|
|
![]() |
Woodstock Times - Book Review | 8/20/2009 |
 |
| |
|
|
| |
|
by Paul Smart
Gay Leonhardt's Amazon-available Swash: A Beach Book is a quietly seductive, subtly subversive literary work, as well as a considerable piece of art, on several levels. Consider its complexities, and beauty, the same way she recognizes and riffs on the subject's covered in this first of a planned series of such books.
It's all about the foam left after a wave rides up a beach. About the essence of the ephemeral, in some ways, but also a very real thing...and it's as easily remembered as the feel of sand between the toes, or the pull of the ocean after one's been in it for some time. As a result, it hints at the power of waves, their means of building and eroding true borders, real constructs.
It's a perfect gift for anyone who spends time walking beaches, or simply yearning to do so. Great for summer homes, but also for our more localized winter abodes, where the very sun-drenched images of foam on waves as well as sand should prove a blessed tonic come the darker months ahead.
"Being at the beach is primarily an experience of witnessing distance. The swash brings the distance to your feet with white foam," Leonhardt writes at one point, evoking the genesis of this evocative, effective project. "While sauntering along in the swash, I slip out of the current of my life and the routine of linear events. Each swash handles the water and shapes it into a particular of that moment, turning the moment into a configuration with detail."
The book is short yet full, a mixture of similarly-sized images of swash, sometimes with horizon lines to lend reference, at others with subtle disorienting effects created by collaging means. The text runs like a series of meditations along the bottom of some, but not all, pages. It reads well in one sitting, then calls back for further perusals, and even reading aloud to loved ones. Or just to oneself.
"For me continually witnessing how all waves move into swash creates a thick blanket of composure and peace that sometimes deepens into an expansive acceptance and other times can build into a mild euphoria. Waves at the beach create the notion that arrivals and endings are the same thing."
Leonhardt, known for her work helping to establish the Woodstock Land Conservancy as well as a noted book artist for years, says her future "Beach Books," all to be similarly self-published and made available through Amazon as well as key bookstores, will take for subjects such other contemplative matters as waves, the books one reads while at the beach, imaginary seas, sand, and foam itself.
""Catching the moment that the very last of the swash is visible is like watching embers from fireworks float down and extinguish," she notes, allowing one to realize that sometimes what is best said has to be written, and focused on things away from our everyday lives and homes. "No matter how many times the patterns are witnessed, it's intriguing and charming. The certainty that there are constant variations in the swash is a reassurance. There is no finality of vision - just swash for as far as I can see."++
Visit www.gayleonhardt.com, local bookstores, or look for Swash on Amazon for further information... and copies of this gem.
Storytellers
Short stories are a telling art form, utilizing as distinct a set of skills as a pop songwriter's, yet also dipping into and reflecting wider literary forms, from poetry to the novel and memoir...as keenly as all music touches on opera or chants.
Two new books by local authors, one a seasoned pro and the other a first collection of interlinked stories, indicate the current breadth of the field, its various depths, tricks, and incandescent ways with catharsis. They also show a wealth of lessons learned and moved on from, stylistic differences (and choices), and together could be used as the basis for a lengthy exegesis on the new centrality of the Catskills to this dwindling form that once brought the world Rip Van Winkle and other tales of our region.
Shady-based author James Lasdun's new collection of stories, his third, and the first after an interim filled with two novels and a pair of well-received books of verse, is entitled It's Beginning To Hurt and starts with "An Anxious Man" seated in his car listening to an NPR report on how the stocks he owns are failing while on vacation. Perfectly, the book ends, in "Caterpillars," with an American family, of sorts, running into elements of both ecological change, and their misogynist reaction to it, while also on vacation...in Europe.
In between, the well-respected teacher and literary figure writes about divorcees moved to small villages, memories of first loves, a reticent man's travels with a veteran womanizer, the paranormal, sibling rivalries, and a host of characters recognizable for their tenuous holds on wished-for livelihoods and almost-happy lives. Lasdun's protagonists face life's twists and turns wanting to effect change in conscientious ways, yet often end up dumbfounded by fate's fickleness, learning instead to go with the flow or, just as often, keep struggling in their upriver swims regardless of any forward movement.
The author, who has signed copies of his book that are for sale at Golden Notebook on Tinker Street, is an unobtrusive writer who makes his intricate stories appear simple, natural, no matter what or who he's writing about. His conversations feel overheard, awkward as real life, and yet his eye for the way events turn on the thinnest dime, or ha'penny, is consistently spot-on. Moreover, his latest shows how well he's observed the subtle shifts in all of us over recent years, with folks feeling beholden to need things now they never even knew they wanted. Or always wanting a bit more.
Although only one story, "Oh, Death," seems directly based on his home road, instances of recognition abound, no matter whether his terrain's London or the Greek highlands, Manhattan or a rural campus in Vermont. His narrator may as often-as-not be omniscient, almost cruel in his detachment and humor, and yet his wives and family members, faulted friends and casual acquaintances are as keenly drawn as the folks we run into, everywhere up here, on a daily basis.
He writes, in "Oh, Death:"
"I liked this mountain music. I'd started listening to it a few years before and found I was susceptible to its mercurial moods and colors, more so than ever since we'd moved up here to mountains of our own, where it had come to seem conjured directly out of the bristly, unyielding landscape itself, the rapid successions of pain and sweetness, tension and release, frugality and spilling richness, rising straight out of these thickly wooded crags and gloomy gullies with their sun-shot clearings and glittering, wind-riffled creeks," "I would listen to it in the car as I drove to work, an hour down the thruway. The lucrative drudgery of my job left me with a depleted sensation, as though I'd spent the days asleep or dead, but driving there and back, I would play my Clinch Mountain Boys CDs at full-volume, and as their frenzied, propulsive energies surged into me, I would bray along at the top of my lungs with Ralph Stanley on 'Bright Morning Star' or 'Little Birdie' or 'Black Mountain Rag,' harmonizing with unabashed timelessness, and a feeling of joy would arise in me as if a second self, full of fiery, passionate vitality, were at the point of awakening inside me."
You can feel the author's skills as a poet at work, as well as his sense of freedom at being able to hint at the same complexities he'd explore in a novel, always at play. Instead of tying his stories together with characters or plot, though, Lasdun works in "It's Beginning To Hurt" at painting a series of musical notes that capture the strange mood of these current times we inhabit.
Brent Robison's first collection, The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility, available from blissploypress.com and Golden Notebook, meanwhile interlocks its stories and characters with a gleeful sense of a writer's attempt to show all he's got. It's a great first book, right down to the fact of the author's having published it himself after running into the realities of today's publishing market for short story collections. Some of the stories rise to memorable slices of life, and the overall breadth of the characters engaged, and the types of experience worked through, show a true humanist's heart at work. Moreover, the use of a fractured story structure, where characters, actions and similar reactions come together over time, lend the overall work the tragic air of great epics, with people doing all they can to escape fate's plans for them; and yet also the bittersweet quality we recognize in the best comedies, where folks keep pressing on, no matter what pushes them back.
Sure, the plot lines sometimes feel more forced than Lasdun's, and Robison sometimes seems to be speaking through his characters and situations, riffing on the job at hand. This may be why this work has faced greater difficulties getting to print than the other...one's stories are almost impossible to quote, since they're so tied together with sparse dialogue, descriptions, plot movements and story twists; while the other seems destined to be heard aloud.
Robison seems intent on cramming all he knows and feels, all he has seen and experienced, into what he is writing. Which resonates, more often than not, in a way that I suspect reflects many readers own thoughts, feelings and experiences...
"Emily can scarcely believe what she is reading; her own private demons revealed on the page, lived by someone else. Or somehow leaked from her mind into the mind of a man she's never met, who wrote it down as if taking dictation and published it for the world to see. She feels simultaneously thrilled, robbed, and mystified," Robison writes in a section of "This Handful of Pebbles," following a mother by her son's hospital bed following a DWI accident.
The difference between these books likely just comes down to a matter of origins... Lasdun being British, and Robison from the West, via New Jersey. One teaches craft while the other practices the sorts of jobs his characters seek to escape.
As much as it has to do with the experiences of writing, of patience with what one is saying...which is not always one's best way.
Robison's reach is heroic here, well-meaning, and successful in the ways he grabs so much of life for us to examine, then, within ourselves. Lasdun is colder, catching a wariness inside and simultaneously revealing some elements we may have suspected but not yet seen described in the world that's changing around us.
Somehow, the end results fit well together, and are each of equal enjoyment, in the end. Look at it as a menu stretching from O'Connor and Maupassant to Bukowski and Boyle. One comes away from these books looking for more from each author...and others who tackle this great genre that seems, somehow, so perfect for our own regional joys. And vistas.++
Brent Robison was scheduled to read and sign copies of his book The Principle of Ultimate Indivisibility, at Joshua's 5 p.m. Thursday, August 20.
Click here to discuss this article in our forum.
|
|
|
|
|
Food