More for Globe’s Best N.E. Books
Posted by PaulM on 13 Jul 2009 at 05:54 pm | Tagged as: Education, Greater Lowell, History, Lowell, Lowell-2009, Poetry
Jackie Doherty has an interesting post on her site about the Globe’s recent listing of “their” top 100 books about New England or by NE authors. Margaret’s been listing some books that deserve to be on the list. I’d add Jane Brox’s Here and Nowhere Else. In fact, I’d add the whole Brox farm trilogy: Here and Nowhere Else, Five Thousand Days Like This One: An American Family History, and Clearing Land: Legacies of the American Farm. Some sharp publisher will realize those three short volumes should be combined into one classic of American nature writing. Jane did for Dracut what Thoreau did for Concord. She’s in Maine now, but made a forever impression in this place. I’d also add Michael Casey’s stunning book of poems that arose from his time in the military and in Vietnam: Obscenities — which won the Yale Prize for Younger Poets in 1972. John Hanson Mitchell’s Ceremonial Time: Fifteen Thousand Years on One Square Mile (set in Littleton or thereabouts) measures up as a regional classic. I don’t remember seeing The Flowering of New England by Van Wyck Brooks, another classic, about “the beginnings of American literature” right here. Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot and the first full-length volume of Charles Simic’s poems, Dismantling the Silence (1971), ought to be on the list. They must have had an edition of Emily Dickinson’s complete poems. And you have to have Robert Lowell’s Life Studies if you have Sylvia Plath’s Ariel. Ray Mungo’s Famous Long Ago is a time capsule of the 60s. Pick a novel by Elinor Lipman, Dave Daniel, Ernie Hebert, and David Plante. Jay Atkinson’s Ice Time: A Tale of Fathers, Sons, and Hometown Heroes rises to the level, as does The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx. I’ll stop here.
You reminded me that I never got around to reading the Dracut books by Jane Brox - I’ve added them to my summer list. You’re right that some poetry was needed on the list. Thanks for the interesting suggestions.
Thanks, Margaret. I amended my original post to acknowledge your listing on the jackie doherty site. We can’t forget the writings of Anne Bradstreet of North Andover, first poet of America and oftentimes the first writer in anthologies of American literature. North Andover has a poet laureate now, keeping up the tradition in town. And Martin Espada’s poems in “The Republic of Poetry” or “City of Coughing and Dead Radiators” (earns a place on the list for the title alone). Poet Galway Kinnell’s “Body Rags” and “The Maximus Poems” of Charles Olson. For an “about New England or by New England” list, I’d substitute Kerouac’s “Doctor Sax” or “The Town and the City” as stories set in N.E. rather than “On the Road,” as chosen by the Globe. And, speaking of stories, there should be a collection of the best of Andre Dubus II to go along with the Globe’s pick of “House of Sand and Fog” by Andre Three of Newburyport and UMass Lowell. We should compile a list of the top 25 books about Lowell or by writers who are connected to Lowell.