A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women.

The judges of the big literary prizes have done a great job recently, and the books I have most often pressed on my friends include several winners from the past year. In case the endorsement of the Booker Prize, the Pulitzer, and National Book Award were not enough publicity, I want to recommend Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (Viking, $20.95, 282 pp.) and E. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News (Simon and Schuster, $12, 337 pp.). Paddy Clarke left me breathless, moved, and amazed by the subtlety of Doyle's craft. Poems take my breath away fairly frequently, but the last time I finished a novel and had to remind myself to breathe must have been nearly a decade ago (reading William Kennedy's Ironweed). A novel about a ten-year-old Barrytown (Dublin) boy, Paddy Clarke conjures up the world of "sticks and stones may break my bones/but names and faces will never hurt me," showing that this child's motto can only be true when everything is okay at home. Humor balances the attention given to pain, although enjoying "the crunch of someone else's pain" is always an ingredient in the laughter represented and elicited. That a novel about the birth of empathy can work in such a pared-down style makes Doyle's achievement all the more impressive. I loved this novel even more than Doyle's Barrytown Trilogy: The Commitments (Vintage, $9, 165 pp.), The Snapper (Penguin, $10, 216 pp.), and The Van (Penguin, $10, 311 pp.).

E. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News is the polar opposite to Doyle's novel. Mainly set in Newfoundland, the novel also examines family life, but the bewildered perspectives belong to adults rather than to a child. Proulx's deliberately choppy prose is the perfect vehicle for a style chockablock with epigrammatic statements, metaphors, and world-defining catalogs. When he meets Tert Card, the editor at The Shipping News, Proulx's protagonist Quoyle registers the "voice querulous in complaint." The narrator adds "For the devil had long ago taken a shine to Tert Card, filled him like a cream horn with itch and irritation. His middle initial was X. Face like cottage cheese clawed with a fork." Both the economy and the imaginative excess of this character sketch suggest die paradoxical virtues of Proulx's style. A style with such energy of its own can detract from the story, but not here. Each of the multitude of characters introduced in the first half of the book plays a role in the accelerating plot. What at first seems to be episodic, twists into a complicated knot of story. The payoff in the novel's scheme of knots (diagrams and definitions adorn each chapter) could not be more satisfying. It takes a little patience at the beginning, but The Shipping News turns into a wonderful novel.

John Crowley's Love & Sleep (Bantam, $22.95, 503 pp.) hasn't yet won a big prize, although it appeared on Harold Bloom's list of "278 Books You Should Have Read by Now" (Esquire, September 1994) barely a month after it appeared in bookstores! Love & Sleep is the second book in a four-novel sequence (Aegypt, the first installment, has been re-released in paper [Bantam, $12.95, 390 pp.], along with Crowley's magnificent fantasy novel, Little, Big [Bantam, $12.95, 538 pp.]. You don't have to know Aegypt to enjoy Love & Sleep, which relates the story of scholarly Pierce Moffat's quest for love and vocation. Crowley layers story within story; when Pierce reads, we get to read the book (by imaginary historical novelist Fellowes Kraft) over his shoulder. The subject of Pierce's research is magic, the magic of a world that no longer exists (but once did), a magic in which he does not believe (but practices). Some of the best stuff occurs when the novel loops back to Pierce's Catholic childhood, spent in an isolated Kentucky mountain town, where, among other things, Pierce and his cousins shelter and furtively baptize a girl from a mining community up the mountain. Crowley's children, women, and men are psychologically convincing, an accomplishment that makes the historical and fantastic elements of his novel all the more thrilling.

Two books of poetry would be worth looking around for: Jorie Graham's Materialism (Ecco Press, $13, 146 pp.) and Annie Finch, ed., A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women (Story Line Press, $15.95, 308 pp.). If you have trouble finding poetry books, you can always call the publisher directly (Ecco Press: 800-342-3226; Story Line Press: 503-466-5352; fax [phone]). Graham's Materialism, her fifth book of poems, investigates the relationship between the body and the soul, the seen and the unseen, the time-bound self and history. The volume includes not only poems but excerpts and adaptations from other texts by philosophers, poets, explorers, artists, and theologians, so it seems like an argument with all the evidence laid out in a trail, and the reasoning removed. Filling the spaces between others' texts are Graham's poems, including "Manifest Destiny," a wonderful poem about Shiloh, a bullet with a bite mark in it, and the process of sympathetic imagination. Materialism allows the reader to encounter a thinking poet's thought.

Annie Finch's A Formal Feeling Comes invites readers to consider contemporary women poets thinking about and using form. Finch construes form broadly to include kinds of poems (sonnets, sestinas, villanelles, ballads), poems in stanzas (quatrains, rhyme royal, heroic couplets), and poems in adaptations and new combinations of rhyme and meter. Not all the poems are strictly metrical; some use syllabics and some use patterns of repetition and internal rhyme to give free verse a backbone. A user-friendly volume, A Formal Feeling Comes includes comments by each of the poets on form, and two appendices explaining the forms of specific poems. The variety of the writing collected by Finch makes this book a very interesting collection of poems by sixty poets, and amply demomstrates the vitality of form in contemporary writing.

Of the books I've insisted my friends read this year, Melissa Fay Greene's Praying for Sheetrock: A Work of Nonfiction (Addison Wesley, $10, 335 pp.) stands out as the one that most surprised me. A "chronicle of large and important thing happening in a very little place," the book relates the struggle for civil rights in McIntosh County, Georgia. Such a summary made me think the book would worth reading; I didn't imagine that I would be so bowled over by Greene's writing, her skill at conveying personalities, and her dramatic construction of her story around the image of the wrecked trucks on U.S. 17, yielding in booty the good for which black people could only pray. Greene avoids the morality-play scheme of vice and virtue that might make her story simpler, and she sacrifices nothing in vividness or in her reporting by showing the reader the failings of her hero and the kindness of her villain. Read this terrific book! If you were right here I'd make you borrow my copy.

Suzanne Keen, a regular Commonweal contributor, teaches English at Yale University. Her essay on Anthony Burgess appeared in Commonweal's February 11, 1994, issue.