Cruelly parted

Am currently feeling the brunt of my separation from two marvelous books I wasn't able to finish before leaving the country again: Richard Powers' Plowing the Dark and the newly-reissued collection of essays by Wendell Berry, Standing by Words. It's horrible. Perhaps my frequent silences here are due to the fact that I feel these sorts of things so keenly I'd rather *not* know what I'm missing.

All the same, I was able to find several gems in my used-bookstore hunts (Galatea 2.2 being one of them), so I plan to focus on the upside of things and share a bit more of what I do have.

Yesterday, I finally started James Longenbach's The Resistance to Poetry (which took over four months to reach me via airmail!). Already I'm seeing an interesting tension between his preface and Berry's essay, "The Specialization of Poetry." But I don't think they necessarily disagree...

More soon.