A Poem for Today

The Complete Poems 

by Thomas Hardy

The last thirty years of Thomas Hardy's life was devoted to poetry. During this time after he had eschewed novel-writing he wrote hundreds of poems. These poems spanned a variety of styles including: satires, love poems, lyrics, reveries, and songs. The topics also spanned a great number including some focused on the Wessex countryside where he set his well-known novels. The result of all this poetic creation is a collection that rivals that of the greatest poets in the English-speaking world. I would recommend this volume to all who revere fine poetry. Here is a poem from one of his late collections:

The Six Boards

Six boards belong to me:
I do not know where they may be;
If growing green, or lying dry
In a cockloft nigh.

Some morning I shall claim them,
And who may then possess will aim them
To bring to me those boards I need
With thoughtful speed.

But though they hurry so
To yield me mine, I shall not know
How well my want they'll have supplied
When notified.

Those boards and I — how much
In common we, of feel and touch
Shall share thence on, — earth's far core-quakings,
Hill-shocks, tide-shakings —

Yea, hid where none will note,
The once live tree and man, remote
From mundane hurt as if on Venus, Mars,
Or furthest stars.

From Thomas Hardy: The Complete Poems, Collier-Macmillan, London, 1976, pp 820-21.

Dysfunctional Family

The Prince of Tides 

by Pat Conroy

“Her library would have been valuable to a bibliophile except she treated her books execrably. I would rarely open a volume that she had not desecrated by underlining her favorite sections with a ball-point pen. Once I had told her that I would rather see a museum bombed than a book underlined, but she dismissed my argument as mere sentimentality. She marked her books so that stunning images and ideas would not be lost to her.”   ― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

This is the tale of a dysfunctional family where a violent father beats his wife and kids. Henry Wingo is a shrimper who plies the oceans off the coast of South Carolina in search of shrimp. He frequently blows through the meager funds he accumulates in ridiculous business ventures. His stunning wife, Lila, serves as both his victim and a cunning and guilt-inflicting mother.

The central characters in this family saga are brother and sister twins. Tom Wingo, a middle-aged man with a wife and three young girls who has recently lost his job as a high school English teacher and football coach, is one of the youngsters who tells the narrative. Tom alternates between remembering his childhood on the remote Melrose Island and his current life in Manhattan.

Tom promises to visit Savannah in New York City, where she resides, to take care of her while she recovers.  However, Tom discovers that his wife is having an affair just before he departs from his South Carolina home.  The gory sight of horror, rape, and carnage known only as "what happened on the island that day" finally sheds light on the sadness, pain, and emotional isolation the Wingo siblings experienced. Conroy skillfully handles a wide cast of characters and a complicated plot, but he betrays his credibility with a gimmick in which Tom relates the Wingo family saga to Savannah's therapist. 

Some readers might notice a poor imitation of Robert Penn Warren's potent evocation of the Southern myth in this work, while others would detect echoes of John Irving's baroque fantasies. The majority, though, will be carried along by Conroy's felicitous, frequently beautiful prose, his sarcastic observations on the nature of man and society, his love of the South's marshland region, and his talent for storytelling.

I enjoyed reading Conroy's book and couldn't help but admire the author's creative ability in creating this family. My understanding of the author's background has led me to believe that some of his real-life experiences served as inspiration for this fiction. That doesn't take away from how much I believe you will appreciate this well-told story.

Essential Dreams

Dreams of My Russian Summers 

by Andreï Makine

“The unsayable! It was mysteriously linked, I now understood, to the essential. The essential was unsayable. Incommunicable. And everything in the world that tortured me with its silent beauty, everything that needed no words, seemed to be essential. The unsayable was essential.”   ― Andreï Makine, Dreams of My Russian Summers




This is a beautifully-written novel about a young man who spends the summers in Siberia with his French grandmother, Charlotte Lemonnier, along with his sister. The narrative is told as a semi-autobiographical story by Andrei Makine, who fled the Soviet Union in 1987 when he was thirty years old. Charlotte, who became trapped there following the death of her Russian husband, shares a world of memories with the children, including memories of France before World War II. Charlotte's sheer Frenchness raises serious suspicions in the eyes of her neighbors and the authorities in the very paranoid realm of Soviet Communism.

The boy is divided as he grows up between his love of his grandma and the lovely world she conjures and his urge as a young child to fit in and embrace his Russian heritage. In his perspective, the French aspect of his character reflects a gauzy humanism and a love of beauty, while the Russian aspect of his character comes to represent a type of barbarism and a potential for violence. His perception, however it may be flawed, convinces him that the Soviets have good reason to be afraid of their Frenchness. 

"I became aware of a disconcerting truth: to harbor this distant past within oneself, to let one's soul live in this legendary Atlantis, was not guiltless. No, it was well and truly a challenge, a provocation in the eyes of those who lived in the present."

Living in the West, it is casually assumed that progressives are often the only ones whose souls contain humanism and the good. For Makine and his narrator, the exact reverse is true; at that time, it was necessary to look to the East to find ideals and a culture that exalted human beings, whereas the Soviet Union's progressives did everything in their might to put them out of existence.

It is not surprising that Makine's story occasionally comes out as being somewhat vague and opaque given how deeply personal memory is. He sometimes leans a little too heavily on Proustian and Nabokov connections; a few fewer references to cork-lined chambers and moths wouldn't hurt; we get the point. Furthermore, I'm not enough of a Francophile to find it funny rather than emotional when someone speaks fondly of France. However, I would recommend the book due to the beauty of the writing, a few striking pictures, and the way the plot alludes to the tragedy of 20th-century Russia.

A Boy's Memories

Ordinary Grace 

by William Kent Krueger

“The dead are never far from us. They’re in our hearts and on our minds and in the end all that separates us from them is a single breath, one final puff of air.”   ― William Kent Krueger, Ordinary Grace




Set in a typical small town, New Bremen, Minnesota, where in 1961 Ice-cold root beers were disappearing from the shelves at Halderson's Drugstore's soda fountain, and Hot Stuff comic books were a staple on every barbershop magazine rack as the Twins played their inaugural season. It was an era of optimism and innocence for a nation led by a new, young president. Yet for thirteen-year-old Frank Drum, it was a gloomy summer marked by frequent and varied visits from death, a natural occurrence, but also murder and suicide. Except for the murder and suicide, it reminded me of the small town I grew up in at about the same time in southern Wisconsin.

When tragedy unexpectedly strikes Frank's family, which includes his Methodist minister father, his passionate, artistic mother, his older sister, who is headed to Juilliard, and his wise-beyond-his-years younger brother, he finds himself thrust into an adult world full of secrets, lies, adultery, and betrayal. Frank is suddenly required to show a maturity and gumption beyond his years. Again I felt a similarity, in part, since I grew up in an extended family of Methodists, with a sister, two uncles, and aunt, and eight cousins (two of whom were the same age as me).

I found this book to be a profoundly compelling narrative of a youngster attempting to make sense of a world that seems to be disintegrating around him, told from Frank's perspective forty years after that tragic summer. Centered within multiple mysteries and deaths this book explores the cost of wisdom and the role of God's unfailing grace.

Horror or Primitive Duality?

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll 

and Mr. Hyde  

by Robert Louis Stevenson

“I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both.”   ― Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has a lot of literary legends associated with it, as would seem appropriate for such a bizarre narrative. One claims that Stevenson had nightmares about the story's gory parts at initially. Another claims that the hasty author burned the first complete draft in response to his wife's criticism. Both myths might not be true. The only thing that is known is that Stevenson's work masterfully caught the obvious paradoxes of Victorian society and illustrated the terrible results of hiding man's innate animal desires beneath the rigid concepts of "decency." This duality preceded the results of Freudian and Jungian studies of the subsequent century; however they provided an interesting addition to the literature of the doppelganger. A horrifying window into the murky recesses of the psyche is provided by Jekyll and Hyde.

This is one of those favorites of which it seems everyone knows the story even though they may only have seen one of the film adaptations of the original book.  It is their loss for the book is a minor masterpiece and the best offerings of Hollywood (my favorite is the 1941 version with Spencer Tracy but Frederic March, 1931, is a close second) wander far from the text of the book, particularly with the addition of a love interest for the good Dr. Jekyll that just is not there.  That aside, the book is high Victorian speculation about the nature of evil and man's ability to create life or at least modify it.  It reminds me of Well's The Island of Dr. Moreau, published a decade later, except Stevenson is a bit more of a romantic.  It also provides an example for the theories of Dr. Freud, who was not on the scene when Stevenson was creating his short novel.  There are many explanations for the dual personalities presented by Stevenson.  I like to think of it as a variation of the doppelganger literature of which Poe's William Wilson and Dostoevsky's The Double are classic examples.  Stevenson's story and character has entered our literary mind and vocabulary and was popular from the beginning with good reason.  

Stevenson was well-liked in his day, but writers in the early 20th century criticized him for penning profit-driven commercial fiction. Since then, he has gained recognition as one of the greatest writers of English literature. This is one of his best stories and a favorite of mine.