B.W. Powe's 3 favorite reads in 2023

In late high-heat summer, I sat reading in the forest-park near our house in our Ontario town. While my daughter played with her friends, I delved into Kafka’s Diaries. Another parent passed by. “What’re you reading?” she asked. “My bible,” I said. “Oh? …Which version?” “Kafka’s,” I said.

I took K.’s book everywhere through the fall. A task. It’s 670 pages, in a large-sized format.
Why Kafka years into the 21st century? There is K.: he’s endured, prevailed in his tragi-absurd precognitions of tyrannical systems. “And yet. No ‘and yet’”, he wrote: his prophetic presence looms over what we do to harm our world and psyches.

He reminds us of the serious undertaking called Writing, and of the necessary accompanying private process, Reading. (Do we need reminding? Maybe, and maybe not.) To K., our trials—to adapt his word—turn us toward experience—its suffering, its muting extravagances—and to exorcising dreams and imaginings. …But can writing exorcise anything? Always locked out of the Castle, waiting for permission to enter…

This 2021 volume is a fresh translation of the uncut (meaning, uncensored) diaries and notebooks: we read Kafka raw,teeming without the filtering fussiness of previous editors who sought to canonize, or subdue, their enigmatic friend. K. envisions how the power of the authoritarian impulse turns messianic, becomes omnipresent, lacerating everything, infiltrating everyone.

The Diaries makes demands with its insights, fragments, aphorisms, sketches, drafts, complaints, confessions, witticisms, trenchant observations, its uncanny, irreducible fables. And clearly audible at last to our inner ear, in the echoing way of this book, his voice.

How he revels in the unfinished, the unfinishable. He’s quotable, memorable; and he’s spectral, fearful—forever shadowing modern life when it deepens into something overpowering. And now his ghostly pen and ink drawings available for our eyes, in the Yale U. edition. K., secular visionary of realms stalked by impulses we can barely name. And yet, he gives the glow of companionship. K., always beside us, and ahead of us.

When I was fourteen, dismayed by high school (longing to drop out), I managed to get Mononucleosis, or the kissing disease, it’s sometimes called (for some reason). It gave me the chance to withdraw into my bedroom and read and make notes. Didn’t venture out of my small room too much.

Two books sparked a dream of writing for a lifetime. Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us. One, a novel about breathing the brisk air of an Alpine rest-sanitorium, experiencing life and ideas (I thought I was Hans Castorp); the other, a book-length essay—immersing my spirit in waves, watery mysteries, the fecund life of seas and currents, tides and sea-creatures. Looking back, I see one book about aspiring and learning: the other, about contemplating the mothering seas and their changeling depths.

This new edition of Carson’s trilogy unites her non-fiction studies of water and shorelines, of wind patterns and water’s infinite transforming. Pull her book close to your mind and sensibilities. Its sea-writing informs you of exact details about shorelines and islands, showing what it means to be surrounded and engulfed by blue and gray, white and green waves, wild currents and tidal-lives that manifest mutability.

Carson’s trilogy is revered for its ecological perception and prescient warnings. A gentle, civilizing guide, gathering stories, allusions, encyclopedic references and documentary evidence, she invites you to flow and merge with her observant chronicles of winds moving across water surfaces, and of the Oceanus, our origins.

Her prose-waves carry you. When I rediscovered her (reading the three books gathered in one edition), her sea visions and river rhythms helped to recall why I write: to make flowing works, too. Water is my element. Ocean and shoreline sensitivities are part of our imperatives.

I take book-breaks. Moments apart from deluging news and dataism. Pause; slip away. The moments become a matter of life and breath. What’re you doing now? people sometimes ask. Heeding a call in a writer.

 Map is a book that asks for this kind of heeding. It collects Szymborska’s patient, wise poems. Restorative in their incisive elegance and wit, her poetry reminds you of the almost lost art of wit—which asks you to recognize foibles, treasure perceptions of the transitory.

These poems offer rare episodes when amused awareness and passing incidents turn luminous; and where nothing is (paradoxically) transcended or prescribed or urged or revealed or torrential. Experience is beautifully condensed and honed, her wry lyric sensibility open to us.

But I find melancholy in Szymborska’s insights. She writes on horror’s edge, a witness to authoritarianism in Poland during World War Two and the Cold War. How many tragedies can people take?  She quietly refuses to let cruel oppressions yank her to declarations of disaster.

Map reads like a journal of a unique sensibility evolving; this unfolds through her skill of catching the instant—quickly envisioning it so we can dream well with her. In her poems the small space of the crafted phrase is miracle enough.

Szymborska’s writings won’t stop the seething in our days and nights; yet her lines move me by implying, there are unmappable catastrophes, but here is the humane.

Strange: how the humane eloquence in her poems wounds with a nostalgia I didn’t know I had for a wise patience.