Monthly Archives: November 2019

For The Laughing Heart—Revised Mr Johnson has succeeded in producing a thought provoking epic of family, love, baseball, good and evil. The Laughing Heart Revised challenges one to examine what we believe, what we hold sacred and what we profane. I was surprised how thoroughly I enjoyed this examination as this is not always a comfortable exercise. It is a book I am sure to revisit as the layers of evocative prose deserve further reflection.

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   This book of twenty-six poems was awarded the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize for 2018. An award well-deserved, indeed, in my opinion. Teicher’s poems here are principally about poetry itself, a literary art based on the line (a perspective with which I wholly agree), a fragment, and—in series even—incomplete. Here’s his way of putting it “ … how the line breaks before the thought is done, how the line, a partial thing, is the measure, and it’s…..

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   Here I will deal with Chapter 1 only, “Death.” In it Nagel takes up the question of whether anything may be said to be lost—has a misfortune occurred?—when someone has died, since the dead person no longer exists and therefore cannot feel loss of any sort. Why a psychiatrist  should take more interest than most people do in this question is immediately apparent when one thinks of the problem of suicide and its contemplation or planning, a problem so…..

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