For more than twenty years now, Gina Berriault has been writing remarkably sensitive and powerful fiction. Her style is lucid, lyrical and very much her own, and she seems to have any number of strategies for breaking your heart. The first Gina Berriault story I ever read, long ago, let me know at once that…
There was a man when I was fourteen who came to our house to dig out the ditch. I was at the age when boredom was as thick as the mud at the bottom of the river and everything – my mother, my father, the road, the house, the barn, all the trees that I…
I am mentioning, long distance, my vacation. She remembers raspberries. “There were so many, it was ridiculous. In the city, they were something like eighty-nine cents a half-pint. We cleaned out the bottom of the hill and by the time we came down again new ones had gotten ripe. I must have eaten about ten…
1917-1977 O to break loose, like the chinook salmon jumping and falling back, nosing up to the impossible stone and bone-crushing waterfall – raw-jawed, weak-fleshed there, stopped by ten steps of the roaring ladder, and then to clear the top on the last try, alive enough to spawn and die. Stop, back off. The salmon…
I stood in front of City Lights the other afternoon. Allen Ginsberg had just dropped off a manuscript called “Howl.” Lawrence let me read it. I thought it was quite good. Bob Kaufman tried to punch me, but I don’t think he particularly disliked the manuscript. Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady drove up. Neal was…
Gaunt Immortality, in your golds and blacks, Consoler hideously laureled, who makes Death into a maternal bosom, loving— Pious device and ruse; marvelous lie! Who does not know, and who does not deny That skull’s infinite hollow, vacant and laughing. Deep fathers, heads untenanted and full, Who under the weight of so much spaded soil,…
The rolls of the river unfold, trees come green, birds sing, cleverly fish keep deep unseen; water is blue, is blue to green, idle lines, worm and fly keep Dennis asleep by his pole. Flowers will lean when breezes flow, honey bee, rising seed; he thought there would never be snow. Birds shake a wing,…
Swifts or barn swallows — No matter which, Well named, Swoop down like angry bees All about my head. Like little whistling darts they are, Shot by some vengeful spirit From up in the barn loft. So many questions aimed at me. What do they want of a poor old soul, Slow witted, unswift of…
translated by Michael Steinberg It is stirring to observe how civilisation ever enlarges its dominion, how even from races otherwise untouched by higher education, talent emerges to hoist itself to remarkable heights. At the house of Privy Councillor of Commerce R., I made the acquaintance of a young man who unites to extraordinary gifts an…
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