154 World Literature Today reviews me from myself.” In both cases, the length of the line is more than a stylistic tic; it is thematically essential to most of Williams’s poems. Matching length of line to length of life, Williams writes with humor and poignancy about aging, as in the moving and bold “Salt,” in which he admits to finding it “Abashingly eerie that just because I’m here on the long low-tide beach of age with briny time / licking insidious eddies over my toes there’d rise in me those mad weeks a lifetime ago.” Many poems in this book similarly evoke Shakespeare’s “sessions of sweet, silent thought,” juxtaposing vivid memories of the past with the quiet indignities of old age. Thus, the active “writing” of the title suggests the movement toward death, not death itself but rather the record of a poet’s progress through life. The writer writing toward dying is leaving a record of his life, a process Williams, like Shakespeare in his sonnets, imagines in metaphors of sexual reproduction: “if I could lie down like a mare giving birth, arm in my own uterine channel to tug out another, / one more, only one more, poor damp little poem, then I’ll be happy—I promise, I swear.” As this vivid and surprising image evidences, C. K. Williams’s many readers will be happy to receive these lively and interesting new poems, whatever the process that births them. Benjamin Myers Oklahoma Baptist University Miscellaneous Chinua Achebe. There Was a Country : A Personal History of Biafra. New York. Penguin. 2012. isbn 9781594204821 For those who already know the writer of Things Fall Apart (1958), Chinua Achebe’s memoir, There Was a Country, will emphasize and elucidate certain intricate or fuzzy details of his already well-known life. This new work is not madeofthemnemonicenergyofgrand autobiography but of the subtle and graceful power of Achebe’s taut prose, his mastery of the form and economy of memorable language. Achebe does chronicle and preserve for us a powerful memoir of a lost and ambiguous time. Achebe sets the score of his life’s story in the rise and fall of another country—the republic of Biafra—and one of the most brutal civil wars of the twentieth century. There Was a Country is structured as a four-part movement of stories. Mario Vargas Llosa The Dream of the Celt Edith Grossman, tr. Farrar, Straus & Giroux Nobel Prize–winning Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa demonstrates his formidable literary talents in this work of historical fiction examining the life and death of Roger Casement, an Irish nationalist who was executed in 1916 for treason. Casement remains a controversial figure whose work in human rights was largely overlooked. march–april 2013 • 155 Twisted Truths: Stories from the Irish Brian Ó Conchubhair, ed. Cló Iar-Chonnacht / Dufour Editions To read Twisted Truths, twenty-two short stories translated from the Irish, is to encounter literary hybrids with ancient roots. Vintage dilemmas of the folkloric grand narratives re-emerge in a globalized world, and the anthology’s featured authors place characters firmly on twenty-firstcentury Irish soil that is also, somehow, universal. Nota Bene It seems to correspond with the four elemental cycles of Igbo life and experience on which the balance of that world is consecrated. Achebe establishes the moment of his origins in the part he titles “Pioneers of a New Frontier.” It is the story of his own father’s transition from an orphan to a missionary teacher, one of the pioneers of Christian missionary education and evangelism in Igboland. We certainly suspect that we have heard that story before of Isaiah Achebe and his generous uncle, the sagely Ozo Udoh Osinyi, who had provided the early Christian missionaries in Ogidi with their first hospitality. However, Achebe fleshes out the fragments of that story a bit more in this memoir by providing a more dialectical interrogation of his own place within that relationship. We also see a bit more of Achebe’s mother in this memoir —just a glimpse, enough to give us a picture, in the kola nut tree incident , of her strength and resolve, and the forge from which...
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Feb 13, 2017
Steven Paas 
Open Access