Interview With a Bibliophile

Sally Thomas

It’s Monday, and time once again for “Interview With a Bibliophile” in which I invite some lovely bibliophiles I know to answer some questions about literary tastes, reading habits, and recommendations. This is to pique some interest among friends and family about new book finds, to stir up some thought provoking ideas, and to simply share our mutual love of the written word. If you love books, I hope you will join us and take a look.

Every morning I brew my coffee and take a long, hot sip. Then I make my way to a wonderful little substack I follow called Poems Ancient and Modern. If there is a new entry there, I do a little happy dance and settle in for a treat. That is how I got to know Sally Thomas. She and her friend Joseph Bottum make poetry a delightful experience; for the aficionados right down to the more timid beginners out there, who discover that poems lose their more frightening aspects in the hands of two humble yet poetically wise friends. Even if I know a poem quite well, I always come away with a whole new perspective. I LOVE when that happens! Wise Charlotte Mason once observed that the best books are those written by a person who is madly in love with his/her subject. Sally Thomas is one such writer. She is a poet in her own right, but she also serves up a banquet of other poems she has lovingly assembled together: Christian Poetry in America Since 1940: An Anthology . She is the author of her own poetry collection called Motherland, and a book of short stories: The Blackbird and Other Short Stories, She has also written a novel: Works of Mercy. Sally’s poetry, fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in First Things, National Review, the New Yorker, Plough Quarterly, Public Discourse, and numerous literary journals.

Sally adamantly declares herself a mountain person and not a beach person. She lived in Utah for eight years and still misses those incredible vistas. She eventually made her way to the beautiful mountains of North Carolina where she raised her children, who are now grown and flown. Sally lives quietly with her husband and her dog, auspiciously named Eudora Alice Welty Thomas. Though poetry is her passion, she also has an equal love for Choral Singing and owns that it is her alternate art form. She has a passion for plants and herbs, but confesses she made the fatal mistake of planting mint in her garden! The upside, though, is that her whole yard smells like heaven when it rains.

And now, it is with great pleasure that I invite Sally to answer my burning questions about books!

*************************

As a published poet and author, who inspires your art? Is there one poem or poet who started the magic stirring for you? Were you young or older when the poetry bug hit you? You can have more than one inspiration.

It is hard to name just one writer. I know that I started writing poems when I was about 14, and that the poet I read most that year was E.E. Cummings --- I think the first book of "grownup" poetry I owned for myself was his poems. This happens to lots of people, but having grown up reading poetry, and having poetry read to me as a small child, I had had no idea that you could be that inventive, or have that much fun, with language. So I went through the typical high-school imitative phase, and that was my launchpad.

But I had always loved poems. As a small child, I loved Walter de la Mare, Vachel Lindsay, Sara Teasdale, Robert Louis Stevenson, all the poets who could make evocative music with rhyme and meter, which is what I have returned to as a writer. So there was a whole baseline of verse in my consciousness, from long before I ever learned to read or write, and that has wound up being more formative than anything else.

Do you have a favorite novel? You can, of course, have more than one. What do you look for in a novel? What keeps you reading?

Novels I reread repeatedly:

Delta Wedding, Eudora Welty (probably my most-reread novel of all time)

The Edge of Sadness, Edwin O'Connor

Excellent Women, Barbara Pym

In This House of Brede, Rumer Godden

Bleak House, Charles Dickens

Those are probably the top handful, in no particular order. I have also reread the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy, and The Hobbit, on repeat throughout my life. And I love Sigrid Undset: Kristen Lavransdatter, of course, but I think I admire Olav Audunsson/Master of Hestvikin even more, ultimately.

What do I look for? What keeps me reading? The one thing that will stop me dead in my tracks is inferior prose. I will not read past the first sentence of anything if that first sentence isn't excellent. It doesn't have to be exciting, or a "hook." But if the first sentence is clunky, I'm not bothering with the rest.

So I guess what keeps me reading, truly, is excellent prose (I should add novels of Alice Thomas Ellis, Muriel Spark, and Penelope Fitzgerald to that list, because they all come to mind as examples of shining prose). It doesn't have to be short and sharp --- I adore Dickens and lament the apparent death of the long sentence. But the writer does evidently need to love writing sentences and have an innate sense of their rhythms. That's more important to me than any element of theme, plot, character, etc. If the writing on the page isn't compelling as writing, I'm not turning the page.

Otherwise . . . all of these novels I've listed are pretty different from each other, and it's hard to say one thing about them all. But I love Delta Wedding for all the things it accomplishes: its shimmering, impressionistic prose, the way the narrative voice moves in and out of the consciousness of various characters, its gorgeous evocations of what is in fact a very flat kind of landscape, needing imagination and love to find and uncover its beauties. It's a novel full of wonder, even as it's haunted by death. The image on which it closes is one of the most perfect and resonant in all literature --- it's just beautiful, without being tidy, everything all solved. I never get tired of this novel. Every time I reread it, it yields up some new insight to me.

Can you name 5 books about, or written by, poets that you would recommend to readers longing to put their toe in the water of poetry but not knowing where to begin?

I have favorites for both the writing of poetry, and how to read it.

For the latter, I really kind of like good old Laurence Perrine, and his chestnut, Sound and Sense. I read this book for high-school English when I was a senior, in the early 1980s, and I found it life-changing. It takes you through all the standard elements of poetry, but most of all, it immerses you in reading poems from all over the tradition, including a fair number of twentieth-century poems. I discovered many still-favorite poems in reading that book for the first time, and I still think it's fun handbook. I made all my kids read it.

For writing, my favorite craft book is Richard Hugo's The Triggering Town.

What is your favorite genre of book? Why? Is there a genre that has been beyond your comfort level in the past that you might like to explore now?

I read more nonfiction now than I have ever done before, though I've always liked nature writing. I read Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in high school and thought it was magical --- this led me to Edward Abbey, Barry Lopez, and, eventually, thanks to a brilliant Christmas gift from one of my sons, the English writer J.A. Baker, whose The Peregrine is now a favorite of mine.

I love travel writing, especially from the early part of the 20^th century. Richard Halliburton (whom, again, I read with my kids) is a lot of fun. Evelyn Waugh's When the Going Was Easy: also fun.

And lately I've been reading popular medieval history. Helen Castor's The Eagle and the Hart, about Richard II and Henry IV, is amazing (and often very funny).

I think I'd like to read more science writing than I have done. And philosophy. I have been putting myself through a Great Books-type reading list, but I keep falling off the wagon.

What is your favorite form of poetry? Free verse? Or highly structured? Why?

Oh, I am absolutely a formalist. There's nothing I admire more than a finely-wrought, very difficult form, pulled off dazzlingly and managing to say something true and piercing at the same time. I tend to love repeating forms: the pantoum, the trenta-sei, and others that require you to repeat not just words but whole lines, juxtaposing them with other lines that cast those repeated lines in new lights. Fulfilling the demands of a difficult form is what brings me, as a writer, to moments of epiphany that I would never have arrived at if left to my own puny devices. I'm not that smart; poetic forms are very smart, and it's good to trust them to know what they're doing and where they're going, which always involves surprise.

What are you reading now and in the coming year?

I'm continually reading poems and critical essays for the Substack my friend Joseph Bottum and I write together, Poems Ancient and Modern. At the moment I'm also reading all the works of the anonymous medieval "Pearl Poet," the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the dream-vision poem Pearl, and two or three other attributions. I've been reading the Poetic and Prose Eddas and the Sagas of Icelanders as well --- I guess my theme this year is "All Medieval Northern Europe, All the Time."

But I've also been reading new books of poetry --- my friend Paul Pastor's The Locust Years is a particular standout in a strong field of books that have washed up at my house lately. And recent novels: Tony Woodlief's We Shall Not All Sleep, and Jonathan Geltner's Absolute Music.

I really want to read more Helen Castor --- her book on the Pastons looks fascinating --- as well as more about 14th-century England. Another Helen, Helen Carr, has a book on Edward III that I very much want to read.

But then I get overwhelmed just thinking about it all, and I mainline five or six Agatha Christie Hercule Poirot mysteries, because even if I've read them before, I never remember whodunnit or exactly how. Sometimes you just have to check out and go to the 1930s, where everyone is killing each other and Poirot is sorting it out, just as he assures you he will do. When it all seems like too much, this is very comforting.

Denise:

It is lovely that you mention Sound and Sense. I had a tutor come in to teach my older boys a poetry class once and he used this book. I sat in on the class about The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost and found out I had been reading it all wrong. It was an amazing revelation! I also share your love for Penelope Fitzgerald, who can sometimes make me laugh out loud with her pithy, witty words. Truth be told, I do not want this interview to end, but alas, here we are. Thank you, Sally Thomas for all your thoughts here. Happy reading to you now and in the coming year!

**************************

I do not feel inclined at this time to have a paid substack. But if we were together in a cafe discussing all these thoughts, I would not be opposed to you buying me a cup of coffee - with cream, of course. In that spirit, if any of my posts resonate with you and you feel so inclined, you can donate here: buymeacoffee.com/denise_trull