This story of Boyish Bumble is Bloody Good! This is a hell of a good little read for the little guy trying so hard to be cool. Demonstrates that today’s catalogue kids are still human after all. Malcolm mumbles, he stumbles, he stutters, he stammers, but he still gets the attention of the cutest little chick in school! For all the little guys who want to get noticed, being klutzy is in!

I had read Frank McCourt’s Angelas’s Ashes, and Tis, and from first line felt he is the quintessential storyteller. But I didn’t fully appreciate him as a deeply , brutally honest writer until Teacher Man. Like some naysayers, I had (against the grain, since he is such a charming sweetheart of a guy!), felt there were some manufactured and greatly embellished scenes in his first two books. A teacher myself, I was on a plane up north, the said book in my lap, having been shoved into my carry-on madly by my son upon leaving the security gate. My son knows me very well! I loved the book, it has a depth and supreme worthiness, and not only did I survive the horrendous northern “toy-plane” flights with his help, I was awestruck as to how he survived what was probably worse than his deprived childhood….his teaching years! Well done Frank, and you are still a sweetheart!

Because I love her stuff!!! I played on the beach and did so many of the same things and had the same dreams, and I’m giving my mom and sisters this book for Xmas. How could I not? SEASHELL (p17) Found/ At low tide/ Little, lacquered/Brown/ Scent of shaving lotion/ Pungent, Poignant, Mystic/ Like oils of Arabia/ or Bengal/ What father, hudband/ Brother/ Dipped his work-worn Fingers/ In its tiny crucible/ Performing small ablutions/ While waves rolled/ And crashed and thundered/ And he dared to dream/ Of little girls and home..” Need I say more.
Shaggymane

OLD HOLLYWOOD IN POET’S WRITING: Personally I think she was also influenced by Hollywood musicals (no doubt from the crackling reels of schoolhouse showings , or the black-and-white snowily-emitting portable in her mother’s kitchen. The picture of a young, impressionable child, somewhat sensory deprived, trudging the gravelled road home to lunch from school, and devouring love stories starring Greer Garson and Susan Hayward is magical…”while I, forcefully earthbound, returned to the pot-holed road of futile dreams….upon which Greer Garson and Susan Hayward would never deign to trod…” I also think she is referring to the most famous musical of all, the Ziegfield Follies, when she compares pre-dawn city lights to “a moody lover…ready to ghost into detachment…before Ziegfielding up and casting again…their traitorous, treacherous spell…” And Casablanca is another prop she ploys cleverly, a Leonard Cohen style movement to her lines here….”bold and brazen..on the bluff….half shuttered…shabby….shameless…daring us..to duck inside….no need for pride….or shirts and ties…..sure isn’t Rick’s Cafe….” One can imagine a young teen gladly cutting loose from this real or imagined innocent den of iniquity of innocent courting and spooning. But perhaps not. Either way, her crafting, like the poet herself, is beguiling!

I grew up in a small community in Eastern Canada. Many people have tried to contrive their early “we-didn’t-have-much-but-we-were-happy” scenario for market value, but this poet seems to be really reaching into her soul in these poems. Quite simply, she is legit. My family didn’t have a car either, or electricity, and walked on gravel roads and skated on frozen ponds, but would that I could write and interweave these themes like she does! ....the swish of our crinolines…..the click of our little heels….on settled loose gravel….that seemed to understand…our staged and futile perfection…..” These lines are from “Summer of ‘62’, the first poem that hit my eye, and I’m hooked. I’ll be reading and re-reading. The cover is beautiful, as is her introductory phrase from Emerson….”the world is his who can see through its pretension…..how succinct.