Shoppers, Angels and Poets

Some survive the holidays by packing as many books as their suitcases will hold. For those readers’ valises and totebags, here are a few suggestions. None will set off airport security, but they’re guaranteed to keep your brain cells on beneficent alert.

If your thoughts currently run toward the apocalyptic, political or familial, pack along copies of Shoppers, a book of two award-winning plays by poet, fiction writer and essayist Denis Johnson, and Angels, a reprint of his first novel, published in 1977. The former takes place in Houston, Texas, and Ukiah, Calif., focusing on an ur-dysfunctional family, sexual harassment investigators and various ecclesiastical figures, including a theologically and ethically imperfect circle that finances its ministry through dealing drugs. Indeed, failings and flaws are what drive these two plays: “Perfection is not the basis of what I’m talking about,” says one of the Cassandras, the resonantly named family at the core of Shoppers.

The Houstons, the familial protagonists of Angels, would agree wholeheartedly. That book’s prophets manqué, thieves and addicts, however despicable their actions, remain timely representatives of the search for meaning in a country where too much is free and too little valued, including the possibilities for genuine freedom in our own lives. In their wayward questing, the Houstons are not unlike drug-amped contemporary Magi, and their thoughts, actions and longings are rendered with a hallucinatory yet universal quality that confounds attempts at paraphrase. Witness the following excerpt: “As he walked beside the road,” Johnson writes of Angel’s James Houston, “he felt his anger burning up in the heat of noon, and saw himself, as he often did when he was outdoors on hot days, being forged in enormous fires for some purpose beyond his imagining. He was only walking down a street toward a barroom, and yet in his own mind he took his part in the eternity of this place. It seemed to him—it was not the first time—that he belonged in Hell, and would always find himself joyful in its midst. It seemed to him that to touch James Houston was to touch one iota of the vast grit that made the desert and hid the fires at the center of the earth.”

The juxtaposition of comedy and violence that accounts for the brilliance of Johnson’s work at its best has an unlikely forebear in Wallace Stevens, who believed that “poetry is the violence from within that protects us from the violence from without.” Emily Dickinson, conventionally imagined as the fey and ever yearning spinster in a prim white dress, bore out this idea as well as any writer, giving voice to “Vesuvius at home,” as she called herself in one of her poems. The aptly titled My Wars Are Laid Away in Books, a new biography by former University of Kansas professor Alfred Habegger, respects the personal and aesthetic fury of many of Dickinson’s best poems—”My Life Had Stood a Loaded Gun,” for example—without falling into the trap of reducing them solely to political documents, as is too often the case with contemporary criticism written by academics.

The fragmented and sexually ambiguous legacy of Sappho, who might be said to vie with Dickinson for the title of the world’s best-known female poet, receives a similarly brilliant treatment, not through biography but through translation via Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter. Carson elects to translate only the fragments left behind by the Greek poet and musician rather than filling the spaces between them with conjectural phrasing; the brackets and ellipses she uses instead give the reader the sense of what is absent as well as what is present. Printing the original Greek en face adds to the experience of looking at the crumbled and torn papyrus on which the verse originals were found, and offers something of the same thrill of discovery that the first to look on Sappho’s manuscripts must have felt.

Three other new collections of poetry, Poems of New York, Poems of the West and Beat Poets, comprise the most elegantly produced travel reading seen in a long while, thanks to Everyman Press. Though each book has a different editor, Robert Mezey’s Poems of the West deserves special mention because it contains some thoroughly unpredictable selections, Miller Williams’ “Pity and Fear” and Bertold Brecht among them. While reprinted lyrics by Randy Travis, Alan Jackson and Tom T. Hall serve primarily as reminders that great songs result from a combination of words and music, not words alone, one of the collection’s stars is another Nashvillian, Mark Jarman. His poem “The Supremes” juxtaposes Motown and a surfer adolescence, concluding with a sense of truth as luminously harsh as the light followed by the biblical Magi—whom we might remember with humility if we catch ourselves grumbling in airport lines or traffic jams, which remain far less uncomfortable for most of us than straddling a camel’s hump.