Book Bag: Works of regional interest

Twice a month, Book Bag highlights works of area writers and books of regional interest. Most of these titles are available in local bookstores or through online retailers.

"The Anthologist"

Nicholson Baker

Simon & Schuster

Paul Chowder is a middle-aged poet who is having a tough time dealing with his stalled career and less than successful personal life. The task of writing an introduction to a new anthology of rhyming poetry - already way overdue - prompts Chowder to reflect on the poetic tradition, from the nuts-and-bolts of meter and rhyme to the lives of great poets of the past, lives even more tortured than his own. Chowder's stream of consciousness ruminations touch on the lives of poetic greats such as Louise Bogan, Theodore Roethke and Elizabeth Bishop, and his own challenges - the girlfriend who has moved out, his broken lawn mower, the mouse that has taken up residence in his kitchen.

Richard Eder, in the Los Angeles Times, says Baker "writes with appealing charm. He clowns and shows off, rambles and pounces hard; he says acute things, extravagant things, terribly funny things."

Baker, whose previous novels include "Vox" and "The Fermata," will have a reading and book signing at The Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley on Sept. 22 at 7 p.m. "Human Smoke," one of his nonfiction works, was a New York Times best-seller; "Double Fold," also nonfiction, won the 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award.

"The Broken Teaglass"

Emily Arsenault

Delacorte Press

This debut novel is the story of two lexicographers, Billy Webb and Mona Minot, who discover that someone has been lacing the dictionary files at the company where they work with clues to a long-unsolved crime. As they ransack the definitions for answers, assembling the pieces to the puzzle, they begin to suspect those around them. Then the mystery suddenly takes a turn...

Arsenault, who lives in Shelburne Falls, once worked as a lexicographer herself. "While I held that position," she writes, "I was fascinated by the dictionary company's citation files - so many little notes, going back so many years, the older ones handwritten and yellowed around the edges. It seemed the perfect place to hide - or find - a secret. Then it finally dawned on me that a dictionary company would be a fun setting for a novel."

Arsenault will have a reading and book signing at the Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley on Oct. 8 at 7 p.m.

"Consequential Strangers: The Power of People Who Don't Seem to Matter ... But Really Do"

Melinda Blau and Karen L. Fingerman

W.W. Norton & Company Inc.

The fragmented lives Americans lead have been bemoaned in many an article lamenting the social isolation and loss of community afflicting many of us today. We're too busy, spread too thin, the reasoning goes, to form the meaningful relationships that nurture us.

This thought-provoking book challenges that point of view. "Every day we interact with people who influence our lives in small and great ways but who are not part of our inner circle," they write. "A yoga teacher, a waitress, a gym buddy, a pet sitter, a former coworker, a ¿friend' on Facebook, dad's army chum, the proprietor of a favorite clothing store, a professional contact known mostly by phone. Each of these relations is different from the other, but they are all consequential strangers - people who are so much a part of our everyday life that we often take them for granted."

The authors argue that these consequential strangers do more than just take up space in our lives: "They are as vital to our well-being, growth and day-to-day existence as family and close friends."

Daniel Goleman, author of "Social Intelligence," says this is a book that "challenges us to rethink our circle of relationships, to widen our horizon of human connection and to expand the numbers of people to whom we owe debts of gratitude large and small. A mind-expanding and heart-opening book."

Melinda Blau, who divides her time between Northampton and New York City, is a journalist who has been writing about relationships and social trends since the 1970s. She is the author of the "Baby Whisperer" series and blogs at www.consequentialstrangers.com [1].

Karen Fingerman is a psychologist who lives in West Lafayette, Ind.

"The Hidden Cost of Oil: New Orleans to Indonesia"

David Lincoln and David Keith

Foreward by Cristobal Bonifaz

Environmental Rights International Inc.

What are the costs - to the environment and to people - to the process of taking oil from the earth? This book asks that central question and argues that governments should place a tax on oil to recover the trillions of dollars it costs in what the authors call the collateral consequences of extracting oil. The authors examine oil operations in this country - California and the gulf - and abroad in countries including Colombia, Equador, Peru and Venezuela.

In his introduction, Cristobal Bonifaz writes, "I hope this book will aid those who have rightly concluded that we must generate alternative sources of energy. The argument against wind power, fuel cells, solar electricity and other energy producing alternatives has always been that the price of such energy cannot compete with the price of oil. The argument has validity only when the assumed costs of oil do not include its real costs, which, as this book helps demonstrate, are many times higher than what we see at the pump."

David Lincoln is an environmental consultant and petroleum geologist with 35 years of experience in oil and gas operation. David Ketih is a researcher and writer who earned a master's degree in history, with a focus on the history of science and technology, from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Christobal Bonifaz is an attorney in Amherst whose work involves environmental issues.

"Boston's Secret Spaces: 50 Hidden Corners In and Around the Hub"

The Boston Globe

Foreward by Robin Brown

The Globe Pequot Press

This is a great idea for an entertaining book - a peek inside some of Boston's nooks and crannies, in photos and words. The lineup includes the space behind the scoreboard at Fenway Park, the private dining room that JFK used at Locke-Ober's, an abandoned underground train station, a meat locker at T.F. Kinnealey & Co. at Newmarket Square, the control tower at Logan International Airport, Bob Kraft's skybox at Gillette Stadium.

"On Poets & Poetry"

William H. Pritchard

Swallow Press/Ohio University Press

In the preface to his latest book, William H. Pritchard, the Henry Clay Folger Professor of English at Amherst College, lets us know that he understands that many of us are intimidated by poetry. No matter how confident we are about offering our opinions about fiction, many of us are "more or less tongue-tied when it comes to poetry," Pritchard writes. "This bears out my experience that students come from secondary school prepared to think of poetry as a very deep art indeed and that their task is to penetrate its depths and arrive at something called the real meaning."

Since 1958, when he began teaching at Amherst, Pritchard has been showing students that poetry has its rewards beyond that search for Real Meaning. It's also refreshing to read that, for Pritchard, whose body of work already includes books, many essays and innumerable reviews, the teaching of poetry has been an ongoing conversation. The classroom, he writes, "is the place where I continue to make the attempt to know literature - to know a poem - freshly."

"On Poets & Poetry" is a collection of essays and reviews, ranging from John Dryden and John Milton through the major American and British poets of the last century. An Aug. 6 review in the Wall Street Journal said of the book that Pritchard's essays "read like colloquies between affable lovers of literature on which we are allowed to eavesdrop."

As Pritchard puts it, "the attempt in all of them is to address an audience wider than an academic one." It's the notion of speaking to readers interested in poetry, whether in or out of the classroom, that "helps keep me going," he says.

In his essay on Robert Frost, Pritchard, whose dry wit seems never to desert him, takes one of the poet's editors to task for inserting commas in places where Frost hadn't put them. "Stopping by Woods on A Snowy Evening," Pritchard writes, had always been "a poem nobody in the world ever thought stood in need of editorial attention." But Edward Lathem had decided to "improve" Frost's texts - and "His house is in the village though" became "His house is in the village, though ..." In what Pritchard calls "a first-rate decision," later editors removed the commas.

Elsewhere in the same essay, Pritchard looks at Frost through a larger lens, describing his work this way: "It's a poetic world large and difficult enough to get lost in; also one you can't exhaust, since there are always new poems that did not quite register before, or old ones that sound slightly different this time around."

Pritchard lives in Amherst.

"Frog Spotting"

Peggy O'Brien

Dedalus Press

Peggy O'Brien lived in Ireland for 20 years before coming to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she is now a member of the English department. Her first collection of poems, "Sudden Thaw," was published in 2004. Poet Martin Espada says that O'Brien "writes with such intelligence, such sensitivity, such skill about everything, it seems, from the grace of dragonflies to a solemn march of wild turkeys to the memory of a poet-friend who lived joyfully and died young. O'Brien has a particular gift for the lyrical farewell ..."

"Legend of the Recent Past"

James Haug

The National Poetry Review Press

This collection of poems is the third by James Haug, who lives in Northampton and has won fellowships for his work from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. His previous works are "Walking Liberty" and "The Stolen Car."

Pulitzer-Prize winning poet James Tate says that Haug's poems "abound in the mysterious, in the world gone wrong by inches. The details are always there, slightly askew, so believable you accept them against your will. And wake up in a world of insight and conviction. These are marvelous poems, ones that help us see what might have been or could have been, in a world full of light."

To submit material for Book Bag, contact Suzanne Wilson at swilson@gazettenet.com [2].