Reading list update -27

This time, two really, really impactful books. I highly recommend both.

Here’s my updated 2024 TBR, my previous reading update and my 13-point review:

1. Five Decades: Poems 1925- 1970 by Pablo Neruda, edited and translated from the Spanish by Ben Belitt. This collection of 138 poems showcases the inimitable style of Neruda: verses peppered with metaphors and analogies and unexpected anthropomorphisms that sometimes sing, sometimes overwhelm, mostly paint in colours so vivid you can reach out and touch them. Like “all that is living concludes in my feet: / from there on, the hostile and alien begins”( Ritual of my legs)  or “Wind rattles the months, a train whistles, / fever paces the bedposts, /  a hard intonation of darkness,/  like a bottomless downfall of patches, /  distance repeated, wine in a nondescript colour, / the dusty approach and bawling of cows –“ (Nocturnal Collection) or “Beyond and beyond and beyond / and beyond and beyond and beyond and beyoooooond: / the horsemen demolish the rain” (Horseman in Rain)
2. Neruda writes as a witness: of the Spanish civil war, (Till one morning everything blazed: / one morning bonfires / sprang out of the earth / and devoured all the living; / since then, only fire, / since then, the blood and the gunpowder, / ever since then. – A few things explained), of economic imperialism (They ravished all enterprise, / awarded the laurels like Caesars, / unleashed all the covetous, and contrived / the tyrannical Reign of the Flies – The United Fruit Co.), of Nitrate ships (the unascending eagles / into whose breathing the acids/ and murderous gases have entered – Cristobal Miranda). If poetry’s highest purpose, the poet’s greatest burden, is to record for posterity, from that unique vantage point, the intersection of language, time and reality — then Neruda does it with the greatest flair.
3. He writes about places: Madrid, Macchu Picchu (the high places, holding our human beginnings: / that steep alembic encircling our silence: – The heights of Macchu Picchu), Lima, Rangoon (It came to me there in Rangoon – all gods / are our enemies, like the God / of our humbled humanity. – Religion in the East), Ceylon and more, raising cities out of the pages.  
4. About ordinary things: Artichokes, wood (an earth-heart plucked out / dominion / that struck like a wave / a sundered duration – The smell of cordwood), divers, lemons (cutting the lemon / the knife / leaves a little / cathedral: – A lemon), pianos, animals (It was winter in Berlin: a light / with no light, a sky without sky. / The air white as a loaf of wet bread. – Horses), opium, stones… finding poetry in the banal inanimate.
5. About life: Like (I would know nothing, dream nothing: / who will teach my non-being / how to be, without striving to be? – Stationary Point) and (put it this way: we have / muddied our landscapes, / and the highways that led to the sky / bear down on us all / with the wastes of a spoiling commodity. – The Truth) and (The child’s foot still doesn’t know it’s a foot, it wants to be a butterfly or apple. – To the foot from its child) and (This I know at great cost: / all life is not outward, / nor is all death from within: / time writes in the ciphers / of water and rock for no one at all, / so that none may envision the sender / and no one be any the wiser. – The traveler). What is life without such language, but then what is language without a life that knows how to seek, how to find and how to weave the light into poems.
6. And he writes about himself as in: (Many wonder, I know— / What’s Pablo up to? I’m here. / If you look for me in the street / you’ll find me there tuning / my fiddle, ready to sing / and to die. – For everybody) or (I’m a journeyman fisherman / of living wet verses / that break through the veins; / it’s all I was good for.” – Little devils) or (I keep on being happy, / disclosing to nobody / my ambiguous malady: / the grief I endure for self-love, / who was never so loved in return. – Conditions). Poetry first of all becomes a mirror for the poet… it is not what he sees, but how much he let the reader see.
7. “The traveller asks himself: if he lived out / a lifetime, pushing the distance away, / does he come back to the place where his grieving began: / squander his dose of identity again, / say his goodbyes again, and go?” – Goodbyes. I read this book from cover to cover over a few weeks but, I know I will come back again and again, to hunt down my favourites and savour them slowly…get yourself a copy and keep it by your bed. This is illuminating, elevating, compelling poetry.
8. Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine is a “lyric essay” (a form that combines essay, poetry and memoir) on the lived experiences of racism, particularly in modern America. It has been referred to as a multi-media installation which I think is most fitting, considering its form, the inclusion of images and several scripts for ‘situation videos’ that the reader can view elsewhere, in which she reads the lines as background score for the simple images, converting words into powerful stories. Is this the future of all writing, especially poetry? Do readers want to, especially in this increasingly digital world, consume poetry through videos, or even better, as short reels? I confess I watched a few videos that I could find online and the combined power of spoken poetry and visuals was overwhelming.
9. The content itself, for a reader who doesn’t know the details of the public cases of racial violence that she describes, maybe a bit challenging to fully absorb, but she leaves no doubt about what she is talking about and the immensity of the actions and the consequences. “That time and that time and that time the outside blistered the inside of you, words outmaneuvered years, had you in a chokehold, every part roughed up, the eyes dripping.”
10. She describes how racist language and behaviour are “normalized” between friends, at work, or in everyday interactions and the reactions to such microaggressions: hurt, confusion, anger, resignation — whether capable of being articulated or not, trigger feelings of historical oppression, fears about visibility and erasure.
    • “For all your previous understandings, suddenly incoherence feels violent. You both experience this cut, which she keeps insisting is a joke, a joke stuck in her throat, and like any other injury, you watch it rupture along its suddenly exposed suture.”
    • “Occasionally it is interesting to think about the outburst if you would just cry out— To know what you’ll sound like is worth noting”
    • “A friend argues that Americans battle between the “historical self” and the “self self.” By this she means you mostly interact as friends with mutual interest and, for the most part, compatible personalities; however, sometimes your historical selves, her white self and your black self, or your white self and her black self, arrive with the full force of your American positioning.”
    • And when the woman with the multiple degrees says, I didn’t know black women could get cancer, instinctively you take two steps back though all urgency leaves the possibility of any kind of relationship as you realize nowhere is where you will get from here.
11. She studies the challenges of tennis champion Serena Williams, using the prism of a quote by Zora Neale Hurston, “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.” Rankine writes about Williams’ outburst on court against a call she believes was unfair: “Perhaps this is how racism feels no matter the context—randomly the rules everyone else gets to play by no longer apply to you, and to call this out by calling out “I swear to God!” is to be called insane, crass, crazy. Bad sportsmanship.”
12. From Hurricane Katrina that struck in 2005, (“You simply get chills every time you see these poor individuals, so many of these people almost all of them that we see, are so poor, someone else said, and they are so black.”), to the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012, the 2006 conviction of the Jena six – six black highschoolers charged for beating up a white student, to everyday stop-and-frisk situations (“Then flashes, a siren, a stretched-out roar—and you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description.”), to the Zidane headbutt football incident (“That man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity, out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it, knows … something about himself and human life that no school on earth—and indeed, no church— can teach.”), Rankine lays out her views, in sharp, poignant prose-poetry: “Exactly why we survive and can look back with furrowed brow is beyond me.”
13. “You are you even before you
    grow into understanding you
    are not anyone, worthless,
    not worth you.
    Even as your own weight insists
    you are here, fighting off
    the weight of nonexistence.”
    The book is heavy as truth spoken so freely, so eloquently always is and the reader is left examining their own lives, the injustices, big and small, that occur in their own environment and what the larger human question is with regard to equality, discrimination and freedom. That a book can do this, speaks to the power of the writer and to the urgency and breadth of the conditions faced.