Simon the Fiddler by Paulette Jiles

She had me at Jock of Hazeldean.

Simon the fiddler had passed for fifteen years old, traveling from Paducah to Texas while evading the Confederate conscription men. People valued his gift of music and protected him.

Simon played Jock of Hazeldean at the barbecue party, a Scottish ballad of a girl who refuses the hand of a Lord to run off with her true love.

He "had a bottomless supply of waltzes, jigs, reels, hornpipes, and slow airs", the last "could bring men and women to a standstill" as the music raised memories of love and homeland, life before the war.

I personally loved the references to the music Simon plays. MacPherson's Lament tells the story of a condemned man who breaks his violin rather allow anyone else to play it. Lorena was a sentimental ballad, the most popular song of the war and was featured in Ken Burn's series. Doris asks Simon to play The Minstrel Boy, an Irish tune beloved by soldiers throughout time. Other songs mentioned include Shenandoah, the slow air Death and the Sinner, The Red River Valley, and Robin Adair (the song that gave my grandmother, mother, me and a cousin our middle names).

It was in the last days of the war Simon was found by the Confederates who take him for the regimental band. At war's end, Simon and other musicians traveled together, "servants of music and not of the state," seeking their fortune.

So it came that Simon played at a barbeque and saw the dark-haired girl in the audience who becomes his lodestar. To escape Ireland, Doris Dillon had signed a contract as an indentured servant to an elegant family ruled by a corrupt Colonel.

Every choice Simon makes afterward is rooted in his goal of becoming a man who can support Doris as his wife.

Texas was a shifting battleground for years, and after the Civil War vast areas were outside the arm of any law. The musicians traverse the state, living in abandoned places while entertaining polite society. They struggle to earn money for essentials and yet Simon saves up to purchase land of his own.

Throughout their adventures, Simon tries to avoid trouble, but he is undaunted in seeking to win Doris's love. He risks everything to save her from the unhappiness of her situation, for the Colonel preys upon the girl, whispering she will succumb to him in the end.

The climax involves music. While Simon is playing the Flowers of Edinburgh a disgruntled former band mate cries out for the lewd Shanty Hog-Eye Man. Simon finds himself in a fight for his life.

Simon the Fiddler is a romantic tale of a knight in homespun who saves an immigrant girl from the clutches of a drunk predator. It is a tribute to the power of music in our national and personal lives. And it is a vivid picture of a world broken by a devastating war.

I received an ARC from the publisher through LibraryThing. My review is fair and unbiased.

Read a sample and hear an audio excerpt here.

Simon the Fiddler
by Paulette Jiles
William Morrow
Publication April 14, 2020
hardcover 27.99 USD
ISBN: 9780062966742
ISBN 10: 006296674X

from the publisher

The critically acclaimed, bestselling author of News of the World and Enemy Women returns to Texas in this atmospheric story, set at the end of the Civil War, about an itinerant fiddle player, a ragtag band of musicians with whom he travels trying to make a living, and the charming young Irish lass who steals his heart. 

In March 1865, the long and bitter War between the States is winding down. Till now, twenty-three-year-old Simon Boudlin has evaded military duty thanks to his slight stature, youthful appearance, and utter lack of compunction about bending the truth. But following a barroom brawl in Victoria, Texas, Simon finds himself conscripted, however belatedly, into the Confederate Army. Luckily his talent with a fiddle gets him a comparatively easy position in a regimental band.
Weeks later, on the eve of the Confederate surrender, Simon and his bandmates are called to play for officers and their families from both sides of the conflict. There the quick-thinking, audacious fiddler can’t help but notice the lovely Doris Mary Dillon, an indentured girl from Ireland, who is governess to a Union colonel’s daughter. 

After the surrender, Simon and Doris go their separate ways. He will travel around Texas seeking fame and fortune as a musician. She must accompany the colonel’s family to finish her three years of service. But Simon cannot forget the fair Irish maiden, and vows that someday he will find her again.
Incandescent in its beauty, told in Paulette Jiles’s trademark spare yet lilting style, Simon the Fiddler is a captivating, bittersweet tale of the chances a devoted man will take, and the lengths he will go to fulfill his heart’s yearning.

A Little History of Poetry by John Carey

It all started with A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson. Then, when I was eleven, discovering the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe. By fourteen I was borrowing every poetry book on the school library shelves, spending my scanty allowance to buy the poets I really liked.

I was drawn to some poets and ignored others. I knew little about the lives of the poets I was reading or the social and historical context of the poems.

My education included survey Lit courses, a Modern Poetry class, and an honors class on Milton. I was so ignorant that when my Modern Poetry professor asked me about Ezra Pound's antisemitism and alliance with Fascism it was the first I had heard of it. (My school history classes never seemed to make it past the Civil War.)

My high school World Lit class covered the entire Western Canon. We received mimeographed handouts (yes, I am THAT OLD). We learned about philosophers and economic and scientific thinkers and writers and poets. I went to the library to read from the original works. The brief excerpts piqued my curiosity and I needed to know more.

I tell this story for a reason. John Carey's A Little HIstory of Poetry reminded me of that World Lit Survey class. Carey ploughs through the entire history of poetry in the Western world, starting with Gilgamesh and ending with Mary Oliver and Les Murray.

I was quite familiar with my favorites, but I had given little attention a great many others. It was interesting to fill that gap in my knowledge.

Some poets are mentioned by name or with a few lines, but those Carey deems more important (or perhaps, with more interesting or scandalous lives) get pages.

This treatment has its limitations but also its uses as an introduction. Like my survey course did, readers may be inspired to read further.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

A Little History of Poetry
by John Carey
Publication Date: April 21, 2020
Yale University Press
Hardcover Price: $25.00
ISBN: 9780300232226

from the publisher:

John Carey tells the stories behind the world’s greatest poems, from the oldest surviving one written nearly four thousand years ago to those being written today. Carey looks at poets whose works shape our views of the world, such as Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Yeats. He also looks at more recent poets, like Derek Walcott, Marianne Moore, and Maya Angelou, who have started to question what makes a poem "great" in the first place. This little history shines a light on the richness and variation of the world’s poems—and the elusive quality that makes them all the more enticing.

Coming to Age: Growing Older with Poetry

In her poem Reconsideration, Mary Ann Hoberman reminds us, "...only lucky folk grow old."

When I was a young woman older people would tell me, "Don't ever grow old, Nancy." I would laugh and reply, "It's better than the alternative."

Now I am an older person, I still think old age better than the alternative. Still, every year brings a new reminder of what I am loosing. For the first time I feel a chill at the idea of nothingness. How can I not be? How can the world be if I am not?

This mystery begins to niggle at me when I wake at night. 

Coming to Age is a collection of poetry that speaks to the universal human experience of aging and the concerns and joys that accompany growing older. The poems were chosen for their universality and accessibility.

Themes include being rooted in this time and place; the passage of time; the solace of nature; the physical body's frailty; the loss of loved ones; the view from old age; the memories that made us who we are; the mystery of life; and that which gives solace and joy and sustains us.

Many of the poems moved me, eliciting a cold chill of recognition or a warm sun of memory.

"But memories, where can you take them to? Take one last look at them. They end with you," wrote Clive James in Star System. And I wonder about all the knowledge I hold that will be lost, the swing of my mother's blonde ponytail ascending the stairs when I was three, the sound of my son's baby voice. And I regret all the untold tales held secret in my mother's breast, the stories lost with death.

The breadth of the poems can be shown in these examples, Wendell Berry appreciating the peace nature brings and Kurt Vonnegut how we destroy the Earth.

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Wendell Berry

Requiem

The crucified planet Earth,
should it find a voice
and a sense of irony,
might now well say
of our abuse of it,
"Forgive them, Father,
they know not what they do."

The irony would be
that we know what
we are doing.

When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
"It is done."
People did not like it here.
Kurt Vonnegut

It takes a kind of courage to read these poems, to open yourself to grapple with life and death. But you will find catharsis and a recognition that you are not alone, and you will perhaps even find joy.

There is "So much to do still, all of it praise," Derek Walcott wrote in Untitled #51.,"...how pure a thing is joy."

"What love, what longing, my reader, speaks to you from this page!" proclaims John Hall Wheelock in To You, Perhaps Yet Unborn, in which he imagines readers who read his words posthumously.

These poems are the gifts of poets whose words reach out over years or centuries to alter our perceptions and comfort us.

I was given a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Coming to Age: Growing Older with Poetry
by Mary Ann Hoberman and Carolyn Hopley
Little, Brown and Company
Pub Date April 14, 2020
ISBN: 9780316424912
$25.00 (USD) hardcover; $12.99 ebook

from the publisher:

This exquisitely giftable anthology of poems about age and aging reveals the wisdom of trailblazing writers who found power and growth later in life. 

At eighty-two, the novelist Penelope Lively wrote: "Our experience is one unknown to most of humanity, over time. We are the pioneers." Coming to Age is a collection of dispatches from the great poet-pioneers who have been fortunate enough to live into their later years. 

Those later years can be many things: a time of harvesting, of gathering together the various strands of the past and weaving them into a rich fabric. They can also be a new beginning, an exploration of the unknown. We speak of "growing old." And indeed, as we too often forget, aging is growing, growing into a new stage of life, one that can be a fulfillment of all that has come before. 

To everything there is a season. Poetry speaks to them all. Just as we read newspapers for news of the world, we read poetry for news of ourselves. Poets, particularly those who have lived and written into old age, have much to tell us. Bringing together a range of voices both present and past, from Emily Dickinson and W. H. Auden to Louise Gluck and Li-Young Lee, Coming to Age reveals new truths, offers spiritual sustenance, and reminds us of what we already know but may have forgotten, illuminating the profound beauty and significance of commonplace moments that become more precious and radiant as we grow older.

The Story of Harriet Tubman: A Biography Book for New Readers by Christine Platt

The Story of Harriet Tubman by Christine Platt
Shown with Harriet Tubman detail on my quilt
I Will Lift My Voice Like a Trumpet

"Stories about Dreamers JUST LIKE YOU," the back cover promises. And Harriet Tubman had big dreams and with fearless courage changed her life and the lives of over 300 other enslaved persons over ten years. And she never lost a passenger on the Underground Railroad.

During the Civil War, Tubman became a spy. Concerned for the indigent and homeless former slaves, she created a home. And she worked to secure voting rights for women.

Who would have imagined that an enslaved, illiterate field hand could make such a dramatic impact?

The Story of Harriet Tubman by Christine Platt relates Tubman's dramatic and inspirational story with learning aids including a glossary, quiz questions, timelines, and discussion questions.

Platt does not sugar-coat the horror of Harriet's life as a slave. Readers read that she was beaten and nearly died and experienced 'sleeping spells' and visions after she recovered.

"How will her courageous spirit inspire you?" the back cover asks. And that is the purpose of the biography. One may be on the lowest rung of the social ladder, seemingly without power or control over one's one life, but with vision and commitment, sometimes one does the impossible.

Colorful illustrations by Lois Lora bring the text to life.

I received a free book through Callisto Publisher's Club in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

from the publisher:

Discover the life of Harriet Tubman―a story about courage, bravery, and freedom.

Harriet Tubman became a celebrated leader in the fight to free people from slavery. Before that, she was a determined young girl who believed that everyone deserved to be free. Harriet Tubman bravely used the Underground Railroad―a network of secret routes and safe houses―to free herself and many other enslaved people. Explore how Harriet Tubman went from being a slave on a plantation in Maryland to one of the most important figures in American history. 

How will her courageous spirit inspire you? 

This Harriet Tubman biography includes:

• Path to freedom―Explore a visual timeline of Harriet’s life so you can see her progress over time.
• Helpful definitions―Discover a glossary with easy-to-understand definitions for the more advanced words and ideas in the book.
• Test your knowledge―Take a quiz to make sure you understand the who, what, where, when, why, and how of Harriet’s life.

If you’ve been searching for Harriet Tubman biographies for kids, look no further―this one has it all.

About the author:

Christine Platt is a literacy advocate and passionate activist for social justice and policy reform. A believer in the power of storytelling as a tool for social change, Christine’s literature centers on teaching race, equity, diversity and inclusion to people of all ages.

The Story of Harriet Tubman
by Christine Platt
Rockridge Press
Publication April 7, 2020
$6.99 paperback
ISBN: 978-1646111091

Odetta by Ian Zack

In 1978 my husband and I went to the Philadelphia Folk Festival. Our interest in folk rock turned into a deep love of folk music.

We attended concerts around Philly and bought recordings and listened to WXPN on the radio, discovering favorite singers.

One name we heard was Odetta, Odetta, and we knew she was a queen who had once ruled and was still worshipped.

I was a child in the 1950s, cushioned in my working class white neighborhood, unaware of things beyond my front door when Odetta was breaking into songs that stirred souls and feed movements and engendered a whole generation of singers whose names filled the airwaves of my sixties teenage years.

I knew so little about her.

Ian Zack's Odetta: A Life in Music and Protest  is a wonderful biography of Odetta that presents her life, her art, and her legacy.

Odetta's amazing voice spurred teachers to encourage training and her mother scrimped to find the funds for voice lessons. After high school, Odetta worked menial jobs days and studied European classical music nights, singing in the Verdi Requiem and Bach's Mass in B Minor. Odetta loved opera and art songs but knew her career options were nil because of her color.

Odetta was cast for a revival of Yip Harburg's Finian's Rainbow in 1950 which led to her work with Turnabout Theater Jr.

Folk music was the new big thing, The Weavers success spurring an interest in folk songs. Friends took Odetta to hear a concert including Lead Belly songs and it "touched the core of me," she said. It changed the twenty-year-old's life.

The shy girl whose voice was a powerful instrument sang with her eyes closed as she inhabited the songs of her people.
She eschewed straightening her hair, cutting it short and leaving it natural, unwittingly engendering a movement.

Pete Seeger became her biggest fan and promoter. Generations claimed Odetta as their spiritual mother including Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, Carly Simon, The Kinks, Grace Slick, and Janis Ian.

There are so many interesting stories in these pages. Odetta was on the TV Western Have Gun--Will Travel because Richard Boone was a fan. The script was a "clear endorsement of black rights," Zack writes.

With the arrival of the Beatles, popular music took a new turn and Odetta struggled to attract the new audience--basically, my generation. She had a series of flops. Her love life had its ups and downs, mostly downs, with a failed marriage and unsustainable relationships.

And yet with age, she became more comfortable with herself, confident on stage, celebrating her African American heritage. President Clinton awarded her the National Medal of the Arts and Humanities, confessing that she had inspired him as a boy.

I enjoyed this biography as a vehicle for learning more about this iconic singer and the role of folk music in American history. It was also a nostalgic trip 'down memory lane', recalling the first time I heard many of the artists who inform the story.

I was given access to a free ebook by the publisher through Edelweiss. My review is fair and unbiased.

Odetta: A Life in Music and Protest
Ian Zack
Beacon Press
Publication Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN 9780807035320, 0807035327
Hardcover $28.95 USD, $38.95 CAD, £22.50 GBP

from the publisher:

The first in-depth biography of the legendary singer and “Voice of the Civil Rights Movement,” who combatted racism and prejudice through her music.

Odetta channeled her anger and despair into some the most powerful folk music the world has ever heard. Through her lyrics and iconic persona, Odetta made lasting political, social, and cultural change.

A leader of the 1960s folk revival, Odetta is one of the most important singers of the last hundred years. Her music has influenced a huge number of artists over many decades, including Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, the Kinks, Jewel, and, more recently, Rhiannon Giddens and Miley Cyrus.

But Odetta’s importance extends far beyond music. Journalist Ian Zack follows Odetta from her beginnings in deeply segregated Birmingham, Alabama, to stardom in San Francisco and New York. Odetta used her fame to bring attention to the civil rights movement, working alongside Joan Baez, Harry Belafonte, and other artists. Her opera-trained voice echoed at the 1963 March on Washington and the Selma to Montgomery march, and she arranged a tour throughout the deeply segregated South. Her “Freedom Trilogy” songs became rallying cries for protesters everywhere.

Through interviews with Joan Baez, Harry Belafonte, Judy Collins, Carly Simon, and many others, Zack brings Odetta back into the spotlight, reminding the world of the folk music that powered the civil rights movement and continues to influence generations of musicians today.

Godshot by Chelsea Bieker

What I was reading repulsed me but I could not put down Chelsea Bieker's debut novel Godshot. Lacey's narrative voice drew me in, her conflicted nativity and faith struggling to survive as her family and community fails to protect her. The novel reaches into the deepest questions of life and illustrates the limitations of love and faith.

The tragic series of events and abuse endured will be hard for some to follow; this is a dark story. But just when it seems that Lacey has lost everything, including control over her own life, she finds salvation.

Drought has hit the town of Peaches, the orchards turned to dust. Pastor Vern finds the community ripe for hope and promises to deliver rain if they believe in him. Isolating the community from the world, believers allow him total control.

Pastor Vern brings good to some. Lacey's mother found strength to overcome her alcoholism. Pastor Vern also destroys as he wields his total power. His plan to create a perfected church involves assignments, special purposes that believers long to be given. They want to be Godshot. Lacey's mother's assignment takes her on a downward spiral until she abandons Lacey to run off with a man filled with false promises.

Lacey is taken in by her grandmother, one of Pastor Vern's unthinking believers. Lacey desperately misses her mother and endeavors to track her down, her search to learn taking her into the world beyond the Godshot.

Lacey's assignment begins her journey of doubt. Would God require such things?

The novel touches on so many hot-button issues relating to the social status and role of women, the persistence of human hope placed in unreliable leaders, the love of a child for her mother, and the awakening of a young woman to see beyond her community’s  teachings.

Lacey's journey from darkness into light, from powerlessness to self-determination comes to a satisfying conclusion.

I was given access to a free ebook by the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Godshot
by Chelsea Bieker
Catapult
Pub Date April 7,  2020 
ISBN: 9781948226486
Hard cover $26, $38.95 (CAD)

COVID-19 LIfe: Comfort Food, Writer's Block, and Isolation

Month two in social isolation. The last time we were in public together was March 10 to vote in the Michigan primary election.

March 10 was also the date of Michigan's first COVID-19 cases.

We have been able to order delivery groceries from a local store and Imperfect Produce, and health and personal care items from the local drug store. You have to be up and online early in the morning to find an Instacart opening for delivery!

I wipe all the packages down with a virus-killing solution, repackage what I can, discard all the packaging, and then wash my hands and all the surfaces. Will this become the 'new normal'?

My hubby panic-ordered toilet paper on March 20 on Amazon, and it arrived from China April 10! We were down to one more roll.

It's comfort food time, like goulash.

And streusel-topped coffee cake like Mom used to bake. I used her cake pan, too, the one I remember from the 1960s.

My brother will be on unpaid furlough from Ford. My son is on a two month 20% pay reduction and his partner on unpaid furlough. Our retirement investments plummeted. Still, we count ourselves lucky; we all still have health insurance.

Sunny is reaching the age when she should be spade, but the vet office is closed. She will go into heat any time now. We haven't seen the grandpuppies in a month!

My husband and I take daily walks very early in the day, bundled in winter clothing. We rarely see anyone else. The young folk, dog walkers, and families wait until the day warms up.

 We did, though, see a gigantic opossum making its way home one morning. It likely spent the night rummaging through the trash set out for morning pick up.

We had several warm days in the sixties, then a snow and sleet. In other words, it's been a typical Michigan spring!

The birds are building nests and the daffodils are in flower.

My brother finds the lonely places to commune with nature. He shares spectacular photographs. Below is Dodge Park in Oakland County, MI, on a misty morning last week.

Earlier in the week he took his kayak down the canal to Cass Lake.

Meanwhile, life goes on.

I received the Advanced Reading Copy of The Preserve by Ariel S. Winter.

Book requests came in at the last minute and there was one offered by the publisher which I could not resist.

I am working hard to keep up! Writing the reviews is not coming as easily now. I am distracted.

New books on my NetGalley include

• Ingredients: The Strange Chemistry of What We Put In Us and On Us by George Zaidan
• Vesper Flights by Helen MacDonald, author of H is for Hawk
• Poisoned Water: How the Citizens of Flint, Michigan, Fought for Their Lives and Warned the Nation by Candy J. Cooper, a Middle Grade Book on the Flint Water Crisis

My LibraryThing win to come is

• In Search for Safety: Voices of Refugees by Susan Kuklin

My mask-making abilities have proven abysmally bad. Every other quilter in the universe is mass producing masks for family, friends, and local hospitals. I have tried various patterns. I have no elastic, no twill tape or ribbon, no hair ties, no stash of batik cottons. Now it's asked we wear masks in public. I could wear one I made if need be. But I just stay home.

Sad news has come from my weekly quilt group. We haven't been together in over a month. One member lost her grandson to cancer. Another was diagnosed with cancer of the brain. She was a real creative force in our group. 

I am thankful that I can shelter safely in place, with all the food and books I need, and with my companion of 48 years. I am thankful we have a yard full of flowers and trees and suburban wildlife to enjoy. I am thankful we can safely walk the neighborhood in the early morning.

This pandemic has unearthed the great social and economic disparities in our country. I hope that they will be addressed in the future. 

The way Michigan's Governor Gretchen Whitmore is doing, she may be tapped to a national leadership role in the future! 

I hope you and yours are all isolating and safe.