BOOK BARN

#294. DEAF REPUBLIC, BY ILYA KAMINSKY. I read Ilya Kaminsky’s book-length parable-poem Deaf Republic in a single sitting; by the end of it, I was trembling and my hands were shaking. The setting is an occupied European town; in the opeing scene the citizens have gathered to see and listen to a puppet show. A soldier attempts to disperse the crowd; he accosts a deaf child, Petya, who spits on him and is shot for his insolence. In that moment—a stanzaic break—a strange tra

#293: GOING FOR THE HOME RUN. In writing elsewhere about Jane Hirshfield, I have mentioned her training and practice in Soto Zen Buddhism, something she tends to downplay in interviews. Any known kind of religious or philosophical affiliation can be an easy method for sticking a writer in a box—a label for use in place of critical thought. But I recur to this as I have always sensed in her work a center of quiet, of compassion—that humane and enlightened space one is to

#292: SENDAK IN BLACK AND WHITE—II. In the early nineteen-sixties, an editor at Macmillan introduced the poet Randall Jarrell and Maurice Sendak to each other; Jarrell had written a children’s story, The Bat-Poet, and the editor wanted Sendak to illustrate it. “That often remains simply professional, or it turns into a friendship,” Sendak said later. “In the case of Jarrell, it really did turn into a friendship.” They were both opera buffs; they visited; they talked boo