her middle name: Vincent. Her teacher refused, calling her by random female names starting with V. (The name comes from the St. Vincent hospital, where Millay’s uncle was saved from death at one point.) 

Millay was openly bisexual, documenting relationships with women from her teens. Many of her poems are about love between women, which caused some scandal during her lifetime. (Although, to be fair, times were less puritanical in the 1920s than they would become later.) Millay would eventually marry in her 30s, after a number of love affairs with both men and women, having refused multiple offers of marriage, gotten pregnant, and had an abortion. The marriage was explicitly an open relationship, with both spouses continuing to have affairs with others. Her husband (like her) was strongly feminist, and fully supported her work. In fact, he took primary responsibility for domestic duties. 

In 1936, she was flung from an automobile in a freak accident, and suffered significant nerve and spinal damage. In constant pain for the rest of her life, she became addicted to morphine and alcohol, which contributed to her death at age 58. 

Even more tragic than that, however, was the tale of her career. She had previously been opposed to war, but, seeing the dangers of Fascism long before most of her fellow artists, she strongly advocated in favor of the United States entering World War II. This led to her essentially being blacklisted in artistic circles, effectively ending her career. At the same time, pro-Fascist poets such as Ezra Pound continued to receive accolades. 

Millay wrote about 160 sonnets, about the same as Shakespeare. They are not all related in the same way, but there are definitely themes that flow through most of them. There are three sonnet sets, both of which are haunting and moving. The first is Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree, which tells, over the course of 17 poems, the story of a wife caring for her dying husband who she separated from years ago. The second is The Harp Weaver, a tale of a mother who freezes to death creating a lavish wardrobe for her child. It is not difficult to see in both of these a reflection of Millay’s mother, whose life was harshly circumscribed by her failed marriage to a worthless man, and her need to sacrifice herself to keep her children fed. The third collection is Fatal Interview, believed to have been written about a long term relationship of hers which had ended. It is a devastating look at love, loss, and the ravages of time and age. 

Although there are a few exceptions, these themes tend to run through the other sonnets as well. Millay’s musings on the nature of love, desire, sex, loss, grief, pain, and endings are just amazing, really. I had not realized that these poems existed, but this book is now one of my favorites. 

Here are a few that stood out - although I could have listed most of them here. This one is from her first collection, Renascence, written in her late teens. 

THOU art not lovelier than lilacs,—no,     

Nor honeysuckle; thou art not more fair     

Than small white single poppies,—I can bear 

Thy beauty; though I bend before thee, though 

From left to right, not knowing where to go,        

I turn my troubled eyes, nor here nor there     

Find any refuge from thee, yet I swear 

So has it been with mist,—with moonlight so.   

Like him who day by day unto his draught     

Of delicate poison adds him one drop more        

Till he may drink unharmed the death of ten, 

Even so, inured to beauty, who have quaffed     

Each hour more deeply than the hour before, 

I drink—and live—what has destroyed some men.

This illustrates one of her skills: taking a mushy love-sentiment, and somehow turning it a wee bit poisonous. There is a sting in this and other poems. Like this one. 

Love, though for this you riddle me with darts,

And drag me at your chariot till I die,—

Oh, heavy prince! O, panderer of hearts!—

Yet hear me tell how in their throats they lie

Who shout you mighty: thick about my hair,

Day in, day out, your ominous arrows purr,

Who still am free, unto no querulous care

A fool, and in no temple worshiper!

I, that have bared me to your quiver’s fire,

Lifted my face into its puny rain,

Do wreathe you Impotent to Evoke Desire

As you are Powerless to Elicit Pain!

(Now will the god, for blasphemy so brave,

Punish me, surely, with the shaft I crave!)

A bit of reverse psychology there, and yet so much angst. 

This next one is definitely a favorite. Having been raised in a subculture pounded into us the ideas that Marriage is Miserable Hard Work™, Commitment™, Keep Your Vows Even If Abused™ and the rest of the idolatry of marriage and family, I have been drawn very much to the counter-idea: that a good relationship shouldn’t feel like martyrdom, and that one should actually be happy to be around one’s beloved. 

OH, THINK not I am faithful to a vow!

Faithless am I save to love's self alone.

Were you not lovely I would leave you now:

After the feet of beauty fly my own.

Were you not still my hunger's rarest food,

And water ever to my wildest thirst,

I would desert you–think not but I would!–

And seek another as I sought you first.

But you are mobile as the veering air,

And all your charms more changeful than the tide,

Wherefore to be inconstant is no care:

I have but to continue at your side.

So wanton, light and false, my love, are you,

I am most faithless when I most am true.  

Elizabeth Barrett Browning also captured some of this in her sonnets (also favorites of mine - I’m a hopeless romantic). Here is another one with delightful ambiguity about love:

Loving you less than life, a little less

Than bitter-sweet upon a broken wall

Or brush-wood smoke in autumn, I confess

I cannot swear I love you not at all.

For there is that about you in this light—

A yellow darkness, sinister of rain—

Which sturdily recalls my stubborn sight

To dwell on you, and dwell on you again.

And I am made aware of many a week

I shall consume, remembering in what way

Your brown hair grows about your brow and cheek

And what divine absurdities you say:

Till all the world, and I, and surely you,

Will know I love you, whether or not I do.

Less lighthearted is this one:

Once more into my arid days like dew,

Like wind from an oasis, or the sound

Of cold sweet water bubbling underground,

A treacherous messenger, the thought of you

Comes to destroy me; once more I renew

Firm faith in your abundance, whom I found

Long since to be but just one other mound

Of sand, whereon no green thing ever grew.

And once again, and wiser in no wise,

I chase your colored phantom on the air,

And sob and curse and fall and weep and rise

And stumble pitifully on to where,

Miserable and lost, with stinging eyes,

Once more I clasp,—and there is nothing there.

Again, just a brilliant picture. Bitter and yet full of desire. 

This next one is another favorite. 

Let you not say of me when I am old,

In pretty worship of my withered hands

Forgetting who I am, and how the sands

Of such a life as mine run red and gold

Even to the ultimate sifting dust, "Behold,

Here walketh passionless age!"—for there expands

A curious superstition in these lands,

And by its leave some weightless tales are told.

In me no lenten wicks watch out the night;

I am the booth where Folly holds her fair;

Impious no less in ruin than in strength,

When I lie crumbled to the earth at length,

Let you not say, "Upon this reverend site

The righteous groaned and beat their breasts in prayer." 

A few layers to this one, to say the least. Millay challenges the idea that the elderly are sexless, or extra-righteous, or merely to be reverenced. She is still herself, passionate, impious, and the same as she ever was. 

I quote this next one because of an experience of my wife. This obnoxious racist dickhead who was the parent of a kid (poor guy) who was in band with one of my kids came up to her and said something nearly word for word as that said in this poem. (Do I even need to add that this guy is a huge Trump fan? Or that he was FINALLY banned from a local homeschool forum after repeated posts of neo-confederate and other vile propaganda?) 

Oh, oh, you will be sorry for that word!

Give back my book and take my kiss instead.

Was it my enemy or my friend I heard,

“What a big book for such a little head!”

Come, I will show you now my newest hat,

And you may watch me purse my mouth and prink!

Oh, I shall love you still, and all of that.

I never again shall tell you what I think.

I shall be sweet and crafty, soft and sly;

You will not catch me reading any more:

I shall be called a wife to pattern by;

And some day when you knock and push the door,

Some sane day, not too bright and not too stormy,

I shall be gone, and you may whistle for me.

Dude was literally acting surprised my wife was reading a “big book.” He probably has no idea about the stuff that she read while still a kid. After this incident, when she withered him with a glare, we have taken to calling him “Tiny Books.” Because his books are probably like the “hands” of his political idol. I am also reminded of one of my favorite bits by James Thurber. 

I unfortunately cannot quote all of Fatal Interview, but highly recommend it as a poem cycle. Here is the opening sonnet:

What thing is this that, built of salt and lime

And such dry motes as in the sunbeam show,

Has power upon me that do daily climb

The dustless air?—for whom those peaks of snow

Whereup the lungs of man with borrowed breath

Go labouring to a doom I may not feel,

Are but a pearled and roseate plain beneath

My wingèd helmet and my wingèd heel.

What sweet emotions neither foe nor friend

Are these that clog my flight? what thing is this

That hastening headlong to a dusty end

Dare turn upon me these proud eyes of bliss?

Up, up, my feathers!—ere I lay you by

To journey barefoot with a mortal joy.

From there, the cycle veers from the ecstacy of love to the depths of despair to the resignation to the depredations of time. This one, from early in the series, is as good of a love poem as I have read. 

Not in a silver casket cool with pearls

Or rich with red corundum or with blue,

Locked, and the key withheld, as other girls

Have given their loves, I give my love to you;

Not in a lovers'-knot, not in a ring

Worked in such fashion, and the legend plain—

Semper fidelis, where a secret spring

Kennels a drop of mischief for the brain:

Love in the open hand, no thing but that,

Ungemmed, unhidden, wishing not to hurt,

As one should bring you cowslips in a hat

Swung from the hand, or apples in her skirt,

I bring you, calling out as children do:

"Look what I have!—And these are all for you."

It just gets better every time I re-read it. And the form is perfect. The two ideas in the two quatrains, followed by the turn in line nine, and the last couplet so memorable and true. 

A later poem from the series take the theme carpe diem, but with the twist that what youth doesn’t use, age will twist into something ugly. Unfortunately, what came to mind with this one was the way that my parents’ generation has mostly grown unwise with age, giving in to “compromise and fear,” selling their souls to preserve a mythical past. 

Heart, have no pity on this house of bone:

Shake it with dancing, break it down with joy.

No man holds mortgage on it; it is your own;

To give, to sell at auction, to destroy.

When you are blind to moonlight on the bed,

When you are deaf to gravel on the pane,

Shall quavering caution from this house instead

Cluck forth at summer mischief in the lane?

All that delightful youth forbears to spend

Molestful age inherits, and the ground

Will have us; therefore, while we're young, my friend—

The Latin's vulgar, but the advice is sound.

Youth, have no pity; leave no farthing here

For age to invest in compromise and fear.

This next one is pretty dang dark. The relationship has begun to turn a bit, and the combination of doubt, ennui, and suspicion creep around the corner. 

Most wicked words!-forbear to speak them out.

Utter them not again; blaspheme no more

Against our love with maxims learned from Doubt:

Lest Death should get his foot inside the door.

We are surrounded by a hundred foes;

And he that at your bidding joins our feast,

I stake my heart upon it, is one of those,

Nor in their councils does he sit the least.

Hark not his whisper: he is Time’s ally,

Kinsman to Death, and leman of Despair:

Believe that I shall love you till I die;

Believe; and thrust him forth; and arm the stair;

And top the walls with spikes and splintered glass

That he pass gutted should again he pass.”

While not the bulk of the poems, there are a few which are about altogether different topics. One that I found particularly interesting is this one, written in honor of suffragist Inez Milholland. Who also happened to be Millay’s husband’s first wife - she died a few years prior to Millay’s relationship with her husband. 

Upon this marble bust that is not I

Lay the round, formal wreath that is not fame;

But in the forum of my silenced cry

Root ye the living tree whose sap is flame.

I, that was proud and valiant, am no more; ---

Save as a dream that wanders wide and late,

Save as a wind that rattles the stout door,

Troubling the ashes in the sheltered grate.

The stone will perish; I shall be twice dust.

Only my standard on a taken hill

Can cheat the mildew and the red-brown rust

And make immortal my adventurous will.

Even now the silk is tugging at the staff:

Take up the song; forget the epitaph.

That’s a seriously great epitaph. Milholland would die before realizing the dream of voting rights for women - a cause Millay also supported. 

This next poem is more about nature - both nature in the sense of the natural world, but also in the sense of human nature. And not a very nice part of that second nature either. 

Enormous moon, that rise behind these hills

Heavy and yellow in a sky unstarred

And pale, your girth by purple fillets barred

Of drifting cloud, that as the cool sky fills

With planets and the brighter stars, distills

To thinnest vapor and floats valley-ward, —

You flood with radiance all this cluttered yard,

The sagging fence, the chipping window sills!

 Grateful at heart as if for my delight

You rose, I watch you through a mist of tears,

Thinking how man, who gags upon despair,

Salting his hunger with the sweat of fright

Has fed on cold indifference all these years,

Calling it kindness, calling it God’s care.

Millay was concerned about the modern American - or perhaps Western - tendency toward social darwinism and of a “science” devoid of humanity or empathy. In our own times, we are still continuing to pay for this soulless vision of technology and raw capitalism. As Millay points out, we embrace data points without context, without wisdom, without kindness. It is power for power’s sake. 

Upon this age, that never speaks its mind,

This furtive age, this age endowed with power

To wake the moon with footsteps, fit an oar

Into the rowlocks of the wind, and find

What swims before his prow, what swirls behind ---

Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,

Rains from the sky a meteoric shower

Of facts . . . they lie unquestioned, uncombined.

Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill

Is daily spun; but there exists no loom

To weave it into fabric; undefiled

Proceeds pure Science, and has her say; but still

Upon this world from the collective womb

Is spewed all day the red triumphant child. 

It’s a bit of a downer to end on, alas. Millay’s poems do seem to get darker over time, and it is easy enough to see why. This poem was published in a collection dated 1939, and there is no secret about the state of the world at that time. Fascism threatened to envelope at least Europe, and possibly the world. Although it would be anachronistic to read the horrors of nuclear war into this poem, it fits all too well. 

The collection as a whole is more thoughtful than exuberant, more focused on time and loss than on the ecstacy of love - although that is present as well. The poems stand up so well, though, because of this emotionally realistic approach to life and love. All is not well, and along with joy and love come loss and pain.