Midweek Mess O’Books

About John Donne, George Herbert, Geoffrey Hill, Jane Greer, George David Clark, James Matthew Wilson, Anthony Hecht, and more...

Another longer break in writing than I expected since my kids just started school, and we are navigating four schools this year. Five, actually, if you count my grad school. Writing should get better since everyone is kinda, sorta settled into their environments. (Famous last words.)

For those who don’t know,

Jenn Zuko

and I have this weekend tradition on Substack Notes posting a Saturday Shelfie or Sunday Stack (or some permutation thereof). They are pictures of whatever books we are reading/perusing on whatever flat surface is available. (Feel free to join in the fun by tagging us and posting your book pictures.)

Somehow I missed this past weekend, so here is my Midweek Mess O’Books:

My youngest who wanted to be up at 3:30am this particular morning added the unicorn. We took the picture on the staircase which sometimes acts as a de facto bookcase. (Credit: Zina Gomez-Liss)

I have so much to say about what I’ve been reading that I’ve planned several forthcoming posts, but for now here’s the brief run down…

MFA class: Poetry of Meditation with Ryan Wilson

• John Donne: The Divine Poems edited by Helen Gardner. I got this from the library for its commentary. I have a more complete collection of Donne’s work that I own and can mark up.

• George Herbert: The Complete English Works edited by Ann Pasternak Slater. The Everyman’s Library rarely goes wrong in my experience. This is a great collection with a *bonus* bookmark ribbon!

• Six Metaphysical Poets: A Reader’s Guide by George Williamson. This is not assigned reading, but it is an interesting breakdown of the works of John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crawshaw, Abraham Cowley, Henry Vaughan, and Andrew Marvell.

I didn’t know much about metaphysical poetry to start, but I enjoy the reading quite a bit. However, the writing assignments for creating Donne and Herbert inspired works are coming up…

Catherine Project class: Geoffrey Hill’s Broken Hierarchies

• Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012 by Geoffrey Hill. This has been feature in many Saturday/Sunday Shelfies/Stacks. I have been taking this class all summer and we are now down to two books.

• The Lords of Limit: Essays on Literature and Ideas by Geoffrey Hill. This was suggested reading for the class even though technically the Catherine Project courses are only supposed to rely on the subject text and not on outside sources.

Although I was expecting a certain difficulty level earlier in the summer, this is the hardest Catherine Project course I have ever taken. I have studied Latin language, Homer, Virgil, Augustine, Plato, and Aristotle over the past few years, and it has taken me longer to read a few passages of Hill than any of the other works I have studied in the progrma. Our reading group leader

Andrew Schulman

has done a great job of guiding us through Geoffrey Hill’s main collections, but we have only really skimmed the surface of Broken Hierarchies. I think the most important skill we learned was how to read Hill, who is one of the most difficult poets in modern English language.

Other Poetry Collections

• Love Like a Conflagration by Jane Greer. (Lambing Press, 2020. $15.95). In this collection Greer is precise and musical. As a mother who is constantly checking for fevers, my particular favorite poem is her short and lyrical “Saved”:

  Saved
  
  It was not until I felt the fever passing
  that I realized how ill I'd really been.
  I think it must have kindled me in secret
  for a long time, like a merely venial sin, 
  but it lifted in a moment—left me startled, 
  with some subtle feelings, oddly bittersweet:
  a sense of loss with no remembered having,
  of cooling where I hadn't noticed heat.

• The World as We Know It Is Falling Away: New Poems by Jane Greer. (Lambing Press, 2022. $15.95) This is her latest collection of well-crafted verse that turns the temporal toward the eternal.

• Newly Not Eternal by George David Clark (Louisiana State University Press, 2024. $19.95) I could rave but better yet see Jane Greer’s glowing review of Clark’s collection.

• Memory’s Abacus by Anna Lewis. (Wiseblood Books, 2024 $16.50) A debut collection that features many forms, including an impressive crown triolet sequence. It is an astonishing first book from Lewis.

• Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds by James Matthew Wilson. (Word on Fire, 2024 *on sale* for $19.96) JMW is the founder of my MFA program at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, and he may be “the finest poet-philosopher of the Modern Age.”

  As a graduate student in poetry I’ve been surrounding myself with as much of formalist verse as possible. I highly recommend all of these books, and I encourage you to get a copy of one of these collections or more.

Philosophy

• Time by Eva Hoffman. I’ve borrowed this book from the library three separate times already. I probably should just buy it. It is a slim book that is well organized and explores a topic that, quite honestly, gives me quite a bit of anxiety.

• Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger (1976) edited by Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns. I have this from the library, but I ended up ordering a new copy because it has a lot of very good reference material about aesthetics all in one place.

Biography

• Late Romance: Anthony Hecht—A Poet’s Life by David Yezzi. I got this in a fit of distraction. This is a library short term read—not as fast as one of their “Speed Reads” but still… I don’t have much time with this, but it is very good.

This is what I have been reading. More to come on what I think of it all…