reviews his first encounter with it at the age of nineteen through his response, twenty-five years later, as a mature poet and master technician. This concentration on the physical and psychological circumstances of the moment, which may be indebted to the type of prayer called “composition of place” in the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, informs much of the book. The attention to detail allows Hass to fix on moments, like those in Chekhov “when you catch him in the act of being a great writer .” Or to explain a good deal about Czesław Miłosz in terms of his origin in Polish-controlled Lithuania. Or the context in which Howl was received. One surprising result is that the more one knows, or thinks one knows, about the subject, the more one can learn from Hass, who writes: “One of the gifts people who teach can give to students is a sense of complexity, because desire tends to simplify what it sees.” This is from the final essay, on the controversial cutting down of a grove of trees on the Berkeley campus, which opens layers upon layers of complexity— biographical, biological, horticultural , political, geological—and laments less the disappearance of the trees than the opportunities to discuss the multilayered issues surrounding the event. Throughout the book, single sentences offer moments of illumination , as in his view that the western “was always a sort of American Protestant morality tale, a Pilgrim’s Progress, made out of simple virtues and simple tests,” or that Catholics “are tellers of stories and enumerators of lists . . . rather than readers of Scripture.” Anyone familiar with either subject will not only recognize the accuracy of the statements but should be able to use them to develop one’s own arguments. Sometimes the eloquence, confidence , and brief insights serve to gloss over structural problems in longer essays, like those on Louis Zukovsky, families and prisons, and the epistles of John. Each contains much of value, but the organizational principle is not always clear. Even less clear are the photographs used to illustrate Hass’s essays on photographers of the American West. His prose is quite lucid, but Ecco Press has used the cheapest possible method of reproduction , including black-and-white renderings of color photographs, so that the reader/viewer must take Hass’s judgments with a good deal of faith. Still, Hass is a consistently illuminating guide and a masterful reader of poems, photographs, and situations. Robert Murray Davis University of Oklahoma Dany Laferrière. The World Is Moving Around Me: A Memoir of the Haiti Earthquake. David Homel, tr. Vancouver, B.C. Arsenal Pulp Press. 2013. isbn 9781551524986 Like many Haitian writers and artists , the novelist Dany Laferrière has been living abroad for many years— in his case, since 1976, mostly in Quebec. He was visiting Haiti when a massive earthquake struck the country on January 12, 2010, leaving three hundred thousand dead and over a million homeless. Originally published in French as Tout bouge autour de moi (2010), this book is his firsthand account of the disaster and its aftermath. Most of his texts have been partly autobiographical in nature, and this impressionistic, fragmented chronicle is no exception. With the world literally and figuratively moving around him (Laferrière often chooses provocative titles), he is led to explore his role as a writer— and, no doubt, his survivor guilt—on 74 World Literature Today Reflections and Retrospectives: African Literature Today 30 Ernest N. Emenyonu, ed. James Curry Guest editor Chimalum Nwankwo gathers a wealth of engaging articles about the most influential and accomplished African writers of the twentieth century in this latest issue of African Literature Today. The contributors wrangle with the fundamental question: “How does the artist or writer help the human condition positively?” Prajwal Parajuly The Gurkha’s Daughter: Stories Quercus Wrapped in a stunning book jacket, this short-story anthology describes the turbulent, dramatic, and evocative experiences of a people unified by their culture but set apart by diaspora. Featuring a variety of settings and characters, Prajwal Parajuly paints a vividly colorful and sensual portrayal of Nepalese society. Nota Bene a grander and more tragic scale than he...
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Jul 1, 2023
Chris Dunton 
Open Access