Tirzah Goldenberg

We live in a small apartment, and until I found this 1940s desk chair, I worked at the kitchen table with my husband. This is now my proper desk. The chair beside it I’ve had since grad school; for some reason I love that thing. Some special objects line the shelves. Some special photographs. I’ve had that stuffed penguin since the day I was born; a gift from my mom’s closest friend.

Readings

A funny book

Rachel Ferguson, The Brontës Went to Woolworths (Virago Press, 1988, first published in 1931)

I don’t know a book as exquisitely odd as this one. It’s about a family of women whose collaborative imaginations make everything outside of them seem dubious, or at least far less fun. It’s a house of eccentrics you’ve fallen into, and the governess is appalled. Katrine is rejected from acting school, Deirdre’s novel is passed up, Sheil has various misadventures in the schoolroom, but the Carne sisters, and their mother, are too creative to care for long and “altogether, I went to bed strangely cheered.” It’s a good joke, and it’s poignant too, when the heroines finally meet Toddington, a judge, and Lady Mildred, his wife, the details of whose lives have already been spun out in the family Saga. The two quickly come round to the fact of an earlier acquaintance and are happy to oblige: they don’t have a choice: the Carne sisters are too delightful. Ferguson’s wit dazzles every page, the book is a pleasure from beginning to end, and I think it’s one of my very favorites. Few books make me “scream with laughter,” as Ferguson’s characters suddenly do. One day you encounter a book and realize you read far too many serious ones. Yet this book is also serious—about whimsy, about play, about getting in touch with the Brontës, admitting their ghosts into the house but taking them with a grain of salt. My copy is a vintage Virago Modern Classic, the original green kind, softened from use, with three colorful women on the cover, picked up at my local bookshop without having heard of it before. It’s something of a secret.

An inherited book

Daphne du Maurier, Frenchman’s Creek (Sun Dial Press, 1943, first published in 1941)

Books that have been loved for generations and passed down to me to love in turn hold a sacred space in my personal library—my maternal grandmother’s books in particular, for she was a bibliophile and her volumes keep coming to me (as gifts from my mom); and it is through her books, her interests, her bookplates, her inscriptions, her marginalia, etc., that I have formed a relationship with her at all. She was a solitary, elusive figure throughout my childhood, and her library is my only way of reaching her. I arrange and rearrange her books beside her photographs on my shelf; sometimes I read them if they’re not too difficult to approach, as I find her Elementary Welsh Grammar and her Eichmann in Jerusalem to be. Daphne du Maurier isn’t difficult, though; she’s a pleasure. I collect her books now. The one I have that belonged to my grandmother is Frenchman’s Creek. It’s a copy from 1943 that has only “D. du M.” in an elegant script debossed on the hard green cover. There’s tape holding the front and back covers to the spine and some water damage that’s seeped between cover and endpaper. The pages smell deliciously musty, and they open beautifully flat; they’re nice and thick and you feel a sense of accomplishment when you turn them. And the most telltale sign that a book belonged to my grandmother: there’s a bookplate with her signature pasted to the flyleaf. This one is of a ship with an Emily Dickinson quotation beneath it: “There is no frigate like a book / To take us lands away . . . . . .” My grandmother’s maiden name is penned between ship and verse, so she was no older than 21 when she acquired this book; at 21 she married my grandfather.

I’m over the word count, and I’ve not yet arrived at the plot. It’s an adventure story, a romance between a French pirate and an aristocratic English woman. The Frenchman’s ship is, I imagine, why my grandmother chose a seaworthy bookplate, which I’ve not seen in any of her other books. A symbol of freedom, of escape (there is no frigate like a book . . .), “the ship was brought to her secret anchorage” in the reader. Unlike the heroine, Dona St Columb, Elizabeth Anne Moore, later Elizabeth Brownworth, couldn’t travel. Instead she traveled widely in books. She wasn’t a happy woman, but I think she must have found some happiness in a book: “Because I too would find my ship, and go forth, a law unto myself.” A book may be “slender evidence” of her, but a woman who read voraciously is somewhat synonymous with her books. I think of the books I most love and of the time I’ve spent with them and what of my reading might remain between those pages when I’m gone, as Elizabeth left rose petals between the pages of her Emily Dickinson. Her advice has never left me: I’m to never leave the house without a book. Indeed, whenever I do, I regret it.

A book of poetry that was important to you when you were starting out as a poet and how that has shifted or remained constant for you over time

Ronald Johnson, The Book of the Green Man (Norton, 1967)

The third green book I’ll mention. My copy is an ex-library book, a first edition, jacketless, a gift from my husband during our first years together in grad school when I was discovering Ronald Johnson for the first time—I fell in love with him (Ronald Johnson, I mean) via The Shrubberies, yet another green book. I’d committed Johnson’s rhymes and rhythms to memory, enchanted by short musical arrangements like “capering round firepit.” Aside from making good use of Johnson’s cornbread recipe from his cookbook The American Table, I haven’t been on a Johnson kick for years. There are certain writers who meant a lot to me early on, whom I read, it seemed, to death, and who are now a little tired of me: Ronald Johnson, Lorine Niedecker, W. G. Sebald, Emily Dickinson, Gustaf Sobin, etc. But my impulse to open The Book of the Green Man again was a seasonal one; it begins in winter and moves swiftly into spring—April, which is now. In winter Johnson is in Grasmere, Wordsworth country. The lines are no longer merely familiar (“I wish / to make something circular, / seasonal, out // of this ‘wheel’ of / mountains / —some // flowering thing in its / cycle—an image of our footsteps // planted in homage // over each ridge // & valley”); come fall I’ll be in Grasmere too. My mom and I are planning a trip to the Lake District—we’re flying into Edinburgh, will head down into Brontë country in Yorkshire, then back up to Scotland via Beatrix Potter and Wordsworth country, i.e., the Lake District, linger for a bit where Robert Burns was born, and somehow end up in the Highlands and on the Hebrides before heading home. And so “this soil, once Wordsworth” is a strange coming home. Books seem to know us well in advance of our wanderings.

Writings

Two relics, the cup and the book, look well together.
Having ambled down the alleyways, or closes, in due time.
Both have need of dusting.
Either dreaming of the selfsame place.
I wrote her, a stranger, about the environs.
My epistle was returned.
A book was left me on where she’d been going lifelong.
Those darling sheep in the Yorkshire Dales.
Compare my Devonshire sheep cup.
Turn the page to see those darling sheep once more.
James Herriot’s dedication to his grandchildren:
In the hope that they will discover Yorkshire for themselves.
Elizabeth’s vicarious epistle. Simple:
The epistle repeats. The epistle bleats.
Having ambled down the alleyways, or closes, in due time.

Tirzah Goldenberg is the author of Aleph and Like an Olive, both published by Verge Books. New poems appear in from a Compos’t and Luigi Ten Co. She lives by the Salish Sea with her husband and their cherished cat. Tirzah was rhizomed to Etcetera by Cass Eddington.