Rebecca West

I don't know a damn thing abotu Rebecca West. Black Lamb and Grey falcon was published in 1940. Mine is a hard copy from 1944. the beast of a book is 1,150 pages long. But from this one book alone I knew she was fervently political Black Lamb.org described her thusly:

"A vivacious, politically-committed woman, West began writing in radical periodicals while still a student at George Watson’s Ladies’ College in Edinburgh and took her pen name from one of Ibsen’s emancipated heroines. Her early novels and critical studies, excellent in themselves, nevertheless seem preludes to her masterwork Black Lamb and Grey Falcon..."

So here we have that very book and it is as they say.

"...If I carried my questioning of the dead back for a thousand years I would always hear "No, there was fear, there were our enemies, without, our rulers within, there was prison, there was torture, there was violent death."

Giscombe

Giscombe is a poet first and foremost. I don't care for much poetry, and not his in particular; just poerty at all. Where I find allegory and metaphor very descriptive, I find poetry to be code. I find no pleasure in reading or writing in code. So C.S. Giscombe is not one I'd have encountered had he not branched out into prose. I bought this book for $3 because I liked a single passage and afterward read it and went onto enjoy it as a whole.

Into and Out of dislocation is a book about a hundred things: America, Canada, blackness, genealogy, teaching, writing, history, travel, research, sex, good food, bad food, drinking bourbon, mass transit, bicycling... It's disjointed like Saroyan. But skillfully tied together by a tight first-person narrative. The single quote follows. The italics are his, the bold is mine.

"I'm here to reclaim him, I wrote in my journal that winter in Fort George. This is the dry hump of kinship, my arrival at the public dock at Germansen Landing or Fort George or the mouth of Quesnelle to reclaim his ass. "

Sudden Sea

R.A. Scotti has great one-liners. it's very strange to think that her career began in writing spy and detective novels. Her prose isn't dense, it reads easily but then she'll drop a stone into your drink. She uses them artfully using them to slam on the brakes or the accelerator. In non-fiction it's unusual in it's poetry.

"All along the Northeast coast, riled by the wind, the sea became magnificent and mad."

It's simple and visual and it works with the alliteration. The clausulas are different but the near-rhyme is interesting. I like alliteration because it's difficult to use and when you fail you sound foolish. It's very satisfying when it works; and this works.