Cartography of Water by Mike Burwell

Fine Print: I have moved across town and all my Alaska books are in some box I have yet to find. Luckily, Mike Burwell sent me a copy of “Cartography of Water.” Yeah! Someone has heard of my blog.

What I’m reading now: Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them by Francine Prose

For a portrait of pain, one might find Alaska an ideal setting. The high rate of suicide would not surprise all those I left in Southern California, who only know of cold and darkness in this northern place, but the careful poet eye and heart finds more, finds all the metaphors and questions about loss that they need, and finds beauty in the survival, in the green shoots of spring, in “bugs ripening” and a broken branch beside the trail.

“Cartography of Water” by Mike Burwell and published by a new press created by poet Anne Coray spans several decades of writing and includes poems previously featured in his chapbooks. The subject matter ranges from the poet’s arrival in Alaska to his complicated relationship with his son. Burwell received his MFA in poetry from University of Alaska Anchorage. He has been a guide and climber in the Alaska Range and Wrangell-St. Elias and teaches poetry workshops at UAA. He also writes environmental impact statements for the U.S. Department of Interior, researches shipwrecks and studies anthropology.

This book is poetry you can read on your lunch break with coworkers chatting around you and trying not to spill their cup of soup on your head, but be careful because you will soon tune out their conversations about the amount of sugar in certain drinks and the latest actions of the pope. You may forget you are under halogen lights altogether and breathe slowly, as if you were sipping fresh brewed tea, while the poem draws you in and pries you open.

The poems are full of Alaska details that miss the tour guides—Quonset hut, tangerines that arrive on frosted crates. Burwell captures experiences universal to many Alaskans (“April, and still / no sign of spring”) and takes the “wet winter road” to a sadness battling all humanity. We also hear about the more scenic Alaska of bears, birches and borealis, though even then there might be an unexpected insight. After a climb, he notes “All that work / and no epiphany, no transformation.”

A calculated pace creates elegant verses and stanzas. Sometimes the careful pauses make the rhythm so appealing that the words themselves and their collective meaning are almost, almost secondary. When the precision lapses (as it rarely does), it makes the roughness all the more apparent. Some of the poems are lists that don’t intrigue or capture me, but that’s the beauty of poetry books—Skip that one, read others three times in a row.

“Cartography of Water” comes with an audio CD which includes a discussion with Burwell and Coray and reading of seven poems. The interview brings up his past, son, the title and writing poetry. It is a nice recap of the book and gives new insights into the poems. You can attend a short reading in your comfy pants and blow your nose all you want without disturbing anybody.

Here is a sample of the phrases that reminded me why I love poetry so much and how it is so enriching to enjoy the landscape of language and images:

“All day / I knew the spruce were bigger / than my only good thought” (The Right Place in Oregon)

“perfect and alert darkness” (Morning Prayer to Water)

“I touch the cool waist / of the planet” (Dream Island)

“In June with the sun coming down like a bronze mallet” (Summer on the Out Island)

“We sat with men so serious with drink / they made women enter through separate doors” (The Lake at Northway)

“This is the world / I need, each day, / to plunge into” (In the Middle of Winter / the Water Taxi Leaves the Dock at Jakolof Bay)

“Without medicine, your mind can’t hold / the world for long, a scar redraping itself” (Picture at Swan Lake)

Birds I looked up in Sibley’s: merganser and yellowlegs

Side note 1: The Anchorage Daily News asked me, as an arts reviewer, to write what I liked and disliked about arts in 2007 and what I was looking forward to in 2008. For my dislike, I wrote that I disliked that the Daily News reduced then eliminated the book section. They edited that sentence out.

Side note 2: I have Alaska Book Report bookmarks. Soon to be the must-have reading accessory.

Side note 3 (I really need to visit this blog more often so that I don’t need to bulge a post with everything): Radical Arts for Women is sponsoring a short story contest open to all women in Alaska. For more information, visit www.radicalartsforwomen.org. Deadline is Feb. 1.

(NorthShore Press, $16, 78 pages)

There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Trout by Teri Sloat

Fine print: I found this (Pacific Northwest) book at random in the Alaska section of Title Wave.

What I’m reading now: "Bless Me, Ultima" by Rudolfo Anaya

I’m new to the children book thing. Or, rather, I’m coming back to them after devouring them as a child when we checked out as many books from the library as we could carry. (The rule still applies, though sometimes I cheat with the convenient baskets Loussac provides.)

What I do know is that it is very easy to get lost among all those tiny book spines so when I find a book I like, I want to keep getting it as presents until I’ve covered my baby shopping list.

“There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Trout” by Teri Sloat is one such book. I’ve already bought two copies and if Title Wave had had another the other day, I would have gotten a third because one of the women in my knitting group just had her baby and she’d have fun reading this story to little Trixie.

The story is like the song we all know about the lady and the fly, and it is just as catchy. Maybe more so. Only it has Alaska-Pacific Northwest animals like trout, salmon, otter and whales. The illustrations by Reynold Ruffins are bright and fun and you can watch the lady’s belly grow and grow until she swallows the ocean. “What a commotion! She swallowed the ocean!”

Why aren’t more adult books this silly and fun?

32 pages, Owlet Paperbacks (2002), Ages 4-8

Just Breathe Normally by Peggy Shumaker

Fine print: I bought this book expecting to like it because I like “Blaze.”

What I’m reading now: “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” by Ann Brashares.

One moment you’re enjoying Alaska life with your husband, biking on a path safely separated from motor traffic. Next moment a kid on an ATV barrels around a blind corner and almost kills you both. You’re so injured you don’t even remember the accident and must listen over and over again while your husband tells you how strangers held your head and helped save your life.

One moment you’re a sixteen year old getting the younger siblings ready for school. Next moment, your mom is dead and your dad’s crazy second wife won’t let you eat an orange from a bowl on the kitchen counter.

Like Heather Lende, another beloved Alaska writer who got struck while riding her bicycle, Peggy Shumaker, a professor emerita of English at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, faced a grueling recovery after an accident. Lucky for us readers, her memoir “Just Breathe Normally” keeps the grueling moments to snapshots and drifts between recovery and prose poems about Shumaker’s family history. Like with her book of sensual poems “Blaze,” this “poemoir” is full of lyrical gems, humorous surprises, poignant insights and also pain.

The snippets look unflinchingly (and sometimes flinchingly) at childhood, the present and all that in between. The portrait of her dysfunctional family is unsentimental toward her parents yet still tender: These are my parents, this is what I got and how we dealt, I’ll tell you how I judged them then and now let you judge. Not bitter. Well, not too much.

The nonlinear telling means that some scenes a reader might expect aren’t included, but the moments we do get often inform how the more standard-fare incidents would happen. A couple of times, I’m a little lost and don’t know how we got from there to here, but mostly the shifts in time and place are nice and clear and understandable and usually the vignettes can stand alone enough or are beautiful enough to make up from any confusion.

This could have been a memoir that dwelled on snippy medical staff, unfairness (like her not being able to drive while the boy who hit her can) or growing up too soon, but it is all told poetically and with such lyrical language that it rises above each of these things (and also sits on my nightstand for a week while I indulge in page-turning fiction). The beauty of the language and the wisdom in the vignettes make up for the fact that “Just Breathe Normally” brings up a lot of memories about time spent in hospitals and my grandparents’ death, moments I don’t want to revisit.

The picture on the book flap is a stock author photo from before the accident so you missed what I and others saw at a reading at Title Wave in September. Her eye was still healing and partially closed – the slight disfiguration made her story so much more real. This isn’t fiction, this isn’t an academic musing on pain, this is something that changed her being in ways we can see, as well as read about.

University of Nebraska Press, $24.95, 267 pages. Part of the American Lives Series edited by Tobias Wolff

The Spanish Bow by Andromeda Romano-Lax – Review extras

Fine Print: I reviewed this novel for the Anchorage Daily News. Below is what didn’t make the article.

What I’m reading now: Still Water Saints by Alex Espinoza

Wisdom in book by (real life) Varian Fry, an American who helped artists reach safety during World War II: “You can’t take away people’s idea of themselves. Not at the last minute, when they’re facing a dangerous situation. It makes them less stable, less predictable. Everyone clings to some silly thing or other. Everyone seems to have one thing they can’t live without.”

What I don’t mention in my review is that I didn’t really want to like this book so it took me by surprise that I couldn’t put it down after I read the first line in the parking lot. It was a sunny day and the car was heating up, but I opened the door rather than go inside and finish my errands. Why didn’t I want to like this book? Nothing against Andromeda, who I’ve seen a couple times at readings and seems pleasant enough. Her book on renting public use cabins is my bible for cabin adventures and I have another book of hers on my shelf. No, it was more pure jealousy. I applied for a grant she got from the Rasmuson Foundation when I was writing my novel and needed a computer in order to work. I thought she had books already out so I deserved the money more than her. So petty, so true! I think some of the characters in her novel would appreciate it.

But I did like the novel, though the middle was a bit rough getting through and I wanted the narrator Feliu Delargo to be more political and emotional from the get go. Even death does not rattle him until it is piling up to his ears and even then he is too calm. He’s Spanish! Where’s the passion? It all goes to the cello, which we could see more of. And he could have some small victories.

I also liked that his hometown is named Campo Seco—dry countryside. And then there is the scene when the peasants take the bull. You’ll see what I mean. Ayayay.

Here are some more quotes that I want to share (all out of order and without permission from the publisher):

“ ‘Feliu,’ he (Justo) said. ‘We’re living in a time of messages, not art.’ ”

“The beast over there doesn’t know what’s coming. But we do. I recommend the middle road.”
“But you’re not middle—middle is moderate, Loyalist, prodemocracy…"
“No. The other middle."
“Which is?”
“Survival.”

“Duarte’s cello was a glossy caramel color, and the sound it produced was as warm and rich as the instrument looked. It sounded like a human voice. Not the high warble of an opera singer or anyone else singing for the stage, but rather the soothing voice of a fisherman singing as he mended his nets, or of a mother singing lullabies to her sleepy children.
“When the cellist reached a crescendo on one of the lower strings, I felt a strange sensation, both pleasurable and disturbing. It reminded me of holding a cat, feeling its purrs resonate with me. Listening, I felt the sensation strengthen, as if the cello’s quivering vibrato was actually boring into me, opening a small hole in my chest, creating a physical pain as real as any wound. I was afraid of what might fall out of that hole, and yet I didn’t want it to close, either.”

“After the cello came, my world both shrank and brightened, like a piece of wood burning down into red-hot coal. I woke, for the first time in my entire life, knowing exactly what I needed to do.”

Al-Cerraz: “I still think that motocars are the way of the future. It fascinates me. Is there any more important question, really, than what will last?”

Harcout, Inc. 560 pages. $25.

Read what the New York Times printed.

Reading Deprivation

Fine Print: No Alaska books this week. No books at all. Oh my.

What I’m reading now: Nothing. Ack! But as soon as this week is over, I’ll return to “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” by ZZ Packer, “Letters to a Young Novelist” by Mario Vargas Llosa and “Julius Caesar” by William Shakespeare (none Alaskan).

In a bout of energy to reconnect with my inner creative self, I picked up “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron. I began the twelve-week course four or five years ago and stopped somewhere around week two or three, retaining nothing but my morning pages, which I adore and crave if neglected. It has taken me two months to get to Week 4, but that’s all right. Except, that one of this week’s tasks is reading deprivation. Are you kidding me? I know. It sounds ridiculous, but she sees it as a purging of other voices and forcing your own productivity. I have to say, I have been writing and thinking like a self-sustaining fireworks display. A constant Pop! But it is weird and out of my routine, not an easy thing to rearrange for an OCD person like me. No newspaper, no fiction, no internet, no magazines. However shall I eat my breakfast and lunch? (Quickly, it turns out.) I’m only writing emails and checking them if necessary. Also little or no TV and radio because they too can poison the well.

I’m restless and have trouble concentrating on talk radio. And it’s only Tuesday.

Beluga Days by Nancy Lord

Fine Print: I have not finished. I’m sorry, dear blog reader. I know I let you down. And if this was for some publication that paid me enough to buy this week’s groceries or at least some fresh veggies for dinner, then I would have slogged through. I do intend to pick it up again because the fate of the Cook Inlet beluga is the fate of all animals in Alaska.

What I’m reading now: Affinity by Sarah Waters

Quoted in the book: “The beluga can act like the canary in the coal mine, as an indicator of ecosystem health.” –Bob Shavelson of Cook Inlet Keeper

If belugas are your favorite animal, then please pick up this book as soon as possible. In “Beluga Days: Tracking the Endangered White Whale,” Nancy Lord travels all around—outings to tag and track the whales, meetings on belugas and trips to aquariums—and interviews all sorts of people to learn as much as she can about this creature. In her often elegant prose, she presents different sides of the whale debate, careful to tread respectfully around Native Alaska hunting and culture. The book also extends beyond belugas to a side of Alaska tourists (and residents) miss and teaches about how political the endangered species listing is. In the paperback version, she has a new preface about recent developments.

But, really, whose favorite animal is the beluga? They are not as cool as killer whales or big enough to swallow a fishing boat and inspire legends. They might make nice meals for those that enjoy that sort of thing. And it might be fun to spot their white and gray humps when kayaking, but now there are so few belugas in Cook Inlet that either activity is unlikely; an estimated 300 exist. Do you have to be a fan to turn the pages of this book? No, but it would help.

Lord has a literary, essay-like style and a subtle sense of humor (“moments stuck with me like sea lice to the side of salmon”), but she works so hard to present a balanced, fully researched point of view that sometimes it gets a little dull. Informative! Thorough! Enough to give me nightmares about whales when I made the mistake of reading it before bed, but not quite enough to stop me from reading a couple other books since starting it. The problem is: It is a lot of beluga.

You care because you know you’re supposed to care. You don’t want another creature to go extinct or politicians to manipulate the system, but after a while the most interesting thing about the beluga story are the people she interviews and they come and go.

Cook Inlet belugas made the front page April 20 when the National Marine Fisheries Service proposed to list the belugas an endangered, www.fakr.noaa.gov. In 2000, NMFS determined the belugas were not endangered, prompting a lot of controversy which Lord covers in her book. According to the Anchorage Daily News article, public comment on the listing are due by June 19. The paper quoted Sen. Ted Stevens as saying “This is being spearheaded by people who want to stop development in the Cook Inlet region.” Rep. Don Young said, “This whole thing is out of whack.”

The International Whaling Commission meets this month in Anchorage.

The Mountaineers Books, 272 pages, $16.95

David Sedaris was here

Fine Print: Not an Alaskan. Not a book about Alaska. Just a literary good time.

What I’m reading now: Beluga Days by Nancy Lord. Still. I’m probably too slow a reader for a literary blog, but I’m having fun.

David Sedaris nearly filled the 2,000-seat Atwood Concert Hall last night. It was so nice to see so many people out in support of a queer writer. All the literary liberal types replaced their fleece for slacks and put on their best square glasses for the occasion. KSKA 91.1 and Title Wave Books brought him up here, and Bede Trantina, station manager at KSKA who introduced Sedaris, got almost as much applause as the headliner. What a bunch of NPR geeks we are.

And Sedaris was just as funny, witty and observant as always. The images and juxtapositions he shared will stay with me for a long time. And the laugh therapy was worth the admission. I’m not sure about reading the zombie books he recommended though…

Read what ADN art reporter Dawnell Smith thought about the night.