More delicious words

Here’s another one from Chabon: “There is a small, decisive clink, a bit hollow, like false teeth clapping together.”

It’s not just the startling combination of words that make these images so great but the way they fit perfectly into the style and tone of the work. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a crime novel, gritty, dark, full of noir characters: in the scene from which the line above is taken, the room is full of down-and-outers who probably have - or need - false teeth. And here’s another: “A Disney shtetl, bright and clean as a freshly forged birth certificate.” This to describe a neighborhood that’s home to organized crime on the eve of “the Reversion” when a good many people might be wanting forged birth certificates. Even the image from my earlier post: as the novel progresses Landsman, a police detective, and his partner are indeed comrades in a probably doomed adventure.

At some point I stopped dog-earing my pages to mark such perfect lines because I was turning back every other corner.

Swooning over this simile

Listen to this line from The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon: “He checks behind the hot-water tanks, lashed to one another with straps of steel like comrades in a doomed adventure.”

Wow. Wow oh wow oh wow.

Who are you reading?

A while back Poet Mom wrote this post about who the top selling poets in the US seem to be: either dead (Gibran, Whitman) or well-known (Seamus Heaney, Mary Oliver). It wasn’t that Poet Mom was suggesting that the poets on the list aren’t quality poets, but that there are so many good contemporary poets writing today that don’t seem to get attention (to the extent that poets in modern America are getting any attention at all); that casual readers of poetry reach for names they’re familiar with and aren’t willing to read a new name in poetry the way they might be willing to read a new name in fiction.

Which got me wondering. Who are you reading these days? Who’s the last new - new to you, that is - poet you stumbled upon and how did you make the discovery? What’s the last book of poetry you bought? I’m reading Dorianne Laux and Anna Akhmatova at the moment. My most recent “discovery” is Jack Ridl; his poem “From our House to your  House” in the current issue of Poetry East spoke to me enough to inspire me to order his book Broken Symmetry, and while I was at it I also ordered this and this.

So tell me. Who do you like? Who do you read? Who’s on your “must read” list?