Amherst

Love and romance reside at the heart of British author William Nicholson's work, be it in his screenplays (Shadowlands) or in his prose fiction (Motherland). In his historical novel, Amherst, two secret love affairs--past and present--come together under the influence of poet, Emily Dickinson, who has a vivid impact on all their lives.

Nicholson threads the needle of his intriguing, well-plotted narrative with Alice Dickinson, a contemporary, 20-something, London copywriter whose shared last name with the poet draws her to Emily's work. Alice travels to Amherst, Ma., to research a screenplay she's writing about the real-life, 1880s love affair between Austin Dickinson, Emily's 50 year-old, unhappily married brother, and Mabel Loomis Todd, the 24 year-old wife of an Amherst College professor.

Once Alice arrives in the States, she boards in the home of Nick Crocker, a handsome, married, charismatic English Literature academic in his fifties. Alice's research into the mysteries of love, fidelity and passion is soon complicated when she and Nick begin an affair that ultimately parallels the intense complexity found in Austin and Mabel's relationship that was secretly consummated in the home that Emily Dickinson shared with her sister, Vinny. 

The plotlines of these tender, revealing love stories are told via alternating chapters. Nicholson draws from historical texts and includes letters along with Dickinson's poems in order to fictionally recreate the long-standing affair between Austin and Mabel—and the significant role that Emily, an enigmatic spinster-recluse, played in their romance, as well as how Emily's ghost permeates the relationship between Alice and Nick.

Amherst by William Nicholson

Simon & Schuster, $26 Hardcover, 9781476740409, 304 pp   

Publication Date: February 10, 2015

To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE

Note: This review is a reprint and is being posted (in a slightly different form) with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (2/17/15), click HERE

Dog Songs

Dog Songs is a collection of new and favorite poems by esteemed, popular poet Mary Oliver. The 35 poems plus one longer prose-poem-essay that cap off this slender volume, revolve around dogs and all they mean personally to Oliver, while elevating to more universal themes of the human-canine bond and how the companionship of dogs anchors people to the natural, "heaven of earth" world.

Pen and ink drawings by illustrator John Burgoyne mirror the unadorned language that makes Oliver's poetry both intriguing and accessible. Each poem evokes poignant, thoughtful observations about the dogs that have enriched Oliver's life and work. Often in just a few, carefully chosen phrases, simple dog pleasures such as daily walks, frolicking in the grass, smelling flowers, chasing mice, darting ahead and going off leash depict a dog's ability to live joyfully in the moment without the anxieties of the past or the future. These vivid metaphors inspire human counterparts to also seek a more vibrant richness of life.

Oliver's poems about her beloved dog Percy—named after Percy Bysshe Shelley, the English Romantic poet—are succinct and clever. Percy's evolution is creatively explored with insight, compassion and humor as he mischievously eats books, has a rendezvous before he's neutered and even keeps the author company while she does her income taxes. "I am trying to live...the examined life. But there are days I wish there was less in my head to examine," writes the poet. Dogs, in their carefree, unconditional friendship and adoration, offer Oliver—and readers—a hopeful respite.

Dog Songs by Mary Oliver

Penguin Press HC, $26.95 hardcover, 97801594204784 , 144 pp

Publication Date: October 8, 2013

To order this book via INDIEBOUND link HERE

Note: This review is a reprint and is being posted (in a slightly different form) with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review on Shelf Awareness: Reader's Edition (10/22/13), click HERE

New Year Resolve

May Sarton

To stop allowing the clutter
To clutter my mind
Like dirty snow,
Shove it off and find
Clear time, clear water.

Time for a change,
Let silence in like a cat
Who has sat at my door
Neither wild nor strange
Hoping for food from my store
And shivering on the mat.

Let silence in.
She will rarely speak or mew,
She will sleep on my bed
And all I have ever been
Either false or true
Will live again in my head.

For it is now or not
As old age silts the stream,
To shove away the clutter,
To untie every knot,
To take the time to dream,
To come back to still water.

"New Year Resolve" by May Sarton, from Collected Poems 1930-1993. © W.W. Norton & Co., 1993.  Reprinted with permission.  As featured on The Writer's Almanac 12/30/12 

Purchase more of May Sarton's work HERE

Poem for a Summer Day

As a writer, I try to read a poem-a-day...So admiring of the form - the rich choice of words/imagery, the cadence, the compression of ideas.  It's not easy to write a great poem, but this one reads perfect!

Want to read a poem a day?  Check out THE WRITER'S ALMANAC with Garrison Keillor

In the Moment by Maxine Kumin

Some days the pond

wears a glaze of yellow pollen.

Some days it is clean-swept.
The trout leap up, feasting on insects.

A modest size, it sits
like a soup tureen in a surround of white

pine where Rosie, 14 lbs., some sort
of rescued terrier, part bat

(the ears), part anteater (the nose),
shyly paddles in the shallows

for salamanders, frogs
and little painted turtles. She logged                              

ten years down south in a kennel, secured
in a crate at night. Her heart murmur

will carry her off, no one can say when.
Meanwhile she is rapt in

the moment, our hearts leap up observing.
Dogs live in the moment, pursuing

that brilliant dragonfly called pleasure.
Only we, sunstruck in this azure

day, must drag along the backpacks
of our past, must peer into the bottom muck

of what's to come, scanning the plot
for words that say another year, or not.

"In the Moment" by Maxine Kumin, from Where I Live. © Norton, 2012. Reprinted with permission. (buy now) 

The American Voice In Poetry

I'm pleased to announce that one of my poems has been included in a recently released anthology entitled, THE AMERICAN VOICE IN POETRY: THE LEGACY OF WHITMAN, WILLIAMS, AND GINSBERG (edited by Maria Mazziotti Gillan).  The anthology is a compilation of award-winning poems selected to celebrate the 30th anniversary of The Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College (NJ).  The book has been published with grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the Discover Jersey Arts program.

It was an honor to read my contribution to the project at the launch party/reading and reception held today at the beautiful and historic Hamilton Arts Club in Paterson (NJ).  What a fun and inspiring afternoon!   

The Record newspaper recently featured a piece about the Poetry Center and the efforts of award-winning poet, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, editor of the anthology and the Founder and Executive Director of the Poetry Center.  Link to read THE ARTICLE.

To order a copy of the anthology, THE AMERICAN VOICE IN POETRY, visit: www.pccc.edu/poetry or call 973-684-6555

Happy National Poetry Month!

If it's April, then it must be National Poetry Month. Link to this profile about Poets House in New York City.  It was originally featured on Bill Moyers' Journal (PBS).

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

Head, Heart

Heart weeps.
Head tries to help heart.
Head tells heart how it is, again:
You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But even the earth will go, someday.
Hearts feels better, then.
But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of heart.
Heart is so new to this.
I want them back, says heart.
Head is all heart has.
Help, head. Help heart.

--a short story by Lydia Davis

There's been a lot of buzz over The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis recently released (as a 752-page tome) by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The longest story tops out at nine pages (3-4 is the average), while others are as short as a single sentence. Each story--long or short--is a gem. The range of Davis's prose is intellectual, insightful, witty, poetic and always profound. It takes surgical-like precision to work in such brevity, and Davis is a master of language and form.

The New Yorker recently ran a feature on the book, as did The Village Voice.