On Leave: A Book of Anecdotes
Poet and critic Keith Tuma spent part of a leave from teaching writing up remembered anecdotes in the context of the year's travel and rumination. Mainly dealing with encounters involving poets, the book makes itself companionable by often being very funny. Tuma is, as Randolph Healy writes, "one of nature's most agreeable raconteurs." Great beach reading for the summer. But there should be a warning on the cover: Take care, you will be stuck repeating some of these stories for the rest of your life. -- Notre Dame ReviewWhat a bad title for such a good-and, paradoxically, ambitious-book: though it presents itself as a low-pressure journal, the inconsequential deeds and recollections of a senior professor in a sabbatical year, On Leave unfolds to reveal a meditation on the anecdote as a form; an elegant sketch of grief, and of partial recovery; a calm revolt against the conventions of one-point-in-front-of-another, stiffly ineffective, argument about modern poetry; and (best of all) an amenable introduction to the sometimes prickly, too often unapproachable "avant-garde" (or, if you prefer, "post-avant") poets in Britain, Ireland, and America, among whom Tuma has made his lit-crit career. -- Stephen Burt Rain Taxi