A library sale treasure and "modern" poetry

This volume of "Modern British Poetry" was copyrighted in 1920, reprinted in 1925, and contains poems by the following: Thomas Hardy (including my fav., "The Darkling Thrush"), Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, A. E. Housman, William Butler Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, G. K. Chesterton, D. H. Lawrence, Seigfied Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves, and many others.

Most of the poets I've listed above were alive when this volume was first published. What a thrill to read the table of contents and see only the dates of their birth; to consider a time in history when they were all alive, possibly well, and perhaps still writing.

But what I find most fascinating about this collection is the use of the word "modern" in the title. The modernist movement was just getting underway when this collection was published. Between printings, a youngish T. S. Eliot -- an American writing in England -- would published "The Waste Land." Seven years previous, he gave the world "Prufrock."

Those poems are not included here. They wouldn't have to wait long, but it would be another day before they were collected into anything similar. By then, only a handful of the poems included in this library sale treasure would be considered valuable enough to stand beside the peach-stained rolled trousers of Alfred J. Prufrock.

Rosalie K. Fry, World War II, and the Orkney Islands

A few years ago, a wonderful Fry fan mailed me Something About the Author Autobiography series. vol. 11, which includes a chapter written by Rosalie K. Fry. As Child of the Western Isles is my favorite Fry book, I was fascinated by the following excerpt in which Fry describes the lovely setting of one of her WRNS posts, a naval base in the Orkney Islands:

"We were based on Hoy, the second-largest island of the group and, incidentally, the hilliest and most beautiful of them all. Here we were housed in long wooden huts with thick hawsers fastened over their roofs at intervals to hold them down securely during the tremendous gales that sweep across these islands. As a defense against the wind, we always wore our hats tied on with woolen scarves.

Beyond the immediate surroundings of the naval base, Hoy was wild and very beautiful. As a watchkeeper I was often off duty in the daytime. So I was determined to explore as many of the islands as possible and bought a detailed map on which to plot my many trips...

Whenever one went on the islands there were seals and rare birds to be seen and luxurious masses of wildflowers which always seemed to be more brilliantly coloured than their counterparts elsewhere. There were also prehistoric remains, standing stones and buildings, and one marvelous Pictish village probably dating from about 500 BC...

Some years later these lovely islands helped to provide the settings for Secret of the Ron Mor Skerry and Mungo."

Note: The Secret of Roan Inish film was based on Fry's 1957, London-published Child of the Western Isles, which in 1959 was published in the US as The Secret of Ron Mor Skerry.

Poem: The Year Jackie Became a Widow

Just months before Dallas,

Mom and Dad posed

on their new land

and Mom’s heels sunk in the mud

while the wind blew Dad’s suit

and carried his cologne across earth

which later cemented into the street

Gary would cross (after his crew grew

and long after Bobby got shot)

to see forbidden Sandy

while her brother danced hoop dreams

into everyone’s sleep.

Skiing Through Time

On the street opposite the graveyard
I veer to the side so the car
hits the puddle head-on
and creates spray reminiscent
of my lost world.

But there, for a moment,
besides the ancient headstones,
I am water skiing once more,
no longer earth-bound.

Two More Haiku-ish poems reflecting on spring in urban suburbia

The traffic cannot overcome
the scent of green life
or the sound of dripping rain.


The puddle holds a brown pine cone
and the image of white window panes.

Two Haiku-ish poems

Abandoned House

The dominoed roof tiles peek inside at the floor of plaster and pine.



Seen at a stoplight in Downtown Chicago

The stacked brown buildings squeeze the sky
until their windows splash with blue.

Book Review: Go Set a Watchman

A few decades ago I read an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story called The Ice Palace. Its theme – the culture clash between the American North and South -- was intimately understood by the Minnesota native who'd married an Alabama belle.

I’ve been fascinated with this clash ever since. So while I picked up Go Set a Watchman because there was no way I was going to miss the second Harper Lee novel, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it covers this topic, largely because the now-adult, NYC-based Scout visits Maycomb yearly.

While Mockingbird’s perspective was obviously ensconced in the south, Watchman looks at that same culture with slightly northern eyes. If Scout once viewed Maycomb from Boo Radley's porch, she now sees it from much further away, especially as it regards racism and her father’s involvement in it.

For yes, it turns out that the great Atticus Finch was a racist. I was surprised but ultimately not shocked. Why not? Because nothing about this good man's behavior in Mockingbird hinted that he was more than just that: a good man. Not a radical one.

Remember that conversation in Mockingbird between Miss Maudie, Scout, and Jem, the one in which Maudie reminds the children that Atticus has been chosen to do Maycomb’s dirty work for them? He was asked to defend Tom Robinson. He didn’t volunteer. There were good people in Maycomb, good enough, anyway, to try and do the right thing even when the outcome was a forgone conclusion. They asked Atticus because they wanted a representation of their best intentions to prove they were better than the mob who tried to lynch Tom Robinson before the trial, and certainly better than Bob Ewell, the white trash who accused him in the first place.

For readers to now discover that Maycomb's best white citizen didn’t actually consider blacks as equals is of course a huge disappointment. But why should we be surprised that a pre-civil rights southern white man held such abhorrent views?

Although he was the best in his own sphere, he was ensconced in that sphere. He might put his reputation and safety on the line to defend a falsely-accused black man but that didn’t mean he’d approve of his daughter marrying a black man (or, even, as he says in Watchman, go to school with her).

Regarding Scout’s possible marriage (and a new topic): she has a beau in Watchman. Henry, her father’s junior law partner, is her on-again-whenever-she-comes-home beau, a romance built on a post-Mockingbird childhood friendship. And if it’s patently obvious that Atticus wouldn’t have approved a black man as son-in-law, Aunt Alexandra – now living with her brother – does not approve of where the Scout-Hank relationship might go:

We Finches do not marry the children of rednecked white trash which is exactly what Henry’s parents were when the were born and were all their lives. You can’t call them anything better. The only reason Henry’s like he is now is because your father took him in hand when he was a boy, and because the war came along and paid for his education. Fine boy as he is, it won’t wash the trash out of him.

Later on in the novel, Henry reiterates the point to Scout:

You can parade around town in your dungarees with your shirttail out and barefooted if you want to. Maycomb says, ‘That’s the Finch in her, that’s just Her Way.’ Maycomb grins and goes about its business: old Scout Finch never changes…

But let Henry Clinton show any signs of deviatin’ from the norm and Maycomb says, not ‘That’s the Clinton in him,’ but ‘That’s the trash in him.’”

I find this absolutely fascinating: within certain social realms there are enormous differences visible only to the citizens of that realm. This seems especially so in the South, at least in novels like this one and GWTW.

Regarding the rest of the novel: although I found one section absolutely gut-splitting – the flashback wherein Jem, Dill, and Scout put on their own “revival” – the rest of the novel was underwhelming. For me, it lacked the earlier novel’s potent combination of nostalgia and transcendence. Unfair assessment? Perhaps. And perhaps I’ve now joined the ranks of absurd reviewers who rate a book for what they think it should have been rather than for what it is: i.e., giving a brownie cookbook one star for not mentioning cookies or a YA book two for not being adult. Call me absurd then but Watchman is no Mockingbird and while I couldn't put the former down and am glad to have read it, it's unlikely I’ll be rereading it anytime soon.