Peter Heller recommends 6 poetic reads for prose lovers
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Peter Heller is an award-winning adventure writer and the best-selling author of the novels "The Dog Stars," "The Painter" and "The River." In his new novel, "The Last Ranger," a stoic Yellowstone officer works to track down whoever is killing the park's wolves.
The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Álvaro Mutis (2002)
Mutis was a close friend of Gabriel García Márquez and to my mind just as brilliant. The first in this collection of 1980s and '90s novellas is an up-the-river story that rivals "Heart of Darkness" for lush, ruminative prose and extreme, iconic characters. It induced in me a sort of hallucinatory malarial fever. Buy it here.
Over the Plain Houses by Julia Franks (2016)
An inveterate Appalachian river runner writes a novel and ... startles her readers into a vivid awareness of the life around them and of their own magic as sentient creatures. Franks knows the scent of damp earth under plow, the touch of sap on a cold tree, and how to write about men who cannot countenance the wildness of women. Buy it here.
The Whole Motion by James Dickey (1992)
Poems brought to you by the man who wrote "Deliverance." If you can clear your mind of Burt Reynolds in a wetsuit, you'll discover poetry full of pathos and self-awareness, humor and unadorned beauty. Dickey was a liar and a rogue; I read the poems and forgive him. Buy it here.
West with the Night by Beryl Markham (1942)
Markham, who grew up in the Kenyan Rift Valley hunting with spears and training horses, became one of West Africa's greatest bush pilots. Her memoir is so spare and pure it prompted Hemingway to write: "She has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer." Buy it here.
One Hundred More Poems From the Chinese translated by Kenneth Rexroth (1956)
These ancient poems constitute some of the most beautiful writing I've ever read. The writers were aficionados of loss, the first blues artists. In a few simple lines they can place you knee-deep in a mountain stream with the cold mist shredding the pines, then break your heart. Buy it here.
The Carrying by Ada Limón (2018)
Our current national poet laureate is a towering writer of nuanced, musical poems that are so simple on the surface but keep ringing and resonating and hitting chords, deeper and deeper, long after the last word has ended. Get the audio and hear her own rich voice. Nature writing, human nature writing, at its finest. Buy it here.
This article was first published in the latest issue of The Week magazine. If you want to read more like it, you can try six risk-free issues of the magazine here.
