Natasha PulleyThe Lost Future of Pepperharrow

Abstract

love most: “As sage gives its scent when you crush it. As stone / is hard. They were happy and I could touch it.” Even as it treads through deeply difficult subject matter, the book manages to be celebratory, extravagant, and often erotic; a matrix of intense noticing that makes it possible to understand how we live through and past all the difficulties of our lives. “Oh, blame life. That we just want more.” Or, Bass seems to say, blame the unrestrained blooming of fungus; the grizzly whose “shitting ferries the seeds”; the always separate and unknowable depths of a lover. Bailey Hoffner University of Oklahoma Natasha Pulley The Lost Future of Pepperharrow New York. Bloomsbury. 2020. 512 pages. FOR ALL ITS strange science, clairvoyance , and electrical ghosts, The Lost Future of Pepperharrow presents a nineteenth century remarkably analogous to our own history and fraught present. It is 1888, five years after Thaniel Steepleton, a Foreign Office translator, and Keita Mori, a clairvoyant watchmaker, met in Natasha Pulley ’s 2015 debut novel, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street. Together they travel with their daughter from their home in London to Mori’s estate in Japan as international tensions brew and nationalism secures an increasingly mainstream foothold. Greeted by Mori’s wife, Takiko Pepperharrow , the pair navigates their uncertain future in which the stakes are at once intimate and global. Mori is unsettled, and not just because of the hauntings. Meanwhile, Thaniel, ill and despondent, begins his post at Tokyo’s British legation as the strain in his relationship with Mori magnifies. Then Mori goes missing, leaving Thaniel and Takiko to untangle the connection between the ghosts, a labor camp, and a corrupt prime minister whose warmonger disposition threatens Mori’s life and the safety of civilian populations. Whereas Watchmaker is set largely in London, its sequel expands in both page Books in Review Major Jackson The Absurd Man New York. W.W. Norton. 2020. 112 pages. MAJOR JACKSON’S FIFTH book of poems is troubled by its own age. “The soil overruns with honey,” says the speaker in “I’ve Said Too Much,” a confession ripe with seasons of overindulgence . But satiety may not quite be what Jackson has in store for us this time. As though it had spent the five years since the release of Roll Deep (2015) weighing a smattering of gray hairs before embracing salt-and-pepper, The Absurd Man brings a different feel to Jackson’s perennially strong poetry. With a dose of self-awareness that is by turns playful, thought-provoking, and heartbreaking, the poems in this book offer up a collective narrative to complement their stand-alone lyricism. Return readers will mark a change in this book’s “Urban Renewal” suite, a recurring, sequential section that Jackson has described as a sort of autobiographical bildungsroman spread out across his collections. As in the book’s earlier poems like “November in Xichang,” the poetry in this section deploys Jackson’s signature roaming ekphrastic. But, often, Jackson doesn’t quite rhapsodize, leaving us a handbreadth short of the rapture of his habitual syllabic alchemy. Ultimately, his keenest lyric notes come not in poems like “Paris” but in the last half of “North Philadelphia” (the home of Jackson’s youth): “tunes / not so much learned yet risen, earth’s laments / gardened in our throats from black soil, a slow grumbling, / fitful drawn-out grunts grafting onto gospel notes / not recognized but felt, a ring-shout.” He ends, “I’m still in that dimness, several rows behind their wails, / writing their moans so you can feel them like Braille.” In The Absurd Man, the tune of Jackson’s most tactile, Braille-like passages takes after Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus, whose epigraph heads the section, valorizing the art of “the absurd creator.” In many ways, though, the epigraph toes the line between being a deceptive frame and an ironic foil, a presiding duplicity the reader is alert to from the book’s coy opener, “Major and I,” a playful take on Jorge Luis Borges’s “Borges y yo” that similarly exploits the sometimes troubling implications of a writer’s multiple personae. Indeed, the speaker resists the absurd...