John Poch’s new book of poems, “The Future of Love,” is so full of riches that I can’t possibly do them all justice in this post. So I’m going to focus on three of the book’s main motifs: Spain, colors, and love. Poch has clearly spent considerable time in Spain. It’s referred to or is even the setting for over fourteen of the book’s poems.
El Greco once painted Martin of Tours. It is a giant painting, though El Greco also painted a smaller version, as he was wont to do. In the painting, Martin sits atop a steed in shining armor. The beggar/Christ stands nearby, so close, actually, as to almost merge with Martin and the horse. Martin has not cut the cloak, yet. It’s a green cloak that looks more like a banner that is wound round the nether parts of the beggar/Christ figure.
There was a quite extensive exhibit of Caspar David Friedrich paintings at the Albertinum, one of the art museums in Dresden. One has the feeling that there is always a Caspar David Friedrich exhibit at one of the art museums of Dresden. Nonetheless I was glad for it. I was glad to move slowly from one canvas to the next and to see more Friedrich paintings in one location than I had ever seen before.
On this upcoming family camping trip, there are so many things I should be reading. But what do I want to read? It must be something best consumed in brief snippets. I may take a volume of R H Blyth’s haiku translations. But even that is too much in the way of commentary (brilliant though it is) when what I want is something pared down to essentials, something crystalline, elemental, vivid, this-worldly. The only narrative I’m interested in is that of travel in this world.
Since October 7, 2023, the world has been focused on the Holy Land. And not in a positive or hopeful way. So what better time for Bret Lott’s latest book—Gather the Olives: On Food and Hope and the Holy Land—to come out? As he notes in his foreword, Lott delivered the manuscript to his publisher in the summer of 2023, when it was possible to find in Israel the subtitle’s “hope.” And find it he does.
For me, as an author of fiction who takes inspiration from a historian like Francis Parkman, perhaps the most salient of Parkman’s features is his prose style. Few can match his cadences and powers of description. The ability to describe a scene vividly is an underestimated and for the most part a modern virtue of the prose writer; in an age of screens it has fallen into abeyance.