BOOK BARN

#283: SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS, OR, ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE. “In 1692, the Massachusetts Bay Colony executed fourteen women, five men, and two dogs for witchcraft.” The Salem witch trials are part of every New Englander’s collective memory. Even as the time recedes further into the past, the trials have become part of the local pop and tourist culture—Salem on Hallowe’en is scarcely less crowded than Times Square on New Year’s Eve. The subject has interested me for years and I’

#282: THREE POETS. It’s rare for a first collection of poems to show the strength and grace of Danusha Laméris’s book The Moons of August. Many poets, still singing in the tones of callow youth, rush into print, which can have its merits: the early poems of Yeats, for instance, have a charm and sweetness that belong entirely to the young. But Lameris’s book, with its voice fully arrived, the perfected sense of when to cut a sentence short, the precisely right divvying of

#281: KALEVALA. Reading the Kalevala, Finland’s national epic, is like visiting an utterly strange and foreign country. You don’t know the cities, and can’t quite make out the street signs; you don’t speak the language, have never read their poems, and know nothing of the local gods or cults. The landscape is beautiful, in a northern way that denotes a demanding lifestyle; but the roads take turns you don’t expect, the fauna are unfamiliar, the people keep their distance.