books! across the air!

I won't say "across the water:" the US postal system has abolished - get this - surface mail. Yes! As of July, if you want to send things abroad you have to do it by air mail. I found this out at the counter of a postal establishment, with three parcels to send to myself in London, one of which was a box of books weighing 38 pounds, approximately an hour before leaving to catch my flight.

At the time I just swallowed my shock ($145!) and paid up, going overdrawn in the process and severely complicating my journey home. (Picture your correspondent, after 24 hours of travel, leaning exhausted on an overfilled airport trolley in a seething, loudspeaker-filled, overcrowded arrivals area at Heathrow, without enough cash to get even a coffee, let alone home, making one of those feverish longwinded calls to Telephone Banking... Ah, these are the memories! But flash back to the Bolton CT Post Office though, and Steve, slapping the labels on as I try to think of the postage in pounds - £73 for the books, not quite so bad, and the two pictures at £23 each, a bargain!).*

Well - my books, plus one of the pictures, have arrived. Hurrah! Not the picture I'm really attached to, though. Well, who knows. Accentuating the positive, I counted the books: there were 53 of them. That's $2.73 each. I'd have spent more than that on Abe or Amazon. And most of the books I shipped I'd never paid for, as they came either from le Duc or my uncle, and the ones I paid for were second-hand.

Anywya, now it's great! £73 isn't that bad, and it's like Christmas! Wanna see? Here they are:

le Duc's:
TS Eliot, hardback, Complete Poems and Plays, comfortably worn, its spine familiar as an old shoe
Dorothy Parker, Death & Taxes, worn first
Marianne Moore Collected, first, but I had to scrap the dw alas - it was beautiful, or had been
Warriner's English Grammar and Composition, 1951 ed. - a book I can distinctly remember throwing across the room when I was about ten, and which I've been wanting a copy of for years
Dylan Thomas' Choice - a boxed anthology given my dad as a leaving gift by his colleagues when we moved to Connecticut;
The Shaker Cookbook: Not By Bread Alone, 1951 hardback with charming DW
The Smithsonian Folklife Cookbook - big, fun, free bonus to members, surprisingly good
The Blender Way to Better Cooking, 1965, a fabulous magazine-style colour thing, look out for some Elegantly Dressed Turkeys posts

Tom's:
Ingeborg Bachmann, Songs in Flight, a fat HB
Elke Erb, Mountains in Berlin
Rimbaud, Four Poems, trans. Ben Belitt, signed by Ben Belitt
Jules Laforgue, Choisix de Poésies, a beat-up old Brentano's edition
Kenneth Rexroth, trans: One Hundred Poems from the Chinese, and
Li Ch'ing-chao, complete poems (Li Ch'ing-chao was a woman, in the 12th century - I'm very interested in this and the poems are really nice), both New Directions
James Merrill, Scripts for the Pageant - this is Part 2 of the Ouija board one, but I like having things separate too. God how I love James Merrill.
two John Ashbery firsts, pb, with very silly covers: Rivers and Mountains, and Three Poems
Mayakovsky, the Bedbug and Other Poems - & I've been looking for a cheap copy of this, so I'm happy! Thanks Tom.
Pasternak, the Poems of Dr Zhivago. I already have Pasternak in a nice little red paperback, but this has illustrations and is basically a sweet little gift HB that went with the movie.
Adrienne Rich, two paperback firsts: Diving Into the Wreck, and
The Dream of a Common Language
a usage book: If You Catch an Adjective, Kill It, galley proof
Plath, Crossing the Water, pb first
Robert Duncan, Bending the Bow
Dean Young, Strike Anywhere
Ernesto Cardenal, Zero Hour and other documentary poems
Antonio Machado, Times Alone - selected poems, trans. Robert Bly - I wish you could see the wonderful photograph of Machado on the front of this - oh wait! I've found one. Isn't he marvellous?
HD - the Life and Work of an American Poet, HB 1st, Janice Robinson - this was my birthday present
Whitman, a critical anthology

I bought:
Thom Gunn, Passages of Joy, first
anthology, American Negro Poetry, with a big Claude McKay section (but not as big as the Langston Hughes section)
Howard Norman, In fond Remembrance of Me, a memoir**
WG Sebald, Campo Santo, essays
Jonathan Franzen, the Discomfort Zone, memoir essays***
Carolyn Kizer, Cool, Calm & Collected, a big fat collected ed, HB. I'd never read her at all! Love some of it. Thanks to Eva Salzman for that tip.
August Kleinzahler, Cutty, One Rock. I love the title essay in here. There are others I hate. I got it in the Strand, and the US edition is of course far more beautiful. He's a great raconteur.
John Ash, The Anatolikon - I'm very excited by John Ash at the moment, this is all I could fine. I know it's all sitting there in Foyles, but that's at full UK price.
Edna St Vincent Millay, Collected, lovely old friend HB. Cheaper than her current paperback new Collected! Yay.
Donald Hall, Without
Presley and Merwin, shipping back after having written review on plane going over.****
Richard Wilbur, the new Collected
Wallace Stevens, Collected, pb, cheaper and prettier than here - my old one was a bit the worse for wear

Er, what else? A couple of them were actually notebooks: good old Harriet-the-Spy composition books, only with graph paper insides. I love them and now only wish I'd bought more. I prefer the green ones, though, where Harriet (and Roy Lichtenstein) preferred the black.

* More of a bargain if the second one arrives, admittedly.

** I love Howard Norman. If you love prose, you must read his novel The Bird Artist. He's published by Faber in this country but no one has ever heard of him, and he just blows me away - quietly. I'm convinced I was behind Howard Norman in a queue in a coffee shop the only time I ever went to Montpelier Vermont - he does live in VT and I'm sure it was him. But I was too shy.

*** Now, Franzen is up himself for sure: he wrote half of The Corrections sitting in a darkened room with a flipping blindfold on, and let's not revisit the Oprah scandal. And, weirdly in light of all his intense seriousness, he can lapse into a very typical solipsistic triviality. But I loved his long piece on growing up with the Peanuts. And The Corrections is, I think, a truly amazing novel.

**** One thing I must say t readers in England. Merwin is HUGE in the USA. I hadn't realised how big he still is: one sure sign of how Anglo I am, purely geographically. I was struck by how many books of his are in all the shops, lovely big paperback editions: The First Three Collections, The Second Three Collections... I'd have had those if I hadn't been loaded to bursting already. I really think it behooves all of you to read him. I might do a post, actually.