Books, Love letters and Poems

Letter writing. Whether it’s handwritten or typed, a carefully crafted missive carries an expression of sentiment that no emoticon can rival. And that’s exactly what this month’s book list is celebrating. And while we’d happily wax poetic about the lost art of letter writing, we think we’ll leave it to poet Eavan Boland who wrote:

And if we say / An art is lost when it no longer knows / How to teach a sorrow to speak, come, see / The way we lost it: stacking letters in the attic, / Going downstairs so as not to listen to / The fields stirring at night as they became / Memory and in the morning as they became / Ink.

Sigh… Here are some picks from yours truly.

Gustav Mahler: Letters to His Wife, revised and translated by Antony Beaumont, edited by Henry-Louis De La Grange, Gunther Weiss and Knud Martner, Cornell University Press

Ella Minnow Pea, by Mark Dunn, Macadam Cage Pub

Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters, edited by -Merlin Holland, Carroll & Graf

Letters to Véra, by Vladimir Nabokov, edited and translated by Olga Voronina and Brian Boyd, Knopf

Floating Worlds: The letters of Edward Gorey & Peter F. Neumeyer, edited by Peter F. Neumeyer, Pomegranate

Einstein on Race and Racism, by Rodger Taylor and Fred Jerome, Rutgers University Press

The poem “The Lost Art of Letter Writing” is from A Woman Without a Country, by Eavan Boland, published by WW Norton.