The Anthologist (2009)

Delightful. I love the title of the anthology the titular character is struggling to write: Only Rhyme, like Forster���s ���Only Connect.��� I love the prose written as if by a poet, who says one book makes him ���think of the sound of someone closing the door of a well-cared-for pale blue Infiniti on a late-summer evening in the gravel overflow parking lot of a beach hotel that once been painted by Gretchen Dow Simpson.��� I love that his surname is Chowder and he says that ���people are going to feed you all kinds of oyster crackers about iambic pentameter.��� I love that he loves English poems best, poetry with cadences natural to English. I love that he invents a new word for beauty, rupsanil. I love that he says ���tulip bubbles��� to refer to, I think, economic cycles.

The only thing I didn���t love was ���straightjacket,��� which I scrawled on a Post-It with a page number that could have been 21 or 24. The misspelling doesn���t occur on either of those pages, so maybe I made it up. ( )

this book crept up on me. crept up on me and then hit me over the head. i didn't like it at first. i wondered at around chapter 6 or 7 if i oughtn't stick it in the "didn't finish" pile and move on. for some reason, though, i didn't. perhaps because i was almost halfway through and it seemed a waste to give up now. and that's when it got me. i suddenly found that i wasn't bored, but charmed. thoroughly charmed by paul chowder and his voice, which is a lot like my own voice in my head, except his knows a lot more about poetry. and mine is less fond of rhyme. this book is a love story and a love letter about language and poetry and human connection. there is a wonderful abundance of odd and exquisite metaphor. there are made up words. there are little humming snippets of tune. it's a lovely, trickling, marvellously enthusiastic and tender book. if only the cover weren't so ugly. a green shuttlecock, simon & schuster? really? ( )

This novel discussion of English poetry from Chaucer to Mary Oliver made me laugh, resolve to try reading Swinburne again, consider the mechanics of meter and rhyme and generally nod in agreement or pleasure. Good Read! ( )

The plot is a bit thin on the ground in this book. But it's getting 3-and-a-half stars because the use of language is AMAZING. ( )

I disagreed with Baker's base Poetics (rhyme is not and has never been what draws me to poetry & I actually really enjoy iambic pentameter), and I often found his prose as purple as the plum on the cover--but even so I adored this book, as I adore practically everything else Baker has written. He never writes about much--tackling the subject & love of poetry is actually quote ambitious for a novelist who usually works on the scale of the beauty of staplers and the difficulty of heating up a bottle of milk for an infant--but he does it with such verve and unabashed excitement that I am always caught up in the emotion of it all. This book is actually a bit of an anomaly if I remember correctly: it's got a sort-of plot, with actual character arc and everything. Even if it hadn't I'd probably still love it. Baker has an incredible sense of joy that is so often dampened, or lost completely, in the stuffy pretentious of modern fiction. It's glorious to see this enthusiasm keyed on poetry, a subject that I actually care about. I'd reread this in a heartbeat--it really galvanized my (at the time) flagging faith in Literature. ( )