Poetry of love and physics

Love, Stars, and Paradigms. Poems by Swarn Gill. Literary Revelations Press, 2023.

Reviewed by Gary Gautier

Swarn Gill’s book of poems has a bit of everything, from politics to interesting conceptual hooks (“the love of time not noticed”; “we are the moment time vibrates”; “your life / in a groove no wider than a dime”) to the one-lining bravado of Allen Ginsberg (“Melville’s Ahab’s got nothing on me”; “capitalism has its eye on you”). Mostly though, these are intimate poems of human feeling, best when they settle into pockets of suggestive imagery (“a galaxy of gold / through curved lenses / of glass and tissue”). Interestingly, the intimacy is sometimes carried in panoramic Whitmanesque sweeps (“static electricity felt everywhere … the trees, the towers / the peaceful church steeples / me standing tall in a field”; “my carbon is breathed in the trees … I glide through time with magnificent ease.” Or in the imagery of physics and astronomy (“the quartz of you / crystallizing before my eyes”; “I rotate on my axis”; “I marvel at Saturn’s rings”). The collection was a little uneven for me – some poems captivated me less than others, and I struggled at times with the rhyming poems – but I found it strong overall, with lots of poems and hooks and closures I will long remember. Definitely worth reading more than once.

prostrate me
among the daisies
let emerald butterflies
send me to slumber

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On literary fiction

Please link to the post/podcast page of Happiness Between Tails by da-AL to see my guest post on LITERARY FICTION 🙂

https://happinessbetweentails.com/2023/05/20/my-book-pueblos-magico-vid-g-gaultier-on-lit-fiction-pod/

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Dropping and Drowning in Finnegans Wake

I read Book One of Finnegans Wake and was lost most of the time. I picked up curious little impressionistic bits in the overall flow but couldn’t string them together into anything coherent. I suspect this is, in part, the effect Joyce was shooting for. This suspicion was confirmed upon hearing John Cage’s “Roaratoria: A Circus on Finnegans Wake,” which captures that experience perfectly – a hypnotic flow of musical bits and half-heard words and melodies impressionistically breaking to the surface of a rich but unintelligible tide of sound.

I did get some general themes about the book from commentaries – the recurrent references to archetypal gods and heroes, and to that great archetypal event, the Fall. I could glimpse how the deepest archetypal nodes were being reworked through fragments of Irish culture and Irish characters. But much more than that I could not get, as far as reconstructing any kind of coherent narrative. It seems almost as if Joyce set it up so that external commentary would be integral to the fabric of the novel, with obscure references, misleading phonetic spellings in multiple languages, flows of language that follow no discernible logic, etc. If so, it is an interesting twist on the porous nature of the literary work, but with that gained interest is a loss, as I suspect I am not the only reader who had a hard time staying engaged. (I was fully engaged by the John Cage composition, though, where the surface incoherence did not hinder but actually enhanced the feeling of something going on at the archetypal depths. Go figure.)

One thing I did notice that I did not see in the commentaries, so maybe a Joyce scholar (or a Finnegans Wake fan) can weigh in. The invisible symbolic center of the work seemed to be a hidden stain of guilt. The commentaries did mention how Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, or HCE (as much the main character as anyone else), was accused of exposing himself to girls in a park, but to me this element – both the accusation (and we don’t know if it was true, just the accusation itself is sufficient to create a symbolic center of hidden guilt) and other apparently unrelated hints at unspoken guilt – seemed more haunting in the text than in the commentaries. The idea of buried unconscious guilt as the symbolic center resonates both with the recurring motif of the Fall archetype and with Freud, whose ideas hung over the literature of the day. (Virginia Woolf’s press was offered Joyce’s Ulysses and was printing translations of Freud’s work as soon as they came out – one can see Freud’s ideas, e.g., all over page one of To the Lighthouse.) Indeed, the basic style of Finnegans Wake can be seen as an enormous amount of incoherent clutter designed to obfuscate some hidden guilt at the center, which is a perfect literary expression of Freud’s ideas of displacement, condensation, and screen memories, all of which are designed to obfuscate and plaster over some hidden trauma or guilt that the subject cannot face. In Joyce’s case, the obsession with lists, with doubling and tripling of names, with malapropisms and misheard words – what better way to enact displacement, condensation, and screen memories into a literary landscape? At the very least, this would explain the difficulties posed to the reader as intentional, since the whole point is to continually conceal the hidden meaning, as in a cups and balls performance.

To tie back to the John Cage composition, the difficulty in Finnegans Wake seems related to a kind of sonic entropy. Language normally carries meaning and sentiment. In Finnegans Wake, language and words still have a residue of meaning and sentiment but are always deteriorating into sculptures of pure sound. The reader’s anxiety about meaning is built into that entropy, but for the luckiest of readers the sculpture of pure sound remains as an aesthetic marvel in its own right. I am not so lucky, but my new (unpublished) poetry collection, The Day We Met in Earthly Time, is organized into groups of thirteen, is anchored to a poem called “Finnegans Luck,” and is haunted by the idea that all the heavy emotion and intimacy of the collection is in constant danger of disintegrating into sculptures of sound and vanishing memories of sentiment. If you think that sounds interesting, hold your breath and buy my previous collection, Schematics and Assemblies of the Cosmic Heart. Go ahead. Do it. Bring me luck.

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Wormholes / series / writing

Fantasy. Paranormal. Suspense. Popular genres today all seem to trend toward series writing. Maybe with changing technologies in publishing and reading, that’s where the market is. I’m not sure because marketing is a mystery to me. As a reader/writer engaged in the world of lit sans marketing, my opinion is that good books might well come in series, but great books are almost always standalones. Now that I have a few books out there (links below), let me ponder how, if at all, this opinion applies to my writing.

I don’t write series. Nor do I stick to one genre. Although I do believe genres can be useful tags – e.g., setting expectations that can help readers predict whether something suits their taste – best to treat genres as cloudy approximations. “Existence precedes essence,” Jean-Paul Sartre famously said. Similarly, the book precedes the genre. Leaving aside for now pulp fiction, which is written specifically to fit a preset genre, works of art, including novels-as-art, develop organically according to their own aesthetic, and once manifested in their own terms, it is the bookseller’s choice to more-or-less randomly determine which genre tags will best guide readers.

So my novels. I undertake each novel as a self-contained work of art, like a standalone sculpture. The concept of series just doesn’t fit my aesthetic register (not that my register is better than anyone else’s). Does this mean no threading between the (currently) five of them? Well, no. Take the latest, Alice. My previous novels blurred the lines of literary fiction, historical fiction, regional, magic realism, with one possibly cross-categorized as young adult as well as adult. Alice, though, is more of a post-apocalyptic adult hippie fairy tale – my first to occur in a fully imaginary setting. This put a new kind of pressure on me as a writer. Because the opening frame is like a weird, hippie fairy tale, one thing I needed was a population of characters who were individualized people and yet archetypal enough to match the fairy tale setting. So Alice’s little hamlet is populated by the rain king, the kleptomaniac, the sweeper, the mapmaker, the white witch, etc.

Besides the characters, though, another thing that holds the magical setting together is two kinds of wormholes. First, there are wormholes in time within Alice, enabling Alice to interact with a series of young women like herself – just coming into early adulthood – from different time periods. Different eras of history are, in effect, stacked up together and connected by wormholes. A lot of the metaphysical or philosophical elements of the novel, and Alice’s epiphanies, if you want to loosely call it a coming-of-age novel, come through these wormholes in time to other characters and settings.

In addition to the wormholes within Alice, wormholes thread into my other novels as well. I didn’t really plan it this way, but just as she interacts with characters across history, she interacts with characters across my writing corpus. Those characters carry their own baggage into Alice, but it’s not like you have to read the other novels to get this one. And it’s certainly not like a series, where you have a fixed setting and plot lines that continue more or less coherently across the books. It’s more like a character from another novel will pop up as Alfred Hitchcock popped up in his movies, but retaining the personality and baggage of the other novel. Again, each novel is a coherent, standalone whole and can be read as such, and yet there are these wormholes, these reverberations. There are touches of this in four of the five novels, sometimes working backwards (as in a character from the first novel, Mr. Robert’s Bones, might pop up in later novel, and the meaning that character acquires in the later novel reverberates back to the first).

The idea of independent novels with a connected underlay might bring up images of William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County or Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. My wormholes, however, are different. Faulkner and Anderson each use that shared setting as an integrated space for their stories. My novels are not different stories transacted in the same space, but totally different spaces with wormholes randomly connecting them. And my wormholes don’t necessarily follow laws of space and time. Whereas in Faulkner you might get a collective setting that is realistic, integrated, coherent, my wormholes are almost a mockery of realistic coherence from the point of view of imaginative license.

This might sound outlandish, but if you think about it, this is not as unusual as it sounds. The history of literature is essentially a series of hyperlinks or wormholes, where all these novels and ideas and characters are continually building on each other, casting different lights and relevance on other novels. You don’t have to read Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse to understand Richard Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar or vice versa – I pick those two because they are both quite separate influences on Alice. Indeed, on the surface they are unrelated novels from different countries and eras, and I don’t even know if Brautigan read Woolf. And yet, when you do read both of them, you start to see how each can illuminate something about the other – just like the fool in King Lear can illuminate a character in a Camus novel, or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein can illuminate aspects of 21^st-century culture, just like anecdotes by Marx or Freud might cast a new angle of light backwards onto Shakespeare or Jane Austen, just like my Alice might make you want to go back and re-read Lewis Carroll’s Alice. It’s really wormholes everywhere. You can see an example of this in my own wormhole study of works by Umberto Eco and Bob Dylan. The history of literature is the history of all these continually interacting texts reverberating meaning off of each other. If literature has depth as well as surface, these wormholes are an essential part of the underground structure. And the organic development of wormholes across the landscape of literature is a fundamentally different activity than the deliberate production of novels in series.

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Neruda at Machu Picchu (and D. H. Lawrence below)

Hereafter, I use Neruda’s spelling, “Macchu Picchu.”
Translations part mine, part Nathanial Tarn.
Quotes identified by poem number (twelve poems in Neruda’s set).

As with other poems I’ve read by Neruda (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, plus some miscellaneous bits and pieces), The Heights of Macchu Picchu (sic) is built of concrete blocks of imagery – mostly seasonal and nature imagery but with some metals and cosmic flashes too. The images are never remote from subjective coordinates, though, whether the subjective reverberations are those of love and intimacy (as predominate in Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair) or a longing for some lost primeval consciousness (as in The Heights of Macchu Picchu). In the latter case, Neruda stands close to D. H. Lawrence, the prolific English writer of both poetry and prose born one generation before Neruda. Lawrence, too, spent time immersed in the pre-Hispanic cultures of the Americas. He found both the ancient Mesoamerican and the pagan Mediterranean cultures more authentic, more fulfilling of our deepest human needs, than the anemic culture of Christianity and modernity. The longing for that lost authentic mode of being (living “breast-to-breast with the cosmos” Lawrence called it in Apocalypse) takes a theme running through many of Lawrence’s books and threads into this one by Neruda.

Beneath that shared vision, the sense of loss and the urgency of retrieval, I do see a few differences as I read The Heights of Macchu Picchu. Whether these differences point to the subjective registers of my personal response or to something objective in Neruda, you can decide, but they do help shape meaning in my reading of the poems. For one, there is a bit more native American nationalism in Neruda’s response to Macchu Picchu; he seems to feel it as a loss his people have experienced: “Ancient America, bride in the veil of sea … under the nuptial banners of light and reverence … buried America, were you in that great depth …” (X). Lawrence, for his part, seems more tuned to the loss of authentic human spirit in a more general, less nationalistic, way. But, even in Neruda, the nationalism is but a touch here and there, not a dominant idea in the set.

There is also a kind of death-wish that runs through Neruda’s collection, an element of abjection in the poet’s lament: “La poderosa Muerte me invitó muchas veces” (“powerful Death has beckoned me many times,” IV). Although Lawrence (e.g., in the non-fiction Apocalypse or Etruscan Places, or in the novel, The Plumed Serpent) laments the same loss of the primeval human spirit, the driving tone in Lawrence is a defiant celebration of what has been lost. Sure, there is a respect for the great cycles of life and death in both writers, but Neruda’s handling of death is tinged a bit more with melancholy, with a sense of personal abjection, as he feels an irresistible attraction toward “the true, the most consuming death” (VII).

In Lawrence, too, some element of abjection may be attributed to characters in The Plumed Serpent (e.g., modern Mexicans who lack the fullness of life of their pagan forebears and are thus “divided against [themselves]”), but abjection is peripheral, not in the central voice as we find in Neruda. In The Plumed Serpent (set in early 20^th-century Mexico), some of the Mexican characters might be seen as working to restore that full pagan consciousness, some of the (modern) Mexican characters merely express the lost greatness of that pagan world as a form of abjection, and the European characters are too caught up in “mechanical dominance” and “mechanical connections” to get it at all, or they are just starting to perceive the big picture of spiritual loss and possible rejuvenation, but from the outside, as it were. To tentatively plot the voice of Neruda’s Macchu Picchu poems into this schema, Neruda feels the full pull of the old world view in his concrete vision of Inca life in Macchu Picchu but also feels the abjection of the modern Chilean, with a more visceral connection and more visceral sense of loss than was perhaps possible for the Englishman. In any event, the feeling you get in Neruda tacks a bit more to the personal whereas in Lawrence you feel more drawn toward the archetypal, despite the large overlap in their visions.

One other difference worth mentioning may be related to Neruda as a craftsman of poetry. If Poem VIII imagines the ancient pagan consciousness, as Lawrence might do, as “a long-dead kingdom” that paradoxically, dormantly “still lives on” but at a depth we cannot see (“El reino muerto vive todavia”), in Poem IX, the structure of the poem itself seems to suddenly emulate the pagan consciousness:

Aguila sideral, viña de bruma.                        Interstellar Eagle, vine-in-a-mist

Bastión perdido, cimitarra ciega.                    Forsaken bastion, blind scimitar.

Cinturón estrellado, pan solemne.                   Orion belt, ceremonial bread.

Escala torrencial, párpado inmenso.               Torrential stairway, immeasurable eyelid.

Túnica triangular, polen de Piedra.                Triangular tunic, pollen of stone.

Consciousness here takes the form of concrete images, discrete, without all the rational connectors that Neruda (and Lawrence) might associate with modern consciousness. The flow is not one of a causal nexus but of a throbbing heartbeat, uncluttered by the need to reduce everything to rational sequences.

Rejuvenating that primeval heartbeat remains a central theme beyond the structural experiment of Poem IX:

“Through a confusion of splendor,
through a night made of stone let me plunge my hand
and move to beat in me a bird held for a thousand years,
the old and unremembered human heart!” (XI)

And on to Neruda’s invocation in Poem XII, and back to an attitude he fully shares with Lawrence:

“Look at me from the depths of the earth
. . .
bring to the cup of this new life
your ancient buried sorrows.
Show me your blood and your furrow
…
Strike the old flints
…
Speak through my speech, and through my blood.”

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Gabriela Marie Milton’s poems

Gabriela Marie Milton, Woman: Splendor and Sorrow: Love Poems and Poetic Prose
Reviewed by Gary Gautier

The title and subheadings of this poetry collection — “Woman: Splendor and Sorrow” (Love Poems/Poetic Prose) might mislead you into thinking that the focus is narrower in content than it is. If the focus is love, it is love in the broadest sense, a love that encompasses narrative and lyrical and archetypal forms, a fantastic array of imagery, a panorama of human and divine experience.

Imagery always comes first in poetry for me, which bodes well for Milton. Imagery, rather than something rational or polemical, drives the structure and flow (although the polemical does rear its head in the “poetic prose” near the end).

peaches will grow on one side of the moon
injured lambs will scream on the other
taste of strawberries
my hair freshly cut
…
your hands nailed in white marble
…
my love
it’s spring
it’s me
free your hands from the marble*

(The Easter of Roses)

Two points worth noting: one is the reliance upon concatenated imagery to drive the flow; the other is the little conceptual hook at the end, where the field of imagery blossoms into some nugget drenched with philosophical or emotional value.

The imagery can be beautiful (“the marble net of rustling stars”), startling (“bones cracking with love,” “with pins in his heart the pigeon still flies”), or archetypal (“moon” and “stars” and “purple seas”; from “cotton candy sunsets” to “the arms of Morpheus”), but it makes every poem concrete.

To be sure, there are other laws of motion in Milton’s poetic universe – the narrative (“I fast for nine mornings. On the tenth, I walk barefoot toward the water … I love for nine nights. On the tenth, I look for …), the anecdotal and darkly humorous (“I keep a coffin adorned with lilies in my bedroom. I sleep besides death like Sarah Bernhardt”). But the dominant movement is the free association of images, images with personal and emotional power, but most importantly (for me) with archetypal power – whether the archetypal landscape associated with a religious mythos (““resurrection” and “prophets,” “sacrifice” and “creation”) or a landscape perhaps deeper in the collective unconscious, powerful images that predate religion as we know it. Milton is fairly straightforward about the ties to the collective unconscious in the “poetic prose” section.

“My poetry is that which comes from the realm of the unfulfilled. It is the echo of the waves that you can guess but cannot see.”

Thus, toward the end of the collection, she gathers her “wounds . . . in a large wicker basket” and recounts an apparent choice she made regarding which archetypal orientation would be her final resting place.

“I did not want to go to heaven. I wanted to go to the sea.”

She does not equivocate. She makes a choice. All agency goes back to the poet. In a collection based on imagery and suggestiveness, this moment of decisiveness is a nice hook, I think, for how the collection speaks to the splendor and sorrow of women, and in a larger sense, to all of us.

Click cover for link.

P.S. Last day to get Goodbye, Maggie for 99c: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1724881876/

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Damien Donnelly’s “Stickleback” chapbook

The five poems (or “considerations,” as Donnelly calls them) in this short chapbook focus on five paintings (by Dali, Van Gogh, Kandinsky, O’Keeffe, and Chagall, respectively). Opening on Dali’s “Young Woman in the Window,” Donnelly makes it clear that the operative principle in this collection is a fusion of imagery and reflection. Dali’s painting shows a woman at a window “looking out from shadow to sea.” Outside the window is “distance … space … water.” It is the quintessential image to use as an objective marker of the subjective state of reflection.

There is something holographic about these poems, each like an index to the whole, or each like a pebble dropped whose waves ripple through the other four. I’ll take as my pebble just the first stanza of the second poem (keyed to Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers”):

Sometimes
I stopped by, to sit and wonder how you didn’t change
while I clung to the edge of the seat to keep myself
within the skin I was shedding like those petals hanging
onto your brush strokes, though they never met the finality
of their fate.

Note how quickly Donnelly gets to the meat of things. “Consideration” of art and artist absorbs the poet into its own ambiguity in a way that puts this poem in relief against the others. Take for example the second-person pronoun. “You” in the first poem variously references the painting or the figure within the painting, but not the painter himself (Dali). In the third poem (Kandinsky) it references the painting only, and it does not appear in poems 4 and 5. Here, though, in #2 (Van Gogh), the antecedent of “you” is ambiguous. Is it Van Gogh who didn’t change or the sunflowers? Do the petals hang from Van Gogh’s brush strokes or from the brush strokes of the painting itself?

The ambiguity is not just a curiosity. It opens a tension between the ephemeral and the eternal that operates at the core of the poem and perhaps less directly at the core of the collection. On the one hand, the image of a drop of paint hanging, awaiting the finality of the next moment, is as ephemeral an image as we can get. On the other hand, the image fixes the hand of the artist eternally on the canvas. Anyone who has seen Van Gogh’s paintings live will note the visceral presence of the artist in the topography of the paint, where you can see, for example, grooves where he pushed the paint around with the handle of the brush. To see the hand of the artist here, over a century later, to see that ephemeral movement of his hand frozen in time, conjures a sense, or a hope, that art can freeze the ephemeral into something eternal.

The tension between the ephemeral and the eternal is the same tension that animates Keats’s more famous “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” The young lovers depicted on the marble urn will remain “forever young,” and therein lies their beauty. But the truth is that they will never feel the warmth of the kiss, their lips forever an inch apart. Thus, in the final lines, Keats’s poem translates that tension between the ephemeral and the eternal into an ambivalence about the relation of truth to beauty.

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

Note that the quotation marks are Keats’s, not mine. The lines are attributed within the poem not to the poet but to the urn itself, and they express the urn’s point of view. But the poem is haunted by a sense that maybe beauty is NOT truth. The figures are beautiful but the truth is they will never kiss. Moreover, a kind of melancholy hangs over the poem, as the immortality of the figures contrasts with the mortality of the poet, and Keats may have already felt at the writing of the poem the tuberculosis that would kill him barely a year later. The urn’s beauty lasts forever, but the truth the poet must face is death – and very soon, in Keats’s case.

Turning back to Donnelly’s poem, ekphrastic in the same way as Keats’s, “those petals hanging onto your brush strokes” give us at once an eternal marker of the hand of the artist and reminder that he (Van Gogh), like Keats, was already suffering at the time of “Sunflowers” and that he too would die in a year’s time.

The remaining poems in the collection of five are each their own thing, but this spotlight on the Van Gogh poem hopefully illuminates one path toward them. I will just add – don’t overlook the playful imagination (as in #3, the Kandinsky poem, where Donnelly’s irreverent comparison of “La Ludwigskirche in München” to “a burst bag of skittles scurrying along the wall” rings amusingly true for those who have seen the painting – and, as usual in Donnelly, the irreverent humor is recaptured by something more deeply reflective by the end) and sensuality (as in #4, the O’Keeffe image “spread out, like sex, like sweet sugar / dropped into the milk and up comes the wave … white tongue tingles with emerald envy”).

Back to my keynote. These poems are compressions of imagery and reflection. Let yourself linger. Know that there are always more layers to them, like the “eager green stems” in the Van Gogh painting/poem, “holding hundreds of seeds,” like the “strokes of paint / radiating like halos to fill in the hole left after all the lights / went out.”

Disclosure. This book was a gift. I haven’t met Damien live, but he is in my extended circle, we have swapped poems and thoughts about poems, and I have been on his excellent podcast, which you should all link to below.

Damien’s “Eat the Storms” podcast site linked here.

Stickleback is a chapbooks series by Hedgehog Press. Damien’s chapbook (“Considering Canvases with Boys”) is number XX in the series, linked here.

My Amazon review of Damien’s other chapbook (the “Eat the Storms” chapbook) is here.

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In nine days

Another author roundtable chat online, Jan. 27, 7 pm US central time. Please spread the word.

This month’s author chat is with Michael Tusa on his historical novel, “And Trouble Followed” (4.6 stars in 54 Amazon ratings). If you haven’t read the book, no problem, just bring your curiosity. Michael is happy to discuss.

If you want to read about or buy the book, link here.
To join the free book club for prompts per monthly author chats, link here.

The Jan. 27 Zoom info is as follows:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81983291243
Meeting ID: 819 8329 1243

Make sure to get your bookish friends to join the Facebook group for the prompts. It’s free, it’s easy, no spam. Great author chats coming up in the next couple months include Chris Thomas King in February (The Blues: The Authentic Narrative of My Music and Culture) and Elizabeth Brina in March (Speak, Okinawa).

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Sub Rosa and Other Stories

Sub Rosa and Other Stories. James Lambert. Balboa Press, 2021.

A variety of tales – mainly regional (Louisiana and the South), some historical (1950-60s, Jim Crow and Civil Rights era) – all told in a voice that is direct, engaging, part of the landscape itself and easy to connect with. Within the regional setting, Lambert digs out all the threads — nature vs. culture stories, escape vs. quest stories, chaos vs. order stories, and sometimes stories that turn over the stones of, e.g., a rewritten racial past to show the underside. The voice is steady but the style varies — sometimes “like a bull ride — rough, fast, and bloody” (as in the Angola Prison story, “Blood in My Hair”), sometimes finely senstive to small epiphanies (as in “Hobby Shop” and others). In the latter case, it’s like James Joyce’s Dubliners for the (mostly) rural South. All in all, a good range of well-told tales.

Gary Gautier

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Love’s Ragged Claws for free this week

My short novella, Love’s Ragged Claws, is free for instant Kindle download this week (Amazon US, still cheap on Amazon international 🙂 )

Pass it on.

#1 Bestseller on Amazon’s 90-minute reads (free) list.
Shortlisted for the Faulkner-Wisdom Prize
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08RSNTR2B/
NOW FREE

Gabriel enters confession for the first time in 50 years and tells the priest he has only three sins, all sins of the flesh. The confession doesn’t end as the priest might wish, but it opens up the byways of human identity and human connection as it weaves the tale of of the three relationships that ended up defining Gabriel’s life. Adult language.

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