Cosmic, dystopic, poetic

Spring proceeds peony by heavy-headed peony. With satisfaction and struggle, I’ve mostly finished the editorial part of the season, although we’re now proofing Shenandoah‘s Spring issue. I’ll be off the hook for a while, except for the relatively moderate workload of running the annual Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Writers, because I’ve now set the poetry lists for Fall ’24 and Spring ’25, and two editorial fellows will select the poems for Fall ’25 and Spring ’26. While editing poetry for Shenandoah is a privilege, it’s also a LOT, and I’ll be launching my next poetry book, Mycocosmic, in March ’25, so the break is well-timed!

Work toward Mycocosmic is minor so far, but it’s happening. I have three beautiful blurbs in hand and am writing to artists who do mushroom-y stuff for permission to use their work on a cover–no luck so far. I’m in love with Phyllis Ma‘s photography, so if you’re best buds, please let me know. Tupelo Press also held a Zoom meeting yesterday for authors about their new arrangement with Chicago Distribution Center, which was interesting to hear about–it should be much easier than with my previous poetry presses to sell books internationally as well as make arrangements for sales with US bookstores.

I’m otherwise caught up in peer review stuff, campus visits by potential Visiting Assistant Professors, a little bit of writing, and recuperative reading. I just finished rereading Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series, thinking about how to tweak assignments when I repeat the Magical Education course next May. It was such a pleasure. The six books cover a long span of her writing life and you can really see her work grow and deepen–and more feminist and egalitarian. Also, if you’re planning to produce an Earthsea-based HBO series (it would be more diverse and interesting than Game of Thrones, ahem), call me. My first recommendation is to combine books one and two in the first two seasons, splitting the storyline between Ged and Tenar, but I have other ideas.

Another recent task: I’d foolishly agreed to write up a faculty reflection on the next pick for the W&L Alumni Book Club, Prophet Song by Paul Lynch. A dystopian novel set in Dublin that won the Booker Prize last year–what could go wrong? It turns out to be a grueling book. I would dread picking up each evening, so I gave up Tuesday afternoon to plow through the rest in one binge. An elected fascist government takes over Ireland while police brutally crush protest: doesn’t sound distantly futuristic, does it? W&L has no encampments except tents to shelter the drinking of visiting alums; I’m not about to get arrested by police with tear gas, and if I did, I wouldn’t fear being disappeared. But for so many across the world, the terrible times are here. Another summer of wildfire and devastating storms is starting. After that, the election.

In short, Prophet Song is poetically written, but I’d recommend you read the news instead. One useful point: it reminded me that the whole family needs to keep our passports up to date.

Rather than tell everyone to skip the book club, though, I connected Lynch’s novel to my family’s experience of the Blitz in Liverpool. I cover some of this territory in my 2011 poetry collection Heterotopia, but it’s all about mothers and grandmothers and here we are on the cusp of Mother’s Day, so I’ve pasted my meditation in below. The snapshots are from my mother’s albums, mostly of US visits I remember my grandmother making, although the Chester shot was taken a year before I was born. The featured photo above is from a hot day on Cape Cod in 1983; my nan is hamming it up next to my mother’s sister Bobbie, who was smart enough not to wear polyester in July.

On Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, sort of

While the Luftwaffe bombed Liverpool, my grandmother, Florence Cain, was caring for babies in cold-water lodgings: she delivered four children between 1937 and 1941. Her home city, site of the largest port on England’s western coast, was key to the war effort. It’s also just across the Irish Sea from Dublin, a city my grandfather’s people had left under a cloud of religious and political dissent—and where, decades later, Paul Lynch would set his Booker Prize-winning Prophet Song.

My mother, Flo’s third child, was born in a fireplace-heated tenement kitchen in February of 1940. The first major air raid occurred that August, and assaults continued into 1942. The bombings killed thousands across the region and left landmark buildings in rubble. The ensuing economic depression led my mother and her sister to emigrate to the U.S. in their early twenties. Both married Americans. I grew up in New York and New Jersey, visited periodically by relatives with funny accents who told amazing stories around loaded dinner tables. I heard about the air raids and postwar privations so many times, in such detail, that they became my life’s foundational myths.

Flo was the heroine of family lore, the pivot around which tales turned, as Eilish is in Lynch’s novel. For example: one house my grandparents rented had no cellar, just a steel shelter in the back garden that was too small to contain the whole family at once. When sirens sounded, my grandmother stuffed the babies in and covered them with her body. Eventually a house across the road took a direct hit, blowing out the windows of my grandparents’ parlor and forcing a difficult move. Every version of this legend features my grandmother hauling possessions across town in a handcart. Listening to us marvel, my grandmother, tall and strong even in her sixties, would throw back her head and laugh before swallowing her whiskey sour and lighting another unfiltered Camel. She and all those babies in nappies had survived.

Lynch’s Eilish is for many chapters a frustrating character, refusing to leave Dublin with her four children while a fascist government crackdown worsens. I suspect Flo’s story had unflattering passages, too; I sometimes stayed up late enough to hear her bitter criticism of her husband, my grandfather, who died of brain cancer long before I was born. Your nan gets mean when she drinks, my mother would whisper in the morning, clearing away jugs of Gallo wine. Flo was kinder as a grandmother, she said, than as a parent.

Even then I comprehended that enduring the air raids, feeding four children on black-market potatoes, and then nursing her dying husband in a crowded house with a shared privy and mold sprouting on the plaster walls—well, those experiences were a far cry from my suburban childhood, and I suspected they could turn anyone ruthless. I remembered them when my children were young, during my own nights of crying. My life was so much cushier—neither my grandmother nor my mother had a fraction of my educational opportunity, for starters—yet caring for little ones while holding down a demanding job sometimes drove me to the brink. Poor Eilish, with her PhD in cellular and molecular biology, harrying her children and hurrying through her responsibilities. Yet she comes down in the world from a place of privilege; my grandmother started with much less.

I understand Flo’s children’s grudges. I imagine Eilish’s children surviving to resent her choices and her occasional cruelty. Yet I would have forgiven my grandmother anything.

I have mixed feelings about Prophet Song. Its darkness is unrelenting; I would find Eilish hard to spend time with even in plainer prose with paragraphs and quotation marks; as I read news from the U.S. and abroad, I find the novel less dystopian than brutally realistic about our violent, unjust world. Lynch’s novel does remind me, though, that the tales of my grandmother’s triumph are rooted in muddled years when she couldn’t, in fact, predict how each daily staying or swerving would turn out. She couldn’t know, as she shoved those babies into the shelter, whether any of them would survive. Unlike my mother, whose struggles I would come to understand, Flo never told us about her uncertainties or expressed the slightest surprise at where she’d landed.

Discussion questions

1. Some reviewers describe Lynch’s long prose blocks as “claustrophobic” and the unmarked dialogue as challenging to follow. I found the book much more emotionally than technically difficult, but I’m an English professor who studies difficult books for a living. What’s your affective response to Prophet Song? Where do you feel moved, frustrated, or frightened? How does Lynch’s style affect your feelings?
2. Was there a moment when you thought, “Now is when Eilish should jump ship”? What would it take for you to leave your home behind?
3. This novel is set in near-future Ireland yet contains so many references to the past: Eilish becomes “a ghost to her past” (41); Lynch writes that “there is memory in weather” (136); Simon loses his short-term memory; climbing into the attic for a radio reminds Eilish of her childhood, and she describes the attic as “the house of memory itself” (176). Why does memory have such primacy in this story?
4. How do women and girls experience the crumbling of their world differently than the boys and men? What difference does age make in the characters’ ways of coping?
5. When Lynch describes how “you’re watching it happen in your own time and not in a book” (21), it strikes me that he has ambitions beyond the literary: he wants readers to imagine how descent into war can happen to anyone, and I suspect he wants the novel to affect their political decisions. Does Prophet Song change your thinking, even in small ways?  
6. What do you make of the “trickster magpie” inside Eilish when she tells Larry to attend the protest (28)? What does Eilish seem to want from her marriage and her life?
7. A small point, but since I read Richard Powers’ novel Overstory, I see trees differently, and there are many in this book. I think of the old cherry trees on Eilish’s property or her meditation on page 85 on “how a tree abides a dark season.” Why do you think Lynch gives trees so much attention?