I have no idea if Charles Causley’s poetry is known to American readers but I suspect it isn’t, or only to scholars and other poets; to become internationally celebrated for poetry requires the kind of ambition he signally lacked. He was without question one of the most important British poets of the last century—utterly original, his working-class voice untainted by university and the dead weight of literary tradition it passes on, and abidingly popular without being populist.
Little Poems, a new anthology edited by Michael Hennessy, provides a history of short poems since antiquity, from Sappho to Ocean Vuong, a lovely pocket-size volume with several hundred brief, chronological examples of what poetry can do. I read it cover to cover, speeding through the centuries, though approaching an anthology this way, for anyone other than a critic, is perverse. The pleasure of anthologies is scope, scope and openness. As with Wikipedia or the O.E.D., you can enter anywhere and stop any time. They encourage random flipping and riffling, seeing what hooks the eye — a form of bibliomancy, this mode of intentional happenstance. Dipping into “Little Poems” like so, you might find, in rapid succession, a fifth-century epigram by Julian the Egyptian (“I kept singing this, and I will call it out from the grave:/‘Drink, before you put on these clothes of dust’”) and “This Living Hand,” by John Keats, another poem that projects itself into a time after death, ever startling in its moment that sounds like someone talking right now, right next to you: “So in my veins red life might stream again,/And thou be conscious-calmed — see here it is —/I hold it towards you.” You might find a handful of snail poems, or anonymous poems, which, when they appear back to back, as do “Western Wind” (“Westron wind, when will thou blow?/The small rain down can rain”) and “Hey Nonny No” (“Is’t not fine to dance and sing/When the bells of death do ring? … When the winds do blow,/And the seas do flow?/Hey nonny no!”), you can pretend were written by the same famous, nameless poet.
Moreno-Garcia spends a bit too much time explaining how Ewers’s movie magic functions, but the myriad film references and odes to analog tech make this the equivalent of a lovingly nostalgic double-bill “Chiller Theater” for 21st century horror nerds. Best of all is Moreno-Garcia’s depiction of the poignant, lifelong friendship between Montserrat and Tristán, with its simmering romantic undercurrent, shared childhood language and adult resentments. Like its namesake, “Silver Nitrate” catches fire and doesn’t stop burning until the end.
In this summer’s treat, “Silver Nitrate,” Moreno-Garcia again deploys horror as a touchstone for a textured ghost story with surprising historical undertones while paying homage to a lesser-known progenitor of the form. True to her own method, she succeeds here by knowing when to follow the rules of genre storytelling and when to turn them upside down.
Lindsay Lynch’s debut novel “Do Tell” goes far beyond that fateful night in 1939 and the court case that follows — which is loosely based on the real case brought by Peggy Satterlee and Betty Hansen against actor Errol Flynn — and creates a noir-like tale of Hollywood’s underbelly.
At home with our screens, we have yet to bounce back from that disruption, yet to readopt old habits like commuting to the office or watching movies at the multiplex. If recent trends in bad behavior are any indication, we may also have yet to relearn the skill set of coexistence — like how not to throw hard objects at musicians during their live shows, even if it makes for eye-grabbing video.
Into this precarious state of affairs steps “Encounterism: The Neglected Joys of Being in Person,” an argument by the British artist Andy Field for venturing out among the populace. To him, our most ordinary sidewalk interactions can be imbued with “friction and possibility … anxiety and joy.” These are little pockets of opportunity where compassion might grow.