Book review: Grace Notes
Book review:
Grace Notes
by Brian Doyle
Chicago, IL: ACTA Publications, 2011
You know, some of Brian Doyle’s prose, in this collection of his musings and essays, comes pretty close to my concept of poetry.
You ask why? Doyle is so particular, and so deft, in choosing the right words to frame his mood, his awareness, and his imagination in so many examples.
Try this excerpt from “Their Thin Bony Shoulders.” Doyle was invited to tell some stories and otherwise talk to nuns in their Benedictine monastery in Oregon. Among other subjects, he told them about “my mama.”
“And I stood there at the lectern, in that cavernous room in that lovely old monastery, with its cedared air like music in the nose, the extraordinary faces of the nuns held up to me in the twilight, and I tried to imagine or articulate or conceive a world without my mother in it, and I started to cry, and I could not stop.
Forty-nine years old, and still sobbing in front of nuns.
No one spoke.”
Don’t even try to pretend that your eyes aren’t a bit damp.
In Doyle’s Grace Notes, you can also take some time with “Advice to My Son,” “A Child is Not a Furniture,” “On Miraculousness,” and 33 other treats from his inquiring and incisive mind.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2017 All rights reserved.
He’s not so famous for his last (uncompleted) novel, St Ives: Being the Adventures of a French Prisoner in England (1897). It was finished from Stevenson’s notes by Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch, a talented British writer.