Relieved exhalation of breath. Seamus Heaney (here’s his Nobel Prize website bio page) is a poet I come to again and again. The first thing I ever read of his writing, though, besides a couple of pieces in an anthology, was prose — essays, I believe, on poetics and poetry. For a few years, I read almost nothing of him, until I arrived in Jeonju. After some time, I ventured to take a look in the English-language texts collection at the Uni where I was working, and what do you know, but they had a lot of his poetry, to …

The Painted Bed is a strong, hard book. It is painful, because, as one soon realizes, the title announces its theme, only a few pages into the book, is the deathbed of the poet’s wife, the bed of their sleeping, their dreams, the love and their sex in life, and the site of his wife’s passage into the dark realms as well. The book reads as a slow progression from outright grief, through the aftermath of a wife’s death, then into a kind of frame-cut — a jump to a bigger perspective, all the living and dying and movement of …

This is a Roman novel, which is a first for me: I’ve read Roman poetry, and Roman speeches, but never a Roman novel until now. Well, strictly speaking it’s actually not a Roman novel, but a Carthaginean novel, though it was written in Latin. The translation is a very old one, by William Adlington, which is normal in the Wordsworth Classics series: the texts are very inexpensive, but one must read very old and somewhat difficult translations. The difficulty, though, is apparently reflective in Apuleius’ own handling of the Latin language, one he may have learned as his natuve tongue …

This book is, technically speaking, not the #47 book of the year. It’s just that, as I looked through my shelves for something to read, it occurred to me that I’d brought a spare copy to have passed on to a poet-friend (my old teacher, Tim Lilburn) — and read it on the plane ride over to Canada — last summer. It’s probably more like book #22 of my Lunar New Year list, but I’m not going to go back and adjust all the numbers. They can be left to signify my reviews, rather than my readings. Between Sound and …

I attended a wedding during my visit to Montréal last summer; it was my friend Medrie’s wedding, and at it was read a poem by e.e. cummings, a beautiful thing that ended with the stunning lines, “… alive / we’re alive) / we’re wonderful one times one”. All the next day, the poem stuck in my head, and when I stopped by one of my old haunts, CDement, a used CD shop, I noticed that they’d expanded by adding a lot of used books to their stock. Imagine my shock when I found an e.e. cummings text with the title …

While I did not technically “read” this text, I did spend more time listening to it than I would have spent eyeing the text. As it was, I downloaded it from Emule, but it’s a free audiobook available from Librivox. I do not know whether it is legal yet in Korea to circulate this text, although I am quite certain it was on a list of banned texts not long ago — just as were Camus and Sartre in my mother’s childhood in Quebec. I suspect it probably is legal here, though, since I managed to buy a heavily abridged …

Damon Knight claimed that conjure Wife was “[e]asily the most frightening (and necessarily) the most thoroughly convincing of all modern horror stories,” and while I’m not sure the praise sits quite so steady nowadays, I do have to give Conjure Wife a big thumbs-up as far as diabolical imagination goes. This is my second reading of the novel: I read this book back in undergrad, the very same edition, actually, which I bore back to Korea from a box in my folks’ garage. When (back in 1997 or 1998) I mentioned the basic concept of the story to an RPGing …