Fantastic Metropolis

The Voice At 3:00 A.M., Charles Simic

If you don’t like poetry, read no further. On the other hand, you might be pleasantly surprised. Simic concerns himself with big questions of metaphysics, God, The Soul and so forth, and firmly pins them to the ground with gorgeous clever imagery and a slightly apologetic black humour. Lots of ghosts, and other speculative content too, such as the young couple who may or may not have wandered into a painted landscape in the midnight museum. This is a selection from many of his collections including The World Doesn’t End, and Walking The Black Cat.

Simic is a god among poets, having won the Pulitzer. He might be referring to his award in these lines:

I’ve heard I’ve been made the official match vendor
Of the great dark night of the soul

Pretty much. And we need those tiny flares, too.

The Mount, Carol Emshwiller

Creepy, creepy, creepy, but not only creepy: Emshwiller writes about affection’s many subtly divergent guises better than anyone. This astonishingly original meditation on power should be on everyone’s reading list. While it’s ostensibly an alien invasion story, it functions as parable. One of the few honestly eye opening novels I’ve read.

Report to the Men’s Club, Carol Emshwiller

My highest adjectival praise, at least in conversation, is yummy and delicious, as if books were meals, which of course in a way they are. Apparently, when making lemon or other artificial flavours, chemists choose, for economic reasons, to copy only a very few of the chemical chains which make up the source. This is why artificial lemon or vanilla tastes so flat compared to the original. We all know what cherry flavour tastes like, and we all know it’s nothing at all like fresh ripe cherries. Emshwiller uses only authentic flavours in her cooking. The tastes are three-dimensional, and there are a lot to choose from. Aside from which her descriptive excursions into the connective tissues between writing and family life are apt. Sometimes a little too apt.

Ursula Pflug is author of the novel Green Music (Tesseract Books, 2002). She is also a playwright, arts journalist and short story writer.