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"Disgrace" by J.M. Coetzee
The winner of the 1999 Booker Prize is a bleak tale of human and animal misery in post-apartheid South Africa.
By Andrew O'Hehir
[11/05/99]

Ivory Tower
Beyond facts
Can one teach spirituality in college?
By David Alford
[11/05/99]

Interview
The code ahead
Simon Singh, author of "Fermat's Enigma" and "The Code Book," talks about once and future cryptography.
By Margaret Wertheim
[11/04/99]

Reviews
"The Bonehunters' Revenge: Dinosaurs, Greed, and the Greatest Scientific Feud of the Gilded Age" by David Rains Wallace
The fury of two paleontologists tells us much about the temper of the late-19th century. Unfortunately, the book is a slog.
By Thomas Hackett
[11/04/99]

Get Uncle Sam off my back! and other misguided impulses
American government-bashers like to wrap themselves in a constitutional flag. But Garry Wills argues that the Founders wanted a strong government, not a weak one.
By Gary Kamiya
[11/03/99]

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___Here. Take these. My red beads. Call them bright berries
___I cannot crush in your mouth. Or the embers left
___unsorted from the axis of our ash, small spheres
___of desire that hung hope, an amulet and a rope,
___from my neck ...

___Take these from me. Touch each one carefully. Plastic

___cheap and ruby rich, these hard revolutions turn
___the small rondure in which I burn. In your pocket,
___keep this strand. Press each match head of redness into
___your hand. Then snap the string in two, scattering red
___beads, releasing me from the circumference of you.

But this freedom is not without its compromises, its moments of giving in to higher chaos. As she muses in "Basement,"

___I left a husband,
___I lost my past as he lost his wife ...

___With dark cries, I wept at how

___we undermined more than this basement
___could confine. As living rooms and bed-
___rooms split apart, we tore off all
___the flesh of home and gnawed each

___other down to bone.

The small miracle of Kinsolving's poems is the internal rhyme that holds them together as they cover dangerous emotional territory. She has none of Levi's enormous, almost organic forward motion; instead a kind of dense, contained structure gives her poems heft. In "Peelings," a poem about vegetable skins in a porcelain sink, she achieves momentum purely through sound:

___What is unresolved can dissolve, lost
___in the broth of seasons. With so many
___mouths to feed, so much pith and peeling,
___what is the recipe for comfort in our vast
___cold? What changes this chill to a fast boil?

At first the poem seems small. Then, suddenly, its repetitive, sinewy sounds and the web they form between words and lines make it seem vast and solid. Suddenly it doesn't seem at all impossible that some pieces of carrot and potato in a sink can look like a perfectly reasonable defense against the ever-shifting, "unresolved" world. Why shouldn't they?

Both Levi and Kinsolving are, like all poets, trying to nail down the lives they've lived in the language they know. Kinsolving recalls asking for and receiving a magnifying glass as a child. But the request was an error -- she'd meant a microscope. The glass enlarged things in a vaguely satisfying manner, but she wanted more; above all, she wanted the right word for the gift she coveted:

___But the word hid
___elsewhere, almost disguised, as glass
___might be the illusion of clarity. And so
___it's been in all my words and hopes:
___poems, the elusive gift, the microscope.

Thanks to these two books, the elusive gift seems just slightly less so.
salon.com | Nov. 5, 1999

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