Three months after Steven Heighton’s passing, I keep returning to the opening lines of Tomas Tranströmer’s “After a Death”: “Once there was a shock / that left behind a long, shimmering comet tail.” The residue of the shock hasn’t settled . . .
Mortar, the stuff that binds the aggregate, is itself a composite substance, and similarly composite is my foundation as a writer. I find that final phrase discomfiting for reasons I’m not altogether clear on, but in part because I suspect . . .
Recently, a friend loaned me two of Janet Lewis’s novels, The Wife of Martin Guerre and The Trial of Sören Qvist, published in 1941 and 1947 respectively. The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron, published in 1959, completes a trilogy . . .
I remember very clearly when I first read C. D. Wright. A dim winter afternoon in Edmonton, 2005, in Audrey’s Books on Jasper Avenue. Browsing the poetry section, I picked out Deepstep Come Shining. Knew I’d buy it before . . .
