Imagine going in to wake your child for school to find an empty bed. Then imagine a sobbing security guard appears at your door. Can you feel the bewilderment, fear and dawning horror as a kind of physical pain? Can you bear it?
This is what happened to New Zealanders Linda Collins and her husband Malcolm McLeod on the morning of 14 April 2014, the morning they discovered their beloved only daughter, 17-year-old Victoria Skye Pringle McCleod, had committed suicide near their home in Singapore. Loss Adjustment is Collins’ clear-eyed memoir of navigating, and somehow accommodating, this loss.
In his new book Dictionary Poetics, Craig Dworkin gives renewed attention to the places poets find their words, and he frequently scours reference texts for anomalies and disjunctions in definition as source material for his poems. Looking through a much broader scope, Piers Pennington and Andrew Blades’s Poetry & the Dictionary tracks the centuries-long relationship between the terms of their book’s title. Together, these two studies remind us that the dictionary itself cannot be “depersonalized,” that no “picture” it presents is necessarily clear.
On 16 April 1934, Maurice Wilson set off from the Rongbuk monastery in Tibet to climb Mount Everest via the North Col, entirely alone. He carried 45lb of equipment and food including a defective altimeter, his talismanic “flag of friendship”, an ice axe (but no crampons), a copy of The Voice of Silence (his Buddhist text), and a concave mirror (to signal his progress). He also bore the blessing of an ageing lama, and the dream of reaching the roof of the world – the first person ever to do so – on his 36th birthday. Remarkably, he had no technical mountaineering expertise, nor even any alpine experience. In fact, as Ed Caesar notes in this gem of a book, “Wilson had hardly climbed anything more challenging than a flight of stairs”.
In the 18th century, the body snatchers who grubbed up coffins and sold exhumed corpses for medical research were ghoulishly nicknamed “resurrection men”. Carmen Callil, whose motives are a good deal nobler, is a resurrection woman: after a decade spent delving in archives and visiting nameless graves, she has unearthed her family’s past in a book that is both a heartfelt outpouring of pity and sorrow and an irate demand for restitution.
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.