Have You Read a Poem Lately?

Billy Collins wrote this wonderful Memento Mori for indie bookstores to celebrate poetry month in April. It reminds me of my daughter’s poetry project last year as a junior in high school. Each student was required to get up close and personal with a poet for eight weeks. Jane was dreading it (not unexpectedly for a high schooler) and I was psyched! Running to the CD player I put on Billy Collins Live and queued up The Revenant. She listened with a suspicious look on her face and was about to leave the room with an eye roll when I mentioned, casually, “Do you know he wrote a poem about the Victoria’s Secret catalog?” That got her attention. We immediately went out and bought every one of his books (no library for this bookseller’s daughter), came home and spread them out and I said, “Where should we start?” You won’t be surprised to learn that “we” didn’t start; the only thing worse than homework is homework with your mom I guess. Anyway, she liked Billy and admitted that poetry was “sort of” fun. Victoria’s Secret is in Picnic, Lightning along with another favorite, Fishing on the Susquehanna in July.

Celebrate April and poetry with us at The King’s English; we’ll start Friday, April 1st with four poets from the University of Utah and Rob Carney from Utah Valley University will join us on the 23rd.

Memento Mori

It doesn’t take much to remind me
what a mayfly I am,
what a soap bubble floating over the children’s party.

Standing under the bones of a dinosaur
in a museum does the trick every time
or confronting in a vitrine a rock from the moon.

Even the Church of St. Anne will do,
a structure I just noticed in a magazine–
built in 1722 of sandstone and limestone in the city of Cork.

And the realization that no one
who ever breasted the waters of time
has figured out a way to avoid dying

always pulls me up by the reins and settles me down
by a roadside, grateful for the sweet weeds
and the mouthfuls of colorful wild flowers.

So many reminders of my mortality
here, there, and elsewhere, visible at every hour,
pretty much everything I can think of except you,

sign over the door of this bar in Cocoa Beach
proclaiming that it was established–
though established does not sound right– in 1996.

—Billy Collins

The Great Silence by Juliet Nicolson

Review by Marilyn Copeland

The Great Silence by Juliet Nicolson

An estimated 30% of all men in Great Britain aged between 20 and 24 in 1911 were dead by November 11, 1918 at the end of what was called the Great War. It was a rare family that had not lost a father, a brother or a son. Adding in cousins, uncles and nephews, there was probably not a single family that did not have a loss, and many were decimated. Ultimately betraying the promise that it was “a war to end all war,” World War I ravaged Great Britain and opened the door for societal change that was earth-shattering.

Many soldiers many returned to Great Britain with terribly disabling wounds (the treatment of which brought about great progress in the new art of plastic surgery) or with shell shock, in these days referred to as post-traumatic stress disorder.

And how did the women at home cope with the loss of their friends, lovers, and family?  Lady Diana Cooper, a society beauty who also volunteered as a nurse, was not alone in turning to morphine: she found it to be “a staunch partner in times of stress.” Indeed, she tucked tubes of the drug into packages she sent to soldiers in France, and a well known chemist’s shop advertised gelatin sheets impregnated with morphine and cocaine as “useful presents for friends at the front.”

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, a victorious, but inexpressibly weary nation at first could hardly believe the war was over. A year later, signaled by church bells, sirens, and all manner of other noise, silence cloaked Great Britain for two minutes. Not a train, car or carriage moved, as the whole of the nation paused to remember those who had sacrificed so much—the soldiers, the women at home, the children. For many, and perhaps for the country, it was a sign of completion, and a notice to go on with life.

Packed with facts, but also possessed of a strong narrative sense, The Great Silence is a compelling read. The author, Juliet Nicolson, is the granddaughter of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson. His personal writings are among the many historical documents and memoirs referenced in the book. She was also fortunate to be able to interview several centenarians and near-centenarians—still-living survivors of the time.

If you enjoyed Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That, or Mary S. Lovell’s The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family, you will love this book.

Friday Fun for Kids at the King’s

by Rachel Heath

Friday Fun for Kids at the King’s has taken on a fun new twist. Each month – the second Friday, as usual— we’ll feature one of our favorite children’s-book characters. For the month of March we spent a little time with The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

We started storytime with some of Eric Carle’s most-loved books: The Very Quiet Cricket, Mister Seahorse, 10 Little Rubber Ducks, building to our finale, The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

Then we had some real fun! Everyone got to munch on sticks of “caterpillar food” while we colored and answered questions about the book we had just read. It was a great moment of interactive listening for the kids and it was pretty fun for the parents as well.

Before anyone left we put a caterpillar tattoo, (temporary of course!) on every hand, or in some cases every foot.

Everyone had a great time this month with The Very Hungry Caterpillar. We hope to see you in April when we’ll spend some time with Spot the Dog!

Meet Holly Tucker, author of the new book, Blood Work

This Wednesday, March 16, at 7 p.m., Holly Tucker will read from and sign her new book, Blood Work: A Tale of Medicine and Murder in the Scientific Revolution, a fascinating history of blood transfusion and how it became embroiled in contentious religious and ethical debates in 17th-century Europe.

March is Red Cross Month, so Tucker and The King’s English, as well as other authors and independent bookstores, are participating in the Writers for the Red Cross online fundraising event. We have a countertop donation box and Holly will donate 10% to the Red Cross for every inscribed copy of Blood Work shipped, for free, by The King’s English this week.

And now, Holly Tucker, associate professor at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health & Society, tells us about how she came to write Blood Work.

By Holly Tucker

I stumbled on the twisted history of early blood transfusion while I was preparing class notes on William Harvey’s 1628 discovery of blood circulation.  And honestly, when I read that the first transfusions used animals as donors I was so horrified and mesmerized that I really don’t remember whether I showed up to class fully prepared that day.  For nearly a month afterward, I couldn’t get the idea of these transfusions—which took place long before the discovery of anesthesia and antisepsis—out of my mind.  I spent every waking moment pouring over seventeenth-century scientific journals trying to learn as much as I could.

Then I stumbled on the Denis case.  And my fascination became an obsession.

In 1667, a renegade French physician named Jean-Baptiste Denis performed the first human blood transfusions.  The first was on a feverish young boy.  The second was on a local butcher, probably the same one who provided the lamb for the first transfusion.  The third transfusion would be the one that would end transfusion for another 150 years.  Denis transfused a mentally ill man with calf blood.  The man died—and Denis later faced murder charges in one of history’s first malpractice lawsuits.

What I was not prepared for was this:  the court records exonerated Denis of all murder charges.  But it did find that the patient had been murdered nonetheless—by arsenic and by “Enemies of the Experiment.”  I was stunned that historians had never uncovered the identities of these murderers.  Who would have wanted to stop blood transfusion in its tracks?  And why?

So I spent another several years in archives all over:  London, Paris, Rome.  The more I researched, the more I learned just how scary blood transfusion was to many in the 17th century.  Doctors had spent millennia taking blood out; it was entirely counter-intuitive to put blood in.  And to make matters worse, there were no guarantees that blood transfusion would not change fundamental characteristics of the recipients.  Would humans start to bark?

When I first narrowed down the list of suspects, I was pretty sure that I had a good idea of who did it.  But the more I researched my suspect (I won’t tell you who, no spoilers!), the more I realized that he didn’t do it—even if he did find blood transfusion to be loathsome and dangerous.  I felt weighed down my research.  I was driven to find out the identities of the killers.  But at the same time, I had a responsibility to make sure I got things right.  I was accusing someone of a crime.  And even if these folks are now long dead, I couldn’t get it wrong.

I still remember the day that I knew for certain that I had found the killers.  For several months, I felt that I was getting close.  My husband kept asking if everything was alright, because he noticed how distracted I seemed.  On the day that I knew for sure, 100%, without a doubt that I had found the murderers, I called Jon at the office in tears.  He was understandably worried when he answered the phone and heard me crying.  Finally, the words came spilling out.  “I know who did it!  I know who did it!”  Then we started laughing: it had only taken 350 years.

Meet Holly Tucker this Wednesday, March 16, at 7 p.m.!

What Leaves You Breathless?

Fans and friends who attended the Breathless Reads event on February 12 can’t stop talking about how great it was. This wonderful afternoon was co-sponsored by the Salt Lake Community College Community Writing Center (CWC) and the Salt Lake City Library.

Our fabulous authors were:

Ally Condie | Matched
Andrea Cremer | Nightshade
Kirsten Miller | The Eternal Ones
Beth Revis | Across the Universe
Brenna Yovanoff | The Replacement

We didn’t want the fun to stop so…tell us which book or which part of one of the Breathless Reads books leaves you Breathless and you could win signed copies of all five books!

DETAILS:

• Open to ages 13 and up
• 300 words or less
• Submit your entry by FRIDAY, MARCH 18 to the CWC by EMAIL
• Include “Breathless Reads Contest Entry” in the subject line of email
• Be sure to include your name, age and email address
• Winners may be asked to have their photograph taken for promotional uses

FIRST PLACE receives signed copies of all five Breathless Reads books

SECOND PLACE receives a $25 gift card from The King’s English Bookshop plus goodies from the Community Writing Center

THIRD PLACE receives a Journal from The King’s English Bookshop plus goodies from the Community Writing Center

Tell us…What leaves YOU Breathless?

CLICK HERE to send your submission!

Contest winners will be announced on The King’s English blog on Thursday, March 24th.