Christine -Wow assignment Session 3 (because I won't be at Session 4 to share)

So many favourite authors, in many genres, but for one in 'my' genre I settled on Anthony Doerr's 'Four Seasons in Rome'. He spent a year in 'The Eternal City' thanks to winning the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Accompanied by his wife and their six-month-old twins, his book is a faithful recounting of the pleasures and the difficulties of living abroad with babies, needing to use an unfamiliar language, coping with the idiosyncrasies of Italian plumbing and heating .... here's a small excerpt:

.. Across town, next to the McDonald's in Piazza di Spagna, children offer roses to a bronze Maddonna on a pillar. The pope is wheeled out of his car to pray at her feet. ... a massive dog, a Newfoundland, maybe a hundred pounds, barks as his owner locks a leash into the compartment over the rear bumper of a motorino. Bark bark, says the dog. The man says something back. The dog circles the scooter, sniffing. The man lights a cigarette and puts on a helmet and finally seats himself and nods to the dog - hardly a motion with his chin - and the dog scrambles onto the tiny platform in front of the man's feet. ... The man starts the motorino. Cigarette still in his teeth, without checking his mirrors, man and dog race into the traffic on viale Trastevere.

I like the way Doerr sets a scene so visually using simple language. It's like seeing a slice of Rome from inside his head. (I love his fiction too, especially Cloud Cuckoo Land.)

Bonus exercise: I chose a poem, The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins. It was written in the late 1800s, but it's so far from that era's usual style. The word play tantalizes me, and I enjoy reading it out loud. It's about a falcon, but makes me think of a sailboat. Here it is: (Spacing is the way it appears on Wiki)

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-

dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

Christine P