Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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I teach literature to college kids in the Midwest. (Learn more about this Cannonballer: tiny_bookbot's Quick Questions interview.)

tiny_bookbot's Reviews:

The “obstinate love” of memory

The Mother House by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

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The first few days of April, I was supposed to be in Houston for the annual meeting of the American Conference for Irish Studies.  This community of academics is one of my favorites, and this conference is something I’ve come to look forward to, not least because there are pretty much always four poetry roundtables, conference sessions in which a small panel takes the whole audience through a discussion of a recent book of Irish poetry. Handouts of select poems are provided for everyone, and […]

A kinder book for a harder time

Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear

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If I had known quarantine was coming, I would have made some different choices. For one, I would not have ordered Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light as my spring break read, since my focus would be far too fractured to get myself back into that Thomas Cromwell and the Tudors mindset. For another, I would not have assigned Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio to my intro students as our major readings for the back half of the semester. I went into lockdown and immediately recorded ten lectures […]

“Guys, Auden is my man”: it’s hard not to love W. H. Auden

Selected Poems by W. H. Auden

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I’m teaching a course on twentieth century British poetry, and we’re whipping through six poets in about fifteen weeks. My students appreciated T. S. Eliot, and enjoyed Robert Graves, but we are halfway through W. H. Auden, and he has enthralled them, hitting them square in their hearts with brutally accurate yearning and empathy. We’ve taken a thematic approach in working through the Selected Poems: quotidian life, war & politics, and most recently: the love poems. (We’ll hit the transcendence of art & religion, and then touch […]

Ciaran Carson’s Last Words: Love, all love

Still Life by Ciaran Carson

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I love Ciaran Carson’s work. I have loved it since my junior year of undergrad, when I was studying abroad in Scotland and took a course on contemporary Scottish and Irish literature. We read The Ballad of the HMS Belfast: A Compendium of Belfast Poems, and something in Carson’s depictions of his beloved, troubled city hooked itself deep inside me. I have never forgotten the closing lines of his poem “Smithfield Market”: Since everything went up in smoke, no entrances, no exits. But as the charred […]

Signs, and A Severe Mercy, must be read with caution

A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken

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How strange that we cannot love time. It spoils our loveliest moments. Nothing quite comes up to expectations because of it. We alone: animals, so far as we can see, are unaware of time, untroubled. Time is their natural environment. Why do we sense that it is not ours? To be honest, Sheldon Vanauken’s A Severe Mercy was a book I had avoided for a long time. There’s a few reasons, though first and foremost is the C. S. Lewis connection: almost ever edition of the […]

The broken images of Robert Graves

Selected Poems by Robert Graves

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With 1917 potentially poised for success at the Oscars, it feels like a good moment to look at the work of a WWI poet, namely that of Robert Graves. Now, I didn’t read his Selected Poems (Faber & Faber, edited by Northern Irish poet Michael Longley) because of the film. If anything, it’s the other way around: I saw 1917 because I am teaching Graves’s poetry this semester to an upper-level class of English majors, and I was curious as to how well the film supplemented the poetry of […]



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