I had a concept—a woman from an alternate universe, trapped in our New York City, risks it all to recover the only copy of a novel from her home. I’d even made a comprehensive outline on notecards, so I knew what needed to happen to her before the end. But how do you even write a novel? I didn’t know. I hadn’t learned in my classes. A real writer, I’d always thought, is motivated solely by the call of their art; they can’t do anything but write. And yet, to my dismay, writing had become a form of clock-punching for me. I was doing it so I’d have something to show for the high-stakes detour I’d taken in life. Only 40 pages in, I felt lost.
What qualifies as a longer sentence in a poem? It’s unlikely this question can be answered in a way that applies to more than a single example, and certainly we cannot define it by word count or number of clauses. Muldoon’s longer sentences are those that test the elasticity of his own metaphors—how taut can they stretch before the poem’s figurative thinking seems ornamental to (rather than generated through) the poem’s structure. The title poem of Frolic and Detour (2019), his thirteenth and most recent collection, is telling: to avoid this sort of unwarranted frenetic movement, readers will look around for a familiar stop while we travel. When I frolic around my neighborhood, I wander around playfully; on a detour, I’m hoping to arrive somewhere while intentionally avoiding obstructions on my usual path.
It is a tale of how lies and omissions can shape and warp us. It is a story about reconciliation, set against a backdrop of racism and resentments. But more than anything, it is a meditation on family and forgiveness.
Sybille Bedford is not a household name, but among her coterie of admirers in Europe and America she is held in high esteem. Her reputation rests upon a relatively slim literary output over the course of a long life (1911-2006): notably, four works of fiction (three earlier novels were deemed inferior and remain unpublished), a memoir, books about travel and international legal processes, a biography of her friend Aldous Huxley that is still the definitive one, and sundry journalism. Her first published novel, “A Legacy” (1956), rescued from possible oblivion by Evelyn Waugh’s encomium in The Spectator, has become something of a cult classic. She had limitations as a writer, the most significant being that she really had only one story to tell: that of her own life. But what a life it was! And now here we have it, elegantly related by Selina Hastings, the author of finely wrought, literate biographies of Somerset Maugham, Nancy Mitford and Waugh himself.
I appeared to have been run over by a train,
a train long out of eye- and out of earshot.