George Herbert in Bemerton

 One makes eye contact with the weather forecast and stares it down. 'Showers' could mean almost anything but it decided to amount to almost nothing. Having gone so rainless for so long it seems somewhat unjust that it should all come in these end-of-summer, early Autumn days which can be so good for days out.

Bemerton isn't too much of a walk from Salisbury station once you are pointing in the right direction. I like to think I have some sense of direction but when it fails, it is hopeless. St. Andrew's, Bemerton, is as modest as modest gets with a capacity of no more than 50. The Old Rectory is literally five paces across the road, door to door, and one assumes the Christian community mostly now gather in the other, more recent, church only 100 yards up the road. The difference between Herbert's church and that where John Donne worked could hardly be any greater.

But that probably suited them both, Donne being a bit of a showman with his crowd-pulling sermons and Herbert devoting his time to his writing before dying just before his 40th birthday after only three years at Bemerton. It's not unlike the Handel House in Brook Street claiming Jimi Hendrix because he had a flat next door for 18 months but we can feel that Herbert had found his proper place.

I was unable to find the recommended walk back to Salisbury Cathedral along the River Nadder and Herbert's twice weekly journey there might not have suffered from the industrial estate on the more direct route but the sinisterly-named Nadder was gently
picturesque. His burial place is thought to be approximately here in the chancel.

 

On the train there I had reminded myself of the background detail from John Drury's Music at Midnight. One needs a 'way in' to a poet to achieve some appreciation. I was most taken with the line,

We are all but cold suitors, 

in The Church Porch 

and so I put that in the visitor's book. And Death took a very different line to those words by Donne and Dylan Thomas, and those set by Handel, by accepting it rather than trying to argue that it is vanquished.

Such might be my way into Herbert, having less time for his devotions to and communing with God. Maybe some implicit acceptance that we are otherwise alone as individuals in a hostile universe makes him more vulnerable. God might not be a be-all-and-end-all solution for all of us but if it's some kind of partial aid to survival then it might be allowable on certain terms.

Bodhana Sivanandan

 There was something unearthly about the way 10yo Bodhana Sivanandan looked at the three passable opponents she beat, as was inevitable, all at the same time on Chess Masters. It wasn't arrogance and it wasn't insouciant. She knew but there was something sinister in her innocent knowing. German might be able to concoct a word for it but the English language doesn't have one.

One might have thought that chess required some years of study, of building a database of opening theory and strategy but she hasn't had time for that.

One's sympathy has to be with her opponent here,

 who doesn't do much wrong and is clearly any good but is left out of time and facing checkmate while Bodhana has 45 seconds of her 3 minutes left.

There's something matter-of-fact about how she whips through the process of winning, briefly and intensely thoughtful once or twice but mainly dispatching the result as if it were a dance routine she knew.

Such precocious talent needs looking after because imbalances can occur in other parts of what we were once told was a triangle of life meaning something like social, intellectual and emotional. Bobby Fischer might have been better served by not being quite as good at chess.

 

Meanwhile, with my 2000+ ratings at Blitz and Rapid forever banked at Lichess, I've restored 1700+ at Bullet and 1800 at Classical and that's good for me. Maybe one day I'll inch one of those latter two to a better all-time high point but we all have our limits.

Donald Davie, Gioia and Bishop, Bach

Donald Davie was the paragon of a high church scholarly critic whose essays made it sound virtually impossible to write a good poem. Not in fashion these days, you'd think, he brought  rigour and directness to his readings of other poets that might make him seem a dry old stick were it not for flashes of humour and some sympathy.

His The Poet in the Imaginary Museum was suggested in recent Gioia Studies and arrived ahead of the tardy Gioia books. Although at first it seems abstruse stuff, one can see that he's telling you things you've realized for yourself, just expressing them in a higher form of considered utterance. He is enlightening on Wallace Stevens, Eliot, Lowell and others and even makes a case for poetry in translation that I might not entirely accept but can appreciate his effort. It will not be a book to read all of because some of the lesser known Americans are even lesser known now than they were fifty years ago but it is possible to enjoy the essays for their own sake without fully taking their points which is a bit like reading poems sometimes, the sound rather than the sense. 

 

But then Dana Gioia's Studying with Miss Bishop arrived and one is glad to hear about her idiosyncratic teaching methods, openly admitting when she doesn't 'get' poems and turning down the suggestion of Ashbery as a poet to look at because he's a case in point. Unorthodox and apparently disorganized she may have been but the diminshed numbers who didn't desert her course in favour of Lowell's perhaps found it more demanding, and instructive, than it first looked s if it would be. Gioia and Bishop ws a meeting of great minds, one in maturity with the other just setting out and Dana's memoir almost makes one see Harvard seminars as idyllic.

Two good people, wonderful poets making the most of a situation perhaps neither of them entirely relished but if there's anything better than reading them, or about them, separately it's reading about them together.

--

The Davie inroads were made to a soundtrack of the Complete Works discs of The Well-Tempered Klavier. I decided it was time to venture into something familiar although familiar it turned out not to be. 

Of course Bach would have played and heard his own music on the harpsichord or organ, not in the pianoforte versions we might be more accustomed to now so it's hardly for me to say it's wrong. But one instinctively thinks that what one knows is right and anything different is aberrant.

Robert Levin's harpsichord pieces take the quicker tempi at hectic, flashy speeds that sound all for pyrotechnic effect. Not all of it is recognizable as the measured, thoughtful exposition of the Bernard Rodgers 4-discs I've had for so long. Some upcoming spending spree might bring Tatiana Nikolayeva here to be made number one preference but Bernard has done good service. But the unity of the set is thrown away by a good proportion of the 48 being played on organ. Luminous, gorgeously recorded and glorious in their way they are a different thing to the harpsichord and clavichord performances, never mind piano, and it makes for something inconsistent. Not un-brilliant but not as if they are all one work, either. Having said that, having them on piano already it's no bad thing to have these entirely different versions because it ostensibly makes for different music.

Continuing with the sacred cantatas, BWV 41 and 42 made for a fine disc, the cello in the aria in 41 being another 'find' to return to again one day. And if I had only ever known the Well-Tempered Klavier as organ music then the French Suites, BWV 812-817, would have served the purpose the 48 have been doing for so many years and I'd have been none the wiser but that was all a bit of a bombshell, finding music to be quite so amorphous. And yet, really, while worrying about non-period instruments in the orchestral music, it's the switch to instruments that Bach would have known, away from the ersatz piano that has disconcerted me. You just can't win.

Larkin and Herbert, via Thwaite

An essay somebody else might have to write could outline the compare and contrast between Philip Larkin and George Herbert. There's mileage in almost any comparative project if there's a point to be made but by the time I've finished my Gioia-Larkin effort I might have used up all available lines on Larkin. For me, they were brought together by Anthony Thwaite, regaling anybody within earshot at the bar at the first Larkin Society conference in 1997, with his view that they were both 'great, minor poets'.

Given the amount of work Thwaite put into editing Larkin, he could be credited with proving himself wrong and helping to reverse the process described by Cole Porter in turning him 'from minor to major'. 

 

One's own firmly held views become sacrosanct and we defend them for as long as we can and even well beyond any such point. A major recurrent theme here over the years has been an unhealthy need in me to establish that An Arundel Tomb in Larkin does not say that 'what will survive of us is love'. That last line is thoroughly undermined and hollowed out by the lines that lead us up to it. The reason why it is one of the greatest poems in the language of the C20th is how it hangs out such a resonant line on such fragile foundations.

And yet, still waiting for more books to arrive to proceed with Gioia Studies, I spent some time outside with Letters to Monica and could see the poem taking shape.

There is a possibility that when the line first occurred to him he might have thought he meant it. But before he finished it, he made it considerably less clear. And, at the time, still didn't like the poem much. He had also had serious doubts about Church Going. We should all be so lucky to be able to doubt such poems but his 'quality control' perhaps depended on doubting everything and one's shelves would be less laden if other poets had been quite so scrupulous and not troubled us with quite so many poems. 

That poem got through by the skin of its teeth, being sufficiently amended to eventually say what I'm still fairly confident it says and then squeezing into the book. One wonders how many other masterpieces were lost when their authors took against them and made the safety-first decision of not including them. Maybe not many because most writers weren't quite so fastidious and were glad enough to have something to fill a page but it makes one wonder when, later, Larkin said he had all the 'fillers' for his next book but not the good ones, quite where his cut-off point was.

--

George Herbert is allotted a label here after all these years. He's never been anywhere near a favourite, probably because his faith and religion are as intrinsic to everything he ever wrote as Larkin's downbeat ordinariness were to him.

But the end of summer is almost touchable. While it's not an attractive proposition to go on excursions in such heat as might not once have been prohibitive but now seems so, September needs to be made use of because it can be perfect. 

Bemerton has by now been swallowed up by Salisbury but in the C17th was outside of it. It makes for a gorgeous tableau, the rural rectory and mundane church with a vicar poet who would still be read 400 years later. John Drury's Music at Midnight was one of those sumptuous hardbacks that are good to have even if one isn't a believer in its subject but I remain open to being convinced. He analyses some poems to show there might be more to them than blinding devotion and doctrinaire Christianity and his work lasted so well that Let All the World in Every Corner Sing lent itself to being the theme tune to Songs of Praise.

I'll go and have a look with my senior railcard, willingness to walk and need to think I've been somewhere and done something and not just read it in a book. 

 

More Dana

 Where has he been all my life, Dana Gioia. It's like you've been on nodding terms with someone for 30 years and then suddenly find yourself infatuated. It's hard to believe there's another name I'm aware of that I would take to quite so readily if I investigated further but there could be. One would never know.

Barrier of a Common Language is sub-titled 'an American Looks at Contemporary British Poetry'. For once, he might have added because his point is that British poetry has been almost ignored by American readers since about 1945. Except by him, who knows it well and has read most perceptively. It's a slim book, as most of his are but one would rather have a slim book of such insight and, sometimes, humour than three times the quantity without the quality. Evidence by my essay gathers as Larkin is the most referenced poet in the book who, like him, didn't over publish but what he did put in print was all worth having compared to, say, Ted Hughes whose Moortown book elicits precious little sympathy.

Charles Causley and Wendy Cope are praised, as English as any poet could be expected to be; Thom Gunn is admired, as is James Fenton and Craig Raine both appreciated for what he did while also exposed for it. We don't hear much about Charles Tomlinson any more and Gioia sheds some light on Tony Connor and Dick Davis who might never have been widely read in Britain never mind the USA. It's all alarmingly good and all the better, of course, for being on the right side. I'm trying to think of a book one could admire that makes a case contrary to how one sees it oneself. There surely out to be such a thing.

Good books can often lead to others and Gioia directs us to Donald Davie's collected reviews in Poet in the Imaginary Museum. I then sat outside flicking through Letters to Monica to find it derided there but we don't let that worry us because Larkin derided most of his rivals. 

I seem to be ordering these books from sellers who find it difficult to provide them in timely fashion or at all but my impatience doesn't help. I don't know if an essay has ever been compiled quite so slowly, bit by bit, as further material is added. It might have been better to wait until I had the whole picture and then plan the full sweep of it. That would have obviated the necessity of removing claims that turned out to be entirely erroneous. I have an obvious starting point and an idea of where to finish so it's only a matter of fitting in the material in between to get from one to the other.

Never a cross word

 It's a long time since we had a crossword here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Across

1. Rapidly get bigger pig in Orwell (8)

5. Avian musician, we hear (4)

9. Long term con in Mali, ferocious (5)

10. Instrument confused Luke and Lee (7)

11. Further helping for boxer's assistants (7)

12. Lad it made subject to rise and fall (5)

13. Red treats otherwise recommenced (9)

18. Old tribe in nice nighties (5)

20. Quack remedy from no strumpet (7)

22. Opera man among those cross in Italy (7)

23. I love Latin about headless spirit and acid (5)

24. Proceeds against Bridehead and Henchard in Hardy (4)

25. Somewhere to stop to change third leg (3,5)

 

Down

 

1. Hockney made a bigger one (6)

2. Petty Dibble in Top Cat (7) 

3. Bad poet attributed to Roy Orbison, not intially (5)

4. Poet produced muesli and cocaine (5,8)

6. Give unknown, that is lowest denominator to begin with (5)

7. Llandrindod Wells, in the end, abides (6)

8. Band in Essex, tethered (6)

14. Short ghost (6)

15. Captain Day asked to move over (7)

16. Cloud in big top changed about for first of royals (6)

17. Fortified wine introduces itself as something from abroad (6)

19. Follow in French one of 24 Across (5)

21. Gastropod starts to sing naturally as it likes (5)   

On a Sunny Afternoon

Obviously, following Jill, one must re-read A Girl in Winter. Two further books towards the Gioia essay are due, so it says, by Tuesday.

Outside it was warm and quiet. Not too hot, and next door's kids seem to be away. Few novels can surely fill their first hundred pages with quite so little happening. Katherine is German, has been in England for two years and works in a library with some unattractive people. A colleague has toothache so she takes her to an equally unattractive dentist. Then in Part 2 we go back to her first visit to England when she came to stay with her penfriend, Robin, and his well-to-do family. That's about it but since I can't remember what happens, it's great with its lack of car chases, guns or gratuitous glamour. 

We are beyond halfway through August. After two weeks of below par performances on the Saturday Times crossword it was finished with no internet help at all by 11 o'clock yesterday. The horse I had a couple of quid on at Pontefract has gone in from 7/2 to 2/1. The Casiliero di Diablo Pinot Grigio remains on offer at £7.50 in One Stop. Becoming 66 and the state pension and bus pass are now only two months away.

I feel like a character in Camberwick Green, an idealized dilettante writer with my essay gradually gathering itself, bit by bit, to either be crafted into a sleek work of scholarship or, perhaps, a ragged, thrown together mish-mash redolent of something by Jackson Pollock. Surely it's up to me to make sure it's the one rather than the other but writing doesn't write itself, being a writer means you have to make it happen and not assume it is provided ready-made.

It's certainly true that some poems felt like they came from elsewhere and only passed through me on their way to the page but that is, I hope, the benefit of having found how to do it, almost sub-consciously perhaps. I've got two envelopes of back catalogue material to be sent out to good homes willing to take these now officially 'out of print' items and I'm pleased to be able to do so, to have arrived at this later stage, older than Larkin was when he died and, who knows, maybe with no more to come. Or there could be a whole new phase ahead, I don't know. But it's a rare thing, a sort of Sunlight on the Garden feeling that comes along less often than one would like. So let's make what we can of it while it's here. 

Larkin's Jill, BWV 1025 and John Burnside

Next year's Philip Larkin Society conference is to be based around the 80th anniversary of his novel, Jill. I'm unlikely to attend or contribute but I was prompted to re-read it while waiting for further Dana Gioia books to arrive. It's tremendous work for a 21yo, especially the first half. In the second half credulity is stretched a little bit as the imaginary Jill materializes as the real 15yo Gillian and we might rightly wonder about stalking issues except I'm sure it's all understandable in an overawed innocent abroad like John Kemp. What I take it to mean is that such lusts and loneliness will find an object to fixate on and it is Gillian's bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Jill, however, is great and only leaves us to wonder what novels Larkin would have produced in maturity had he not been sidelined into being the most accomplished English poet of his generation. 

--

Meanwhile, back with the Complete Bach, it is to be expected that the best-known pieces that one is familiar with are the best and exploring the discs of the unfamiliar might not always serve up things to compare. I'm not going into the Well-Tempered Klavier, the Partitas and Sonatas, the Cello Suites, the Brandenburgs, the B Minor Mass, Passions and suchlike when there is so much undiscovered country to visit.

Thus one thinks that Bach could have been Telemann in his spare time in the same way that the Beatles provided songs for other artists while retaining enough material for themselves. However, one doesn't know all the best Bach and vol. 123 is a magical disc with its Trio for vln, clo and pno, BWV 1025 augmenting the Partitas most gorgeously. That disc stayed on for three plays being exactly why one had to buy the Complete, because there had to be such things. Georg Egger is the violin, also on Sonatas BWV 1023, 1021, 1019a and a Fuge, 1026. So I moved onto similar on Viola da Gamba which would have been just as good a find were they not familiar already from another recording that stays on the turntable for a few plays whenever it gets an outing.

--

At 2pm today I remembered to check when the Hampshire Art Society annual exhibition was on in the cathedral. It finished today at 4pm so I was able to get there in time. My walls are full enough and so I wasn't in the market for anything unless I was spectacularly impressed. There were things to like in among the kitsch, the workmanlike, the generic and the competent local scenes. 

I don't know if it's the same everywhere, if it's just my preference or if the Portsmouth area is genuinely disproportionately blessed with musicians but there's no comparison. Here, musicians are light years ahead of painters and writers, not that there's anything wrong with the local brushstrokes or words. But the musicians are mostly interpreters rather than composers in their own right so maybe it's not a fair comparison when they can present their versions of all-time masterpieces and not have to think of their own. 

--

John Burnside's posthumous The Empire of Forgetting arrived this week. At 40 pages it might not count as 'full length' but it's what there was when he died last year, aged only 69. English poetry could hardly afford to lose one of its few remaining major artists and neither could Agenda which he had taken over as editor of. St. Andrews have been unable to find a suitable successor and so the august title goes with him, another bastion of seriousness that held up against what some of us might regard as a falling apart of what not so long ago was a strong, if well-hidden, community. 

The first poems continue to work like a long, loose sestina  working on the words angels, wings, snow and light. They have spilt over from John's previous volume Ruin, Blossom and are further evidence towards my theory that some poets, by no means all, struggle to find new things to say beyond the age of 60. 

There's a further 'semantic field' of frost, firelight, dark and themes of hibernation in a 'vision' of continuity, grace and some sort of comfort found in a world in which there might seem,

No remedy for loss, no

cure for rot, no solace to be found

in mere ideas 

except, of course, poems are ideas and these at least attempt to provide such things. 

The Empire of Forgetting is the title of a poem in the book as well as a phrase that occurs in two other poems so we can't miss the point that it must be thematic. There's something pagan about it, a faith in nature and its processes, an awareness that ordinary, daily life might not be everything and there could be something bigger to be celebrated, even beyond the art that says as much.

I don't want to try to define it, it's in John Burnside's evocative music which, like that of Bach, can all begin to sound similar but that doesn't prevent one from wanting to have all of it in however many variations.  

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 Readership appears to be up at DGBooks recently if one gives any credence to the figures on Google Analytics. So, thanks to anybody new to it and welcome but it has to be said that once I seem to be in danger of success at anything I tend to pack it up. Football, cycling, pool and other careers are all behind me, their potential archived and their actual achievements providing much to be modest about. This week I deleted all the DGBooks titles at Nielsen, the ISBN agency, so as not to be bothered by orders from any commercial outlet. Not that I've ever been inundated but I'm in the copyright libraries now, I've used up my allocation of ISBN's and further titles would thus need a publisher with all their requirements of sales, editing, design, promotion et al and there's not much to be gained by all that.

- 

One can't realistically make one's way through the Complete Bach without playing the organ music in due course. It's possibly an area of itself, by no means my favourite but if one must have organ music then it's best it's by Bach. The first disc I put on shone through even the cheap, underpowered CD player I have upstairs which hardly does justice to good recordings. Electric Light was a Seamus Heaney title but it came to mind in some of this dazzle.

I must concentrate and not allow this project to lapse although all such projects will save for later. I'm not sure I finished all the Complete Satie having been transfixed by the opera, Socrate. And so it is with doubts aforethought that I contemplate 40 discs of Tatiana Nikolayeva- well-backed fav to be officially my favourite pianist- at £120.

It's what I want so I should have it. But there are are still nearly 150 discs of Bach not played yet and all the rest of music history, in my account of it, stored on the shelves. Do I need both of her sets of the Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues when I have one of them already, a good candidate for Top 6 Albums as it is.

It's a 'first world problem', conscience tells me. But people who are spoilt only want to be spoilt a bit more.

--

Having found a last title by John Burnside - due to be delivered here any time today- I looked up to see what had happened to Agenda, the high-class magazine that he had recently become editor of before he died. It looks like it's gone with him which is a great shame, not that I was a regular reader, but it looks to me as if such a journal has run out of anybody with the heft to edit it. Where are they now, the serious people prepared to do serious work? I might well side with those counter-reformationists like Larkin and Dana Gioia who reset attitudes after some of the wilder excesses of Modernism but Modernism took itself seriously, was made of highbrow ideas and intentions and maybe one can't have it both ways although some of us might continue to try.

Signed by Dana Gioia

The collecting of signed poetry books never actually stopped but it hasn't continued at any sort of pace because I've got all the affordable poets I could want and Larkin, Eliot and Auden no longer come at sensible prices, notwithstanding having to re-mortgage the house to get Sylvia or Dylan Thomas whose legends make such things far beyond outlandish. I might have another look at Rosemary Tonks, though, because it is only money.

However, Dana Gioia was an absolute bargain at a price one might easily pay for an unsigned book. 

I'm half convinced that graphology is not cod science by the correlation between formal, common sense poets having nice, clean, legible handwriting and the 'freer', less disciplined poets being less legible. Such a thesis demands deeper analysis and there will be outliers like 'exceptions that prove the point' even if they would really undermine it.

Dana Gioia is so very neat and tidy, considerate and caring and finishes with just a bit of a flourish. There would appear to be a bit of a story and background to this dedication which makes it all the better. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
 

Celeb-spotting and other stories

Week after week, year on year, the Times columnists churn it out. Caitlin Moran, Giles Coren, Robert Crampton, often the same, old same old sort of thing. Like I do, too, here. I'm sure I've made even that point before but they get paid for it whereas I do it for fun. Giles seems to me the laziest with his unfunny 'listicles', Caitlin is usually worth a look and today, for once, I take up Robert's theme and do my own variation on it. Famous people seen in public, not when one is expecting to see them. Going to a Simon Armitage poetry reading and seeing Simon Armitage or seeing Beryl Burton at a bike race don't count.

Perhaps the first, possibly in 1971, was when my mother recognized Dai Francis, if we can still mention a star of the Black and White Minstrel Show. It was not far from the stage door of a theatre but we weren't going to the show. She did well considering he was in disguise as himself and not made up.

Me and my mate, as it happens relevantly in this piece, once saw Caitlin Moran when we were outside the National Gallery. She noticed me noticing her but unless she is exceptionally well up on little-known poets, the recognition wasn't mutual. 

The National Gallery seems like a profitable zone in this game. One of my two sightings of Michael Palin was as he came out of an exhibition of Vermeer and his contemporaries in the carbuncle. While the attendants necessarily acknowledged him, it occured to me that being famous might be tiresome as a 24/7 job so I didn't trouble him with any parrot-related quip. The other time I saw him was at the back entrance to Somerset House.

I did nod to Michael Rosen, though, as I looked round after watching the river flow by the Royal Festival Hall and caught his eye. A good man, not quite as universally recognizable as a Python and I thought one man of letters could salute another even if he didn't know I was one.

Seeing Queen Elizabeth II coming out of parliament on what was probably the day of the Queen's speech might not qualify but seeing her come out of Southampton docks and out of a lunchtime pub window on her way to Portsmouth dockyard were chance encounters that do. King Charles, when he was Prince, leaving a concert in Fairford Church is inadmissable because we waited for him.

Patrick Moore in the Lancaster University bookshop when he was on campus to give a talk is a borderline case. I think it's okay because, as with all of these people, I like them more or less and I'll do without Terry Hall of the Specials who sat at the same small table as I was at in the college bar at Lancaster before a gig I wasn't going to because I never rated him and was not impressed.

--

Elvis Costello sang that 'radio is a sound salvation' with some caustic irony but for me it mostly is. There's all kinds of things one comes across during the night and one programme recently triggered a major new poetry allegiance with the archive item on Dana Gioia. But Test Match Special seems to me as good as it ever was when it was Johnners, Arlott, Trevor Bailey, Fred Trueman and all. Aggers is a brilliant broadcaster, Zaltzman conjures the most abstruse satistics out of his computer that would make Bill Frindall swoon; Tuffers has matured into a wise man from the fly boy he began as and Cookie and Vaughany are admirable, as are the ladies, Ebony and Isa. 

A surprise birthday present last year was a collection of pieces by Aggers and Tuffers and I'm floored by the elegant taste with which it was chosen, the buyer being one I'd hardly ever mention cricket to. 

It has helped that the test series just ending has been tremendous, day by day and session by session. It's only a pity that the demands of monetizing the product has meant it has had to be forced through too quickly in order to make room for the Hundred which is dull.

--

Not a day is going by without Dana Gioia increasing in staure, for me, which means me finally realizing the stature he has long achieved. The Atlantic Ocean seems very wide when I think how long it's taken me to pick up the signal.

Dana Gioia: Poet and Critic, edited by John Zheng and Jon Parrish Peede (Mercer, 2024), is an exemplary collection of essays that provides all one wants of a way in to his work and it's taking me from vague acquaintance to substantial grasp most effectively in quick time. And, lo and behold, as good things tend to pile up when they are going well, looking to add to my newly-instituted Gioia section, looking for a signed edition to add to the long-neglected Signed Poetry Books here, a very reasonably priced volume is signed to William Oxley, author of one of the essays and what a thing to have that will be shortly.