Seamus Heaney, "Field Work: Poems" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
"Field Work," arguably Heaney's finest book of poems, was written when he left the violence of his native Belfast to settle with his family in a country cottage in County Wicklow. Of course, memories of the Troubles still impinge: "One morning early I met armored cars / In convoy, warbling along on powerful tyres, / All camouflaged with broken alder branches, / And headphoned soldiers standing up in turrets." But the approach, in general, is more personal and intimate: "We had driven to that coast / Through flowers and limestone / And there we were, toasting friendship, / Laying down a perfect memory / In the cool of thatch and crockery," he writes in "Oysters," and we hear a great poet strike a more meditative note along his remarkable journey.
Francis Wyndham: "The Complete Fiction" (NYRB Classics)
Wyndham, a legend in contemporary English letters, is pretty much unknown here. As an editor, he mentored Bruce Chatwin and V.S. Naipaul and rediscovered Jean Rhys. As a writer, he has published little -- only three books in 40 years, but this is fiction of outstanding quality, short stories on the whole, posed somewhere between Henry James and Jane Austen. His short novel "The Other Garden," in which a shy teenage boy strikes up a friendship with a charismatic and self-destructive older woman, recalls Hartley's "The Go-Between" in its subtle darkness. Introduced in this edition by Alan Hollinghurst.
Sarah Manguso: "The Two Kinds of Decay: A Memoir" (Picador)
"The disease has been in remission seven years. Now I can try to remember what happened. Not understand. Just remember," writes Manguso in this spare, impressionistic account of illness and recovery. At 21, this author was struck by an unpredictable autoimmune disease: "My shoulders still allowed my arms to rotate behind me, but my hands were too weak to resist even the slightest pressure," notes Manguso, who is a poet with an exact and unsparing eye. She got very ill, and then she got well again. But that process was arduous and took seven years; Manguso evokes it with captivating detail, without self-pity, and with humor and precision. A beautiful book.
Ruth Fowler: "Girl, Undressed: On Stripping in New York City" (Penguin)
