Sukey's Favorite

Good Poems
By Garrison Keillor
Highbridge, $24.95
4.5 hours, cassette, ISBN 1565116933

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April alone is designated as Poetry Month, but it's a shame we don't celebrate poetry every day of every month. Garrison Keillor has tried to do just that with The Writer's Almanac which offers NPR listeners a poem a day. Now, with his signature Midwestern modesty, Keillor has selected 218 of these poems in a wonderful, wonderfully accessible collection he calls Good Poems. Most are better than good, often with epiphanies both soft and startling, that illuminate shadows, make you laugh and cry, and turn ordinary moments and thoughts into the stuff of eternity. Keillor reads many of the poems himself, though you'll hear Billy Collins, Roy Blount, Jr., Allen Ginsberg and Sharon Olds, among others. And you'll hear modern masterpieces including Raymond Carver, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop—alongside the classics— Robert Burns, Shakespeare, Donne, Dickinson, Whitman, Blake and many more.

The desperate do-gooder

REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD

Gritty streets, grim housing projects, grim, edgy lives teetering on desperation, hope writhing in hopelessness—yes, you're back in Dempsy, New Jersey, Richard Price's turf and the setting for his novels Clockers and Freedomland. Ray Mitchell, the homeboy hero of Samaritan, has returned to his childhood haunts after a checkered career teaching school, driving a cab, kicking a coke habit and making it as a TV writer. He's desperate too, but desperate to do good, to reach out that helping hand to the less fortunate in his old hood. But he's sideswiped by his own reckless need to intervene in other people's lives and, literally, by a vase someone bashes into his head. Who did it and why and why Ray won't give up the perp allows Price to go back and forth in time, to explore the inner lives of his inner city characters and to keep the drama tingling and taut. Michael Boatman narrates, keeping his cool and losing it in all the right places.


Plainsong

Louise Erdrich is back on her home turf too, back in Argus, North Dakota where she has set so many of her wonderful novels. The Master Butchers Singing Club, a double treat because Ms. Erdrich is the reader, shows us another side of Argus and another side of the author's Ojibwe-German-American heritage. This time her superb storytelling talent is focused not on dislocated Indians, but on a German immigrant much like her own grandfather, who comes to America to forge a life in the new world, bringing only his knives, his master butcher's skill, a suitcase of sausages and a surprisingly lyric voice. Beginning with WWI and ending with WWII, with affairs of state shadowing affairs of the soul, Erdrich follows Fidelis Waldvogel, his feisty German wife, the equally feisty Argus woman she befriends, and the many other, often odd, oddly endearing characters whose lives and fates mingle in the confines of small town closeness.


The Conjuror

That's the name the NYPD has given the "unsub" who's leaving a trail of ghastly murders as he moves about the city and leaving tantalizing bits of evidence that showcase his skill as an illusionist. To find this now- you-see-him-now-you-don't killer, the police bring in Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs, the crime-busting duo who have starred in many of Jeffrey Deaver's bestsellers. And in his newest, The Vanished Man, read by Adam Grupper, Rhyme, a brilliant forensic criminologist confined to a wheelchair and Sachs, his smart, ambitious protégée-plus, need all their collective cunning and then some. Nothing is as it seems—this slippery suspect is a master quick-change artist and, as two very different but very deadly scenarios magically meld together, a master at confusing and confounding the motives for his malevolence. Fast-paced and tension-laced from start to finish.


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