Once you’ve published your own review of a book, it’s always a bit vertiginous to read the same book reviewed elsewhere.  Surely almost every critic writing on deadline wonders if he’s missed something important, emphasized something trivial, or just plain judged a book wrong. When the ‘elsewhere’ in question is the mighty TLS, one of the few remaining genuine heavyweights in the literary journalism world, the anxiety is just that much more tingly.

So we turned with added attention to the 30 October issue of the TLS to take in their response to Pete Dexter’s latest novel Spooner, which is reviewed at length in our November issue by Sam Sacks. As great as the TLS is, their fiction reviews can sometimes be, shall we say, idiosyncratic, and when it comes to American fiction, their writers often seem to be working through anger therapy rather than examining a writer’s work.

Fortunately (for all concerned, really), the reviewer this time is T. O. Treadwell, as steady and first-rate a critic as ever sidled up to a typewriter, and Dexter’s book gets an entirely fair assessment, complete with quotable lines. About Calmer Ottoson, for instance, the true-blue  father-figure to the novel’s protagonist, Treadwell writes, “To draw a virtuous character without sentiment is notoriously difficult, and Dexter’s success here is not the least of his novel’s achievements.”

Most of the critics who’ve looked at Spooner have dwelt at length on the novel’s autobiographical aspects (Sacks makes a rather pointed reference to “the canny deflections of the memoirist”), and Treadwell – whose review is not long – does likewise, at one point mentioning, “One of the attractions of the fictional memoir must be the opportunity it offers for settling old scores, and Spooner contains a splendid range of monsters, many of them brought to satisfyingly gruesome nemesis.”

Treadwell’s verdict is kind: “Pete Dexter has transmuted the vicissitudes of a turbulent life into an accomplished novel.” To learn a great deal more about Dexter’s writing career in general and Spooner in specific – and to see what final verdict Sacks himself hands down on the final product, click on over to our November issue. And then tell us what you think, of course.

Each of the editors of Open Letters Ocean’s Twelve release has a fairly herculean labor to perform. Fiction Editor Sam Sacks has to contend with a general populace that reads mostly talk show-endorsed pap when it gets around to reading anything at all; London Editor Bryn Haworth has a city of 14 million souls to sort out; Political Editor Greg Waldmann writes to a world that’s more politically polarized than ever in its history. But even so, perhaps none of that editorial company has a harder task before him than Poetry Editor John Cotter, who must be wary not only of the worst excesses of his craft’s practitioners but also the peculiar contortions of that craft’s so-called critics.

Those contortions have long been a source of sport for the TLS’’s J.C. in the NB column, and the squib in the 24 April issue is delightful enough to quote in full:

Poetry babble is a tool of measurement used to gauge the relations between poetry as it appears on the page and the critical comments on the back of the book. In certain cases, the gulf separating the two can be wide indeed. Classical babbleologists point to Lisa Jarnot’s book Ring of Fire, which includes many lines like “ding dong/ dug dirt/ ditch dib/ chimp chore”, and others such as “Anomalous circus events in the great outer planets”. Readers wondering if they should read Ring of Fire pondered Patrick Pritchett’s endorsement: “Rising on wave after wave of near endless iteration, like a linguistic Mandelbrot set, they arrive in the long moment after loss as the signature and enactment of an initiation”.

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Few precedents are as clear, but John Goodby’s uncaged sea

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(Waterloo Press), which has seventy-four pages of verse like this -

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stimulates John Hartley Williams to emulate Mr Pritchett: “What can one say of such a ‘tusked ramshackling’ work? All I could say after reading it was: ‘like dramatic sea I hve been a ball of lakes’”. Nothing could be more certain of a place in the annals of babbleology. Experts are also fascinated by the case of Brian Teare, author of Sight Map (University of California). His four-page poem “To Be Two” proceeds as follows:

I ask the barometer falling, Fahrenheit as it

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charts [    ] disappearing: what fact

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is [

]. [                ]

Having memorized those last two lines, we turned to Jane Mead for illumination: “In many cases spoken from a Cartesian epistemological ground zero, these poems reach with urgency and passion toward a knowledge both impossible and necessary”. Ms Mead and Mr Williams have been invited to the NB Poetry Babble Conference. Anthropologists will have a chance to study them to see if their speech bears any relation to their writing.

Cotter would no doubt read that passage with a good-natured smile of resignation – such poets are asking to be misunderstood, after all, and such critics might not quite be aware of the nonsense they’re writing. Those of us who’ve been fortunate enough to experience John’s devotion to preaching the gospel of poetry know that it isn’t shaken by such silliness. Instead, he pulls down a volume (or, as often as not, simply recites from memory) and pulls listeners into the wonder and the unsettling coercion of the world’s most personal art.

And more to the point where rascals like J.C. are concerned, he also writes poetry criticism entirely free of nonsense. So take a pass on the Poetry Babble Conference this year and instead read Cotter here, here, and here. If he doesn’t slip right past your school-taught reservations about poetry and get you wanting to read it all afresh, then your yheart must be made of [             ].

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In the 10 April issue of the TLS, Ian Pindar crafts a thorough and sensitive review of My Vocabulary Did This To Me Neverwas on dvd , the new Wesleyan University Press collection of San Francisco poet Jack Spicer’s work. Pindar’s portrait covers many aspect of this somewhat tortured figure, ultimately observing the problems Spicer had with relationships – the problems everybody has, only heightened to a poet’s degree:

… many of his poems take the form of urgent and arresting arguments with lovers, ex-lovers and friends. A Spicer poem often begins with a lyrical statement and ends in anger, as if reflecting his own yearning for conversation and a companion who never comes or never stays for long.

In the January 2009 issue of Open Letters

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, Jared White also took in My Vocabulary Did This To Me, and among many other things (White has much more space in which to do justice to the book and Spicer; you can read his essay here), he, too, notices the particular strangulations the poet felt toward affection:

…artificial effects of pathos and bathos are at their most manifest in Spicer’s magnificently torqued use of the word “love” in his poems. Again and again, the monosyllabic word arrives with a kind of promiscuous open-endedness even as it seems always deliberately earnest and lacerating. (Besides “poetry” and “love” the only word that appears to me nearly as conspicuously in these poems is “shit.” This is Spicer at his essence: half-heart, half-spleen.)

Pindar claims Spicer’s poems “do not deliberately court unreadability,” and White guardedly concurs. The book itself is available from Powell’s.

The 6 March 2009 issue of the mighty TLS

features, as always, a whip-smart NB column by TLS download Kronos regular J. C., and one of the items he (she? it?) covers this time around is that old chestnut, the death of book-reviewing. Mentioning David Shields’ book Enough About You (in which he confronts his own negative reviewers head-on), J. C. recounts some of the great author-quotes regarding critics, such as Kingsley Amis’ remark “A bad review may spoil your breakfast but you shouldn’t allow it to spoil your lunch,” or Auberon Waugh’s quip “I don’t want ‘constructive criticism.’ I want praise,” and then speculates on a dark future indeed:

The chic claim to make, as an author, is that you never read your reviews. We advise scepticism, but if things continue the way they are going, with the demise of stand-alone book supplements in the US, every author will be able to say “I never read them” because there won’t be any (except in the TLS Murder Party ipod ).

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To which the colonials here at Open Letters might respond, “Now hold on there, Telly (you don’t mind if we call you Telly, do you?)!” Reports of the death of stand-alone book reviewing (never mind that crack singling out the US – we don’t see London exactly swimming in such supplements) have been greatly exaggerated … because in addition to the TLS

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, there’s also, at the very least, Open Letters Frantic film Serpico trailer

! Here, readers can be sure of getting detailed, meaty, and vivacious book-reviewing of the finest quality every month. Such readers (surely you’re among them, J. C.?) may officially begin eagerly anticipating our April issue, which will feature the usual bumper-crop of fascinating reports from all corners of the artistic landscape.

So those of you who might have seen J. C.’s pessimism in the TLS, the cure is within your reach: just take a second to click on our ‘Notify’ feature, and we’ll remind you when it’s time to come and feast your mind on our latest banquet! Even Kingsley Amis would have been satisfied!

Much like the micro-reviews readers can find in abundance on the Open Letters blog, often some of the best, tightest writing in the venerable London Times Literary Supplement will be found in the short “In Brief” reviews collected at the back of every issue. Case in point: the 13 February TLS The Thirty Nine Steps movie contains a review by the redoubtable Ben Morgan (don’t know him at all, but how can somebody with a name like Ben Morgan not

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be redoubtable? It’s so … Welsh) of Edmund White’s biography of the enigmatic Arthur Rimbaud, Rimbaud, The Double Life of a Rebel

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.

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The X Files movies Morgan knows he has very little space in which to make his points, so he makes them with brisk economy, concluding, fittingly enough, with a comment on some of the side-effects of White’s own brevity (The Double Life of a Rebel is less than 200 pages long):

There are costs to White’s coolness. The awkward, besotted Verlaine, who left his wife for Rimbaud, often emerges more vividly than the boy himself. On the other hand, the book’s achievement is to write a Life which illuminates the work without reducing it to oblique self-revelation. Instead it gives the life the shape of the art, a fittingly Decadent agenda.

Of course, there’s still something to be said for the long review – where would Open Letters be without them, after all? – and readers curious to know more about White’s book can turn to our amazing first-annual Poetry Issue and read a full-length examination of Rimbaud, The Double Life of a Rebel, handled by our own enigmantic freelancer Gaston Frontenac. Alternately, readers curious to know more about White’s book could simply, as the kids say, “man up” and read the damn thing, which is, as mentioned, less than 200 pages and so is unlikely to, you know, kill you or anything. Just a thought.

The 6 February issue of the venerable TLS Courage Under Fire divx offers, if such a thing is possible (or advisable) a Donoghue-smorgasbord, with no less than four themes in common with Open Letters’ garrulous Managing Editor. In Henry Power’s chatty and fascinating review of two new books about the art of translating in the history of English letters, he naturally makes mention of the great John Denham, whose translations of parts of Virgil concludes with “On the cold earth lies th’unregarded King/A headless Carkass, and a nameless Thing.” Power astutely connects this to the circumstances of Denham’s own life:

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The execution of Charles I intrudes on Virgil’s narrative; cold earth suggests Whitehall in January, rather than the sands of the Hellespont, where Priam’s corpse was dumped.

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And in the course of examining Denham’s life, Power makes mention of the fact that the poet was always welcome in the homes of the Earl of Pembroke, which might prompt readers to wonder about that art-loving noble family – and to read all about them

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, in one of Donoghue’s essays for Open Letters.

The inimitable J.C. turns in a brief notice of the sarcastic writing manual How Not to Write a Novel by Sandra Newman and Howard Mittelmark, remarking:

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For a full – and perhaps more accurate – account of what it is that Newman and Mittelmark say in their book, hark back to X and read Donoghue’s breezy walk-through of the whole thing.

A breezy walk-through of a decidedly more thorough nature is also on hand to counter-balance Elizabeth Scott-Baumann’s “In Brief” squib on the new anthology Tudors and Stuarts on Film, in which the tawdry necessities of the film industry are taken to task:

Using a strategy of “bait and switch”, writers and directors claim historical authenticity, only to wriggle out through the loophole of artistic licence.

Naturally, Scott-Baumann can’t get into much detail in 300 words, but you can bask in all the detail you can handle by reading Donoghue at 3000 words on Tudors in film (the Stuarts will have to fend for themselves, at least until Donoghue gets around to them).

But surely the biggest OLM-echo of this issue is Steven Gunn’s long and wonderfully readable piece on two new biographies of Henry VIII – books Gunn introduces by mentioning the relative paucity of their particular genre:

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Yet full-scale biographies of the King are strangely rare. In part it is the magisterial quality of J. J. Scarisbrick’s work of 1968 that has enabled it to hold the field for so long. But there seems also to be a sense that Henry is so large a character, the evidence so bulky, the controversies so fierce, that the task daunts those who consider it.

To which Donoghue would no doubt respond with a hearty “pFah”! Certainly the task of biographizing Henry VIII seems not to have daunted him – readers are invited to survey the full results.

The next issue of the TLS will no doubt be less Donoghue-centric, although we can never be sure. One of the inevitable side-effects of rattling on The Legend Trip movie as often and as variously as Donoghue tends to do is that echoes abound. Readers seeking a little temporary relief are advised to curl up with the latest issue of Vogue Weddings until they get their strength back.

In the December 19-26 2008 double issue of the TLS, “N. B.” columnist J. C. weighs in on a subject near and dear to all of us at Open Letters: the place of book reviewing in modern culture! Of course the current state of affairs is bleak:

These are tough times for books and book reviews. The Daily Telegraph has dispensed with its literary editor, Sam Leith, and its weekly literary columnist, A. N. Wilson. Bookish types in the United States are still lamenting the demise of literary supplements at the LA Times and other newspapers. One explanation put forward is that the influence of review supplements has been usurped by the book blogs, in which opinion is democratized, often to point zero. As the usually sensible Peter Wilby put it in an article in the Guardian (which so far remains kindly disposed to literature), “All the punter wants to know is whether the book’s worth buying. Better still, they’d like a decent precis so they need not bother reading the thing.”

To which J. C. gives this stirring response:

This is wrong-headed. A “good review”, in a literary editor’s eyes, is not one that is favourable, but one worth reading in its own right.

To which Open Letters adds its own hearty agreement. Internet book review sites are not the villain here (nor are book blogs, the best of which have precious little “democratized” about them and bristle with well-informed opinion), and the goal is the same regardless of format: to publish reviews that are worth reading in their own right, as their own art form quite distinct from the books they review. Readers are advised that a bumper-crop of such reviews has just arrived, in the form of the January 2009 issue of Open Letters Monthly, which features a special selection of poetry-related reviews in addition to the usual variety of items. You should waste no time bemoaning the downfall of book-reviewing; instead, click on over to Open Letters for January and revel in the craft!

And J. C., you embattled, world-weary soul? Feel free to do likewise. You’ll like what you see.

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It can take a while for British books to travel across the Atlantic, and the reverse is true as well. So it is that Martin Schifino looks (In Brief) at Clayton Eshleman’s one-volume translation of César Vallejo’s poetry.

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Can Vallejo’s poems travel? He was, and remains, a difficult writer…Anyone translating Vallejo is bound to fall short in some area, and no one has surmounted the challenge as well as Eshleman…It is difficult to imagine how it could be superceded.

John Cotter, OLM’s Poetry Editor, reviewed the same volume in depth all the way back in June of 2007. He and Schifino come to similar conclusions.

Thwarted and inherited loves, inspiring patriotism, a resentful standoff with God, the dream of perfect socialism, and a loving, brutal fuck with language lace his poems like loaded coils. These are not poems to be measured at first glance. These are poems to live with. Vallejo’s clustered poems want unpacking, then revisiting…

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No one else has done so much, posthumously, for Vallejo, and his passion radiates through the work. Plenty of other editions deserve our time, but Eshleman’s is a much-needed milestone and what his individual translations occasionally lack in accuracy, they make up for in courage. This is as it should be. Vallejo, as a poet, was more courageous than his time allowed.

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A couple of items to attract the attention of Open Letters readers in the 12 September issue of the TLS:

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First, Stefan Collini turned in a very amusing review of What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

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(by some permutation of the critical hive-mind, a consensus seems to have been reached that this is a Murakami production we can all have fun Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd ipod with). The home-run paragraph ends like this:

It’s always hard with a translation to know quite where the credit lies, but there are some intriguing phrases in this book. For example, observing some older runners, Murakami says: “Their hearts, lost in thought, slowly tick away time.” Nicely Tennysonian, perhaps, but physiologically disconcerting. Or, speaking of his discovery of his literary talent: “There were untouched veins dormant within me.” A triple-metaphor bypass might be needed here. And the cycling leg of one triathlon: “I just let ‘er rip.” I suspect that one does sound better in Japanese.

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Our own Lianne Habinek had her own fun

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with Murakami’s latest, in our current issue – trot on over and check it out!

And second, how could a certain fierce (dormant?) vein of nostagia not be stirred by J.C.’s mention in NB of James Walton’s “literary quiz book” Sonnets, Bonnets, & Bennetts, a collection of brain-teasing questions J.C. found a bit daunting even at the “Round One” level of difficulty, which included such posers as “Which literary character’s first words to whom are: “How are you? You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive,” “Who was the first British writer to win the Nobel Prize?” “What was the first Harry Potter novel?” and “What’s the only book for children by Ian Fleming?”

Longtime Open Letters readers may recall that this very website once sported a quiz of its own, until the baying mob with its torches and pitchforks rose up against their monthly intellectual drubbing and drove the quiz from their somnolent little hamlet. As chance would have it, one such Open Letters quiz also dealt with literary firsts – the intellectually curious might want to click on over to it and test their mettle against a vanished standard!

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Thumbing the 11 July 2008 issue of the TLS Ice Princess film you might have seen Marjorie Perloff’s review of August Kleinzahler’s new poetry collection, Sleeping It Off In Rapid City The Invasion release .

Perloff’s objections to Kleinzahler’s work outweigh her accolades. For instance, after quoting from a piece in which the poet caustically writes about the inhabitants of a San Francisco used bookshop, Perloff goes for the grand dismissal:

What this catalogue lacks is the particularity that makes poems like Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died” (whose middle section, like Kleinzahler’s, is a tour of bookshops, each image and action subtly anticipating the final revelation of Billie Holiday’s death) so arresting. To call the bookshop’s clientele “dowdy” and “ferrety”, or its proprietess a “swollen arachnid”, to remark on a girl’s bad skin and a man’s tic – such dismissive gestures are themselves tics.

Even when she praises, she picks nits:

Kleinzahler’s facility – for example, his carefully wrought staircase stanza and use of chemical vocabulary in “4-phenylcylcohexane” – is impressive, but in such realistic poetry the devil must be in the details, and the details here are largely cliches.

Jack and Old Mac hd The precise meaning of such turns of phrase is perhaps a trifle opaque for non-affectionados to penetrate. Such individuals are encouraged to click on over to the May2008 issue of Open Letters, where our Poetry Editor John Cotter gives the same book a thorough – and thoroughly enjoyable review of his own, full of his signature sylistic beauties.

The joke is that in Kleinzahler’s own poetry, although a random snowflake may well represent a glimmer of the universal mystery, it would never be expected to power a whole poem, or even more than a line. Within a moment or two of its appearance, a “good pee,” a “night train to Milan,” and “kinetic snapshots of trees and light” appear and disappear. The poem may return to that snowflake or it may not. The world spends all day hurling discordant details at its residents, and Kleinzahler’s poetical mission is the re-stitching of those fragments into something musical, intriguing, and occasionally moving. His poems often return (in the way haiku return) to their themes

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only after some divergence in the world of particulars. We stop thinking about what a Kleinzahler poem is about soon after we begin to read it, in the same way we quit thinking about whatever errand we’re be running on a crowded street. We just get caught up.

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You won’t be disappointed.

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