The Odyssey (graphic novel by Gareth Hinds)

Homer’s The Odyssey
Gareth Hinds

Paperback, 256 pages
Candlewick
ISBN-13: 978-0763642686

This grand graphic by the same illustrator brave enough to take on Beowulf (2007) does not disappoint. Although the King Lear graphic that Hinds released in 2008 put an exhilarating spin on the classic,  his deft version of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice made us dare hope for even finer things from this ambitious painter of classics. On this next big project Hinds has delivered very well, and we do rejoice. For who doesn’t love their great literature fully illustrated in vivid color and punctuated by a little “KapOW!” and “Oof!” and “Pinggggg!”?

This cool graphic novel version of Homer’s Odyssey a big book bulging with the weight of its subject and its author. Homer is not, and never has been, light reading, which is why we should be extremely grateful to Hinds for making this imposing classic accessible to today’s dead-poets-weary-and-wary high school students.

My husband, a former high school wrestling champ, tells me that,  to bolster his courage before wrestling matches, he used to read a few pages of the tests and tribulations Odysseus endured. No doubt it worked. When he wasn’t avoiding the lure of sirens, clobbering the Cyclops or beheading the Scylla, Odysseus passed the time clinging for dear life to what was left of his ship after Zeus dashed it to bits with his (legendary) lightning bolt. So I guess that would make wrestling a single human guy to the ground seem pretty manageable.

Tender-hearted readers may wish to stop reading after Odysseus returns home after his long journey of travail, for it’s not a pretty sight. As graphic novels go, however, Hinds exercises considerable restraint, and the bloody scenes are rendered well. So if you’re a bit bothered at how much you enjoy this section, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

As with all graphic novels, the art’s the thing. So click over to Gareth Hinds’ classy website and take a gander at the nice-looking widget that lets you flip through a generous 27 pages of the book(courtesy of Candlewick, who so kindly sent me a review copy).

 

Edible Schoolyard

Hardcover, 80 pages

Chronicle Books
ISBN-13: 978-0811862806
Buy the book

I waited a bit too long to review this book, which came out last year. But it was a hesitation born of love. It was clear that Alice Waters had done the schools and schoolchildren of the world a great favor by starting the first Edible Schoolyard project — now a legendary source of good food, learning, and life-changing joyful community — and I didn’t want to gloss over this volume celebrating the fact.

The book is, of course, lusciously designed by Chronicle (what do they publish that is not the very best of its kind?). Photographs of ladybugs and other insects, as well as small blossoms, appear in the margins of Waters’ essay on learning from the land and from growing and preparing food in community. Interspersed are spreads depicting outdoor views of this well planned earth-renewing (and community spirit-renewing) school project and the children and adults who have brought it to life for over a decade. I dare you to read the story of this garden and kitchen and not be moved to want to plant a vegetable, grow it, and eat it.

Generous back matter includes spreads of the kitchen and garden as well as essays from the children’s journals — on learning to cook, on eating and sharing food. Their shares make clear the connection between the time we spend teaching them and feeding them, and children’s general feeling about what kind of a place the world is, whether safe and worthwhile or dismal and dry. The gift of this school program is that it provides a model that schools, principals, teachers, parents and children can bring into our own communities to help us all flourish as we learn together by interacting directly with the land that grows our food. Over 400 school districts have since embraced the Edible Schoolyard method, in which children learn science, history and math through lessons in organic gardening, healthful cooking, and sharing food with friends.

Well done, Waters! (and thank you for Chez Panisse Foundation, too).

Find out more about the Edible School Project, which has been responsible for a “school food revolution.”

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Ceci Miller is co-publisher of BooktiMookti Press, home of the Runt Farm chapter book series. She is also a children’s author, book editor, and owner of CeciBooks editorial and book publishing consultancy for authors and indie publishers. See some of her book projects here.

Trust

Trust
Liz Waldner

Paperback, 69 pages
Cleveland State University Poetry Center
ISBN 978-1880834848 

The title of this book is a good rule of thumb upon entry to Liz Waldner’s poetry:  Trust, welcome all your illusions, and be willing to be surprised. You’re not going to find out “what happened” in any ordinary sense, but you’ll emerge having burst the strongholds of language. Gaze at the small pieces and parts of these poems, turn them over and over.  Approach them from any angle, and you can see directly into the essential quality of mind that makes art. Witness these visions and you’re likely to emerge feeling newish, a little strange and quite possibly dazzled.

The poems in Liz Waldner’s Trust are extremely pleasing, formally speaking. The language keeps itself in containers that reassure the reader of their manageability, despite the title’s largesse and the mighty favor it asks in return.

Although these poems are arranged according to the sovereigns of the senses–eye, skin, mouth, nose and ear–the reader is alerted early that this body (of work and of ours) is both more and less than it seems: “like the eye/ Itself the sight/ We hope to see through (to)/Always.”  Our senses constantly call us into relationship with the manifest world, and yet we don’t trust it or our perceptions of it because we know, with other-sensory knowing, that it isn’t all there is. Waldner writes/jokes, “The baby maples hold out their hands : / ‘As you can see, there is nothing to see that you cannot see.’” 

Eyes and hands, seeing and holding, watching, giving, and taking by touching. Part by part this book is born, and its devices, which offer, Roethke-like, “a steady storm of correspondences,” insist on our trust. There is really no alternative in this poetry, with its extra-layered world of competing undercurrents: we are obliged to answer yes or go away. By animating these poems with our reading senses and sensibilities, we trust we will be breathed to life afresh within them.

To accomplish these feats, none mean and all entirely devoted to uncovering meaning, the mind of the poet is opened to full view. It is a desperate act of generosity, and it tries every latch. As if to indicate, within all this opening, some reliable point in space where we might rest, Waldner offers Euclid’s geometric definition: “A point is that which has no part.” Yet since this is a very poetry of parts intent on making things whole and coherent, we’re put on notice that, to meet and be met by these poems, we must transcend the typical arguments. This is no country of point-making.  In Trust, the usual rules do not apply in the usual ways.

Significance Gives Way to Meaning
Waldner assigns little, if any, significance to the narrative of ordinary life. In “Taking the Air,” for example, snippets of story dart about: “I almost died in a car crash here” gives way to “Like Marc Bolan who I used to love / Back when my father’s vein crashed in.” The poem, in three lines, proves that this narrative is so vast and incorrigible that it can only be examined little by little with great care and the patience of the Infinite. Bound to our senses along with the poet, we give it our best. Death-defyingly, we step out on faith. Inch by inch we collaborate to bring forth meaning in a third place–some point between ourselves and the page, as well as beyond it.

 Sharing this painstaking search, joining the voice of these poems, we are mysteriously met and understood.

For the reader with a thirst for meaning, these poems pour out many layers and levels. Habits of mind and language are held up and pressed hard until they extract a heady liquor. Now and then bits of myth, fairy tale and nursery song interject levity, as do Waldner’s titles (See “Persephone Tells About Some Goings Down” and “Present Company Occluded”). Such gifts lend humor to hard times, and earn our trust. Meanwhile the work we must do to meet the expectations inherent in this writing does more to reveal our like-mindedness  (ours with the poet’s, ours with all others’) than the most earnest rhetorical appeal could ever do. Thrust into proximity with scraps and allusions, we cannot help but fill gaps, constructing whole meanings from mere filaments. Making things up as we go, we are surprised to find, at the end of it all, a truth that serves.

If the reader assents to this meeting of minds, if we agree to welcome and trust these poems, we are taken into a linguistic vortex capable of pulling us through and beyond the senses, into a music that both deconstructs and unifies by disassembling its parts. We awaken through an intimacy of shared particulars – glass bird, doughnut hole, teacup, rhyme and reason. The making of meanings by these means is a healing act, an ablative alchemy capable of yielding actual, lasting delight.

A Voice We Trust with Questions
The voice of the poems in Trust, as in all of Liz Waldner’s books, is painfully honest. Like all true things, it calls our foundations into question. The reader is invited so close into the poet’s contemplative seeing that “I” quickly and almost imperceptibly becomes “me.” And before I know it, a line such as “May my life forgive me” is my lifeline and ours, the universal plight and wish. Encountered in “On the Way,” it is a line that gives me an opportunity to shudder in advance at the prospect of my unlived life. The line makes me vow, “Never will I need to say these words” and as well as ask myself, “Do I mean it? Am I living, truly, now?” and “What is my life asking of me?” This contemplative questioning in response to the poem’s implied self-inquiry, ups the ante on conscience, elevating it to higher consciousness.

In such a poetry nothing is accidental. The pairs of opposites collide, collude and confess in astonishing ways. Subject and object, poet and reader, taster and seer, are turned topside down and relentlessly re-examined to reveal new communicative properties. The title poem “Trust” is a series of twists and turns that begins postulating what “you told me to imagine” (who, me?) and ends by imagining its speaker saying, “‘Thank you, I have enjoyed imagining all this.’” In one fell swoop, I the reader am called out as co-creator of the poem, the poet, and the moment in which the imagining has just occurred.  “See what we can do together with a little love and attention?” the poem smiles. So genuine is the voice that we hardly mind being kidnapped into the vortex again and again, tricked into transcendence by the poet’s sleight of mind.

But as irresistibly charming as this voice can be, its methods intend no less than to usher us into a unity of self and Self, to wake us from the sleep of disownment.  Having adopted the poet’s “I” as “me” (and we do, we must, in order to stay afloat in these poems) we reclaim our lives through our linguistic power both to contain and dissolve the minutiae that seem to usurp and undermine them. Thus we are drawn into a state of gratitude: we are the one grateful to have been imagined and therefore met, as well as the one grateful to be imagining, empowered and enlivened. For the sake of such miracles (or magic, depending on your degree of trust) not only is a cup of tea made to serve as mirror, but also the poet’s face which we look into in “Trust” and which speaks directly to us, saying “Thank you.” As we gaze into this imagined face we find our own, thankful and open and yet every bit as illusory, “eclipsing the sky.” This poem, after all, is only a wisp of mind. Who, exactly, is this self, so interchangeable and fluid?

The Sacred Order of Things
Such a philosophical feast, of course, calls for a conjuring of every spiritual fish and loaf the poet has at hand. Waldner’s Trust is organized according to the parts of the body and the senses they command, but there is an overarching poetry evident in the progression of titles that speaks to the body’s resurrective, light-bearing possibilities. The book itself is a trust walk down the path of the “Novice,” illuminating a specialized kind of “Assumption” – “spinning the roots / of the possible, the centripetal /world?” — followed by “Annunciation” which ends asserting “all of the tombs are empty.” Just after we read “The Tongues of Angels” we receive the “Covenant.” And thus the book ends, embodying a world without end.

Throughout the work, undercurrents of biblical language bubble to the surface in syntactical flourishes so subtle one could miss them:

          A pheasant walks the edge of the little wood
          In the company of sparrows.
          She looks like the leaf-littered earth beneath the trees
          Heard a voice it loved, woke up and walked.

Lazarus-like, the pheasant rises from the earth, “picks up her bed and walks” in response to “a voice it loved.” And yet these poems are anything but evangelical. These biblical moments are merely snippets of mind, no more or less important than the pheasant’s stroll. And yet the beauty of this image, in which leaves come to life as a pheasant which comes to life as Lazarus–all born alive in the mind of the reader this very moment–is our own innate beauty, the beauty of our mind’s seeing of the three to be One, inseparable. This is the unifying miracle the poet would have us trust. If we do so, the result is a game-changing vision that reveals life and language, despite its confusions, to be wondrous just as it is: “The Lord hath shewn me a new heaven / and it has fallen into a new earth.”

These poems invite us to exercise faith in the transcendent quality of language, and thereby awaken to our full humanity. Trust calls us to rise up through this body of words in which we live and move and have our being, to pick up the shapes and voices that cling to us, and to build and claim a heavenly home within them. Doing so, we distinguish ourselves from mere earth. This, Liz Waldner reveals, is our secret, even sacred, wish: “This is the lived in prayer.”

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Ceci Miller is an author and book editor who holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Her poems have appeared in Poet Lore, The Iowa Review, Helicon Nine, Carolina Quarterly, The Seattle Review, and Quarry West.

What the World Eats

What the World Eats
Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio

Ages 11 to 14
Hardcover, 160 pages
Full-color photographs

Ten Speed / Tricycle Press
ISBN: 9781582462462

Australia, China, Chad, France, Greenland, India, Mali, Turkey, and the U.S. All over the world, families are sharing meals.

It may seem like a stretch to call this a planet-saving book, but I think it is one. For one thing, What the World Eats makes the point – colorfully, beautifully, and with good humor – that in many parts of the world, people eat far less than we do here in the U.S. where over two thirds of the population is obese.

It’s not news, but this book’s photojournalistic approach is. Throughout the book we witness one week’s worth of food, family by family, budget by budget, in 21 countries around the world. Brimming with heartwarming family portraits and family recipes from many countries, this extraordinary act of nutritional reporting brings a whole new level of meaning to the old adage, “You are what you eat.” The images and voices of these cooks and consumers could be our own, and they stick.

I’ve been reading this book at lunch. I’m a mostly-vegetarian who tends strongly toward whole foods, so I love seeing these photographs of big bags of potatoes, heaps of carrots, rows of manzanitas, piles of peppers, huge sacks of rice. Photographic spreads on kitchens, street food, and fish offer a fascinating comparative global study of these foods and their preparation.

These richly colored images, which speak of Earth’s bounty, make me happy. But this book causes me to look deeper than the mere beauty of food, into its relationship to the land where it is grown, and into the impact of agricultural politics and lifestyle practices on the health and wellbeing of our species. The inquiry may not always be appetizing, but it’s increasingly essential as we seek to discover the causes and conditions – personal, cultural, and geopolitical — that result in undernourishment and disease, as well as those that generate happiness and health.

As Michael Pollan and others have helpfully pointed out, our politics have everything to do with what ends up on our plates. The better we understand how to eat and live and cooperate in ways that acknowledge our common dependence on the Earth for sustenance, and the more we begin to act in accordance with this wisdom, the kinder we are to the whole world.

So, yes. This big red book is definitely green.

Listen to photographer Peter Menzel and writer Faith D’Aluisio on NPR’s “All Things Considered.”

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Ceci Miller is a children’s author, book editor, and owner of CeciBooks editorial and book publishing consultancy for authors and indie publishers. See books here.