Five Books I Read This Fall

Pagan Virtues: Poems is the 2020 collection by Pulitzer Prize-winner Stephen Dunn, as well as the first book of poetry I've read in a while. It opens with an older poem, "A Postmortem Guide (1)," containing these resonant lines: I learned to live without hope / as well as I could, almost happily, / in the despoiled and radiant now."

Who alive today doesn't understand what Dunn's scratching at here? (Or, to paraphrase another of his poems, published elsewhere, who isn't one, once?) What I like most about Dunn's work is its quality of everydayness. It's the work of a poet who's most interested in getting by. If poetry is an act of bearing witness, then Dunn succeed in what seems to be the most unobtrusive way possible, with quiet observations on moral positions, political alignments, our motivations to work, and other seeming mundanities. This isn't to say that he's dull or wishy-washy. Rather, Dunn at his best gives voice to our frequently inarticulate confusion and frustration with our "despoiled and radiant now."

That phrase expresses a very Buddhist sentiment, recognizing the beauty in what Zen master John Daido Loori called "the whole catastrophe"—i.e., life, the universe, and everything. Daido Roshi isn't featured in the Lion's Roar publication Deep Dive into Zen, but Norman Fischer, Guo Gu, Joan Sutherland, Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, Josh Bartok, Shinshu Roberts, Stephen Batchelor, and Judy Roitman are. Their writings on Zen Buddhism encompass the history, practices, and quirks of this 1,500-year-old lineage, and make this free e-book an engaging read for the practitioner or the curious reader alike.

The poet and writer Kapka Kassabova wrote three other titles about her travels throughout eastern Europe's Balkan region before Anima: A Wild Pastoral. I didn't read them. For that matter, I'd never heard of her before encountering a New York Review of Books piece about Anima, the last title in her so-called Balkans quartet about the hardscrabble livelihoods of rural people and the animals they live with in southeastern Europe. I'm not ordinarily one to seek out what one might call "adventure writing," but the review intrigued me. Anima seemed like something greater.

The book opens with Kassabova seemingly in search of some je ne sais quoi, hoping to inject more meaning into her existence. She anticipates fulfilling this quest by taking up with nomadic sheepherders in a high village "long, scattered, and empty," called Orelek. (Because, you know, she was in the neighborhood anyway.) Her description of the forbidding, mountain road to town—"hostile, as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to it to bar entrance—reads like a passage from a Gothic novel. It's a potent start. Kassabova writes a beautiful reverie, and Anima is replete with examples of that talent.

One thing that becomes clear from the start is that she's an incurably restless sort, peripatetic and prone to a poet's romanticization of hard living. This isn't to say that she seems to fetishize the dark-skinned shepherd, Sásho, with his sad history as a feral child, his "surprisingly good smoker's teeth," and his drunken bouts of grownup depression. The two of them share '80s comedies on a smartphone screen in a pasture and fall almost inevitably in love. It does sometimes feel like a fetish, though. More than once, I shook free of her captivating spell to consider how much of the book felt like an account, however beautiful, of the author's slumming?

The reader just has to remember that she's the medium through which this account reaches us, not the story itself. Anima is about humankind's relationship with nature and the poetry of living in balance. The mesmeric love that Kassabova has for the concept of equilibrium shows where her heart truly is, not with the ruggedly handsome Sásho but with the earth itself, with its incomprehensibly complex interconnectedness, with the often amazing simplicity of the lives led in harmony with it.

Early in his life, the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh made interdependence a major focus of his teaching. He just called it by a different name. Interbeing: The 14 Mindfulness Trainings of Engaged Buddhism is his book outlining the tenets of the Order of Interbeing, which he founded after the Vietnam War, to strive for social justice in his homeland and beyond.

What he called "mindfulness trainings" were teachings compiled from multiple traditional sources in his effort to renew Buddhism for a new age. These fourteen precepts represent an expansion of the five vows that Buddhist laypeople sometimes take—to refrain from killing, from taking what isn't given, from speaking what isn't true and good, from ingesting intoxicants, and from committing sexual misconduct. The Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings incorporate not only precepts followed by Buddhist monks and nuns, but also the traditional Bodhisattva precepts undertaken by practitioners all over the world who want to transform suffering and injustice into peace and equity.