The Long Way Home
It looks like we should be picking up steam in early April, with new poetry, essays and fiction. To celebrate Barbara Guest’s forth-coming Collected Poetry, I will be posting some essays about her work and life. A remarkable poet, she deserves a much wider readership and far more recognition.
Current books of note: Reading Carmen Laforet’s Nada, a very fine coming of age novel, set in Barcelona. Recently finished William Everdell’s The First Moderns. Brilliant overview of the people and events that shaped the modernist movement around the world.
Recent guilty pleasures: Watched The Wanderers, based upon the Richard Price novel. Good film. Not great, but good. Set in 1963, in New York, it tells the tale of gang life in a somewhat mixed/surreal fashion. Price’s book, and the movie, draw on historical gangs, but alter them for dramatic purposes. Especially “cool” is the part near the end when Richie (Ken Wahl) looks through the window of a local coffee house to see the woman he loves listening to Bob Dylan. The times sure were a changin’. Thanks to the Internet, you can discover how close or far away from those historical gangs the book and movie get …
I didn’t know that a new book was coming out with more of Barbara Guest’s poetry. This is good news.
I will look forward to reading it.
In regard to the Wanderers.… do you remember the movie “Warriors?” I love the end of that movie… along the atlantic coast with the sun rise, and the surviving gang members walking away.. to the tune of the Eagles/ James Walsh, “In the City.…”
One of the good movies from 1979…
Keep up the good work,
Lori
The book is due out in May. Hadley was the editor, I believe. She has worked tirelessly to keep the flame of Barbara Guest’s poetry alive and well.
The Warriors and The Wanderers share 1979. Must have been something in the air. Nostalgia for a bygone era, more explicit, though, in The Wanderers. Which, like American Graffiti, was set in the 1960s, but longed for the 1950s. Looked back to that earlier time, fearing the turmoil to come.