Customer Reviews

On the Winding Stair: Stories (American Readers Series #12)

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Though some of these fantastical pieces do function as stories, the tone throughout is one of poetry. Bedazzling poetry. In first, "Light Carried on Air Moves Less," a wasting girl swathed in scarves and starvation tries to seduce the wind while a love-starved ghost tries valiantly to catch her attention. It is beautiful, humorous, and evocatively visual. It's also a fine taste of what you're in for. "The Scent of Apples" is as beautifully done, again concerning the blindness of potential lovers to each other's existence, as an ailing recluse labors over his orchard while a neglected orphan girl plots his cure and capture.

When these stories work, they work beautifully. "Captive Girl for Cobbled Horsemen" compresses a story of a kidnapped and rescued orphan into two pages, with paragraphs like "In their travels, the red dirt becomes sand, and the sand gives way to salt, and the west drifts blankly, blindingly, before them. Another camp built and picketed at the foot of the mountain." This is pure narrative poetry.

Other attempts are less successful. Some passages (and one story, "The Encounter") join arresting images and great lines in a disjointed fashion that seems to amuse the mind without giving it anything real to comprehend. There are two longer pieces, "Ghosts and Lovers: a Novel in Shorts" and "The Tartan Detective." "Ghosts" has a lovely momentum and a serpentine plot. "Detective," despite its urgency and intrigue, failed to add up to anything for me. The author's fondness for small, absurdist nightmares redeemed by punchlines seems to have gotten the best of her in the final story, but this collection is strong.

The blurbs on the back are almost as lovely as the book itself, speaking of "Borgesian forking paths," "prose enchantments," and a "light-slicing, lemon-blooming, page-swallowing, precipice-filled marvel." It must be lovely to have poets to write your blurbs. This book, strange as it is, certainly deserves those accolades.

I have had the great fortune to learn from Professor Howard, in one of her courses at Brown University. She is perceptive, insightful, and kind.

A great collection of stories by a great literary thinker & poet.