What’s John Morris Reading?
This past winter and spring, I have tended to read novels that are connected to other works of art, especially film and poetry, and to works of literary criticism. For instance, I read the novel “Train Dreams” after seeing the Netflix film starring Joel Edgerton, with a soundtrack by Bryce Dessner of The National, one of my favourite musical acts. The language of the novel, by the late Denis Johnson, is perfectly captured in the narration of the film. Johnson’s novel is a revelation,
with an astonishingly evocative concluding passage – among the best I have read.
In another instance of connections among different genres, Ian McEwan’s compelling and thought-provoking novel “What We Can Know” led me to the work of the English poet John Fuller, especially his corona “Marston Meadows.” The poem is a masterful example of a difficult form, that if done well, is breathtaking to read and reread, as “Marston Meadows” has proven to be.
The poem brought to mind the elegiac corona, “The Moirai,” published a few years ago in an award-winning collection by Canada’s David O’Meara. In the poem, he pays tribute to the late Elise Partridge. The two were close collaborators and friends, and “The Moirai” is not only an accomplished work of art, it also reminds us how poetry can bring life and solace to an otherwise empty room.
Re-reading O’Meara led me back to Partridge’s poem, “The If Borderlands” – in which she brings us to “an endless fence” with “millions of I- and F-palings” where we look at an
alternative, imagined country. Here is a place where roads might have been taken, solace offered and lives saved; where ships come in, a beloved niece does not die, a massacre is prevented, gifts tend to last and we do not flail in the lies of the culture. And yet even in this imagined country, there seem only to be “trees and the vague static of birdsong,” while reader and poet linger in hope for “remedies that might have saved/loved hands, a town! Some globe/tender as a peach.”
Over this same period (winter-spring), I re-read my old copy of “Hamlet,” then went to see the film, Hamnet, at the local cinema with some friends. After that, I read the novel of the
same name by Maggie O’Farrell. Though emotionally draining, this immersion in Shakespeare’s universe was immensely satisfying, and in turn led me to the book, “Hamlet: Poem Unlimited” by Harold Bloom, and more recently to “A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599” by James Shapiro, which I am two-thirds of the way through.
While Shakespeare may be “for all time,” according to Shapiro he was also very much of his time. He wrote in a milieu ripe with rumour, foreign entanglements, factions, pending succession, censorship, repression, unscrupulous competitors, jealous actors and playwrights, and an experienced play-going audience, not least of which was the Royal Court including the Queen herself. The book skillfully demonstrates how the turbulence of this late Elizabethan Age was reflected in works such as “Henry IV,” “Henry V,” and “Julius Caesar.” I’m looking forward to Shapiro’s extensive commentary on “Hamlet,” in the final chapters.
John Morris is a 67-year-old writer based in Ottawa, Ontario. He has been a lifelong poetry lover and in 2021, was awarded first and third prizes for poetry in the National Capital Writer’s Contest.