The language is not hard to understand –
not difficult at all –
the ground says I will catch you
if you – when you – fall.
The language is not hard to understand –
not difficult at all –
the leaves say yes
we hear your gentle call.
***
In other news, my women’s book club enjoyed perhaps our liveliest conversation of the year last week, discussing Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips. It won the Pulitzer in 2024, receiving some scathing reviews along the way.
Set during the Civil War and its aftermath, Night Watch tells the story of 12-year-old ConaLee and her mother, who find refuge at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia under terrible circumstances. ConaLee must not reveal their past or their relationship in order to be admitted. It’s no surprise that the man who has terrorized them will find them again and seek to reclaim them.
Dwight Garner, in his New York Times review, describes the novel as “sludgy, claustrophobic and pretentious. Each succeeding paragraph took something out of me.” What? Our book club felt differently.
We were moved and sometimes horrified by what happened in the book, but not for the same reasons.
ConaLee seems to me one of the great child heroines of American literature, standing beside Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird and Mattie Ross in True Grit.
We let down our guard while reading this book. We let ourselves be taken in. We emerged with both sorrow and hope.