“The Nutcracker

in Harlem”

T.E. McMorrow

and James Ransome

HarperCollins, $17.99

It seems unfashionably early to be discussing holiday season fare. Either the marketing blitz for the festive period has begun earlier than ever or T.E. McMorrow has breathed new life into a children’s Christmas classic with such a timely twist that, in the current sociopolitical climate, it begs to be on the shelves now rather than later.

Set in Harlem during the 1920s, this jazz-inspired retelling of “The Nutcracker,” with gorgeous illustrations by James Ransome, does something more than offer a black cultural representation for young readers: It reintroduces some of the original characters and plot themes as imagined by the story’s creator, the German author E.T.A. Hoffmann, who wrote and published it as a novella in 1816. 

Alexandre Dumas altered that original version, making it lighter and less scary. In 1892, Dumas’s version was turned into a ballet with music by Tchaikovsky, eventually becoming Balanchine’s Christmas season ritual, sugarplums and all.

But something happened to Hoffmann’s story in this progression from dark to light: Marie became Klara, and her flights of imagination became sweeter and more tame. Without returning to the depths of Hoffmann’s darkness — with which Freud would have had a field day — Mr. McMorrow has reintroduced Marie as the protagonist. Here she is a sweet and somewhat shy African-American girl, surrounded by her large, music-loving family, celebrating one snowy Christmas Eve in an elegant home in Harlem.

Marie falls in love with a nutcracker doll that turns into a handsome teen after she falls asleep. In her rich, coming-of-age dreams, an army of angry rodents appears, hot on the trail of Christmas candy and sweet potato pie. Happily, a more modern, girl-power moment ensues, with Marie relying only on her smarts to win the battle.

Each page is filled with sumptuous illustrations and paintings by Mr. Ransome, who has worked on dozens of children’s books and teaches at Syracuse University. His style not only illuminates the delights of Hoffmann’s literary treasure, but perfectly captures the glitz and gaiety of the era’s thriving black culture. 

From an author’s note we learn that Mr. McMorrow worked as a stagehand for a ballet company in Harlem many years ago, where he saw “the power of music and dance transform people.” Today, as some readers might know, Mr. McMorrow is a reporter for this publication, as well as a playwright and member of the Drama Desk in New York City. 

His well-crafted, quasi-homage to the original “Nutcracker,” together with illustrations that help the imagination run wild and the inclusive theme of Christmas magic, will be sure to provide an escape from the tedium of the imminent commercial holiday season.

Rosset, Considered and Reconsidered

Looking for more Rosset? There was the front-page obituary in The New York Times in 2012, but after a lull there followed in relatively speedy succession a posthumous autobiography, a collection of his decades of correspondence with his friend Samuel Beckett, and “Barney’s Wall,” a documentary film about a 12-by-15-foot collage and mural the publisher and part-time East Hamptoner put together toward the end of his life in his East Village apartment — each written about in these pages.

You can add to your library another assessment, “Barney: Grove Press and Barney Rosset, America’s Maverick Publisher and His Battle Against Censorship,” by Michael Rosenthal of Columbia University. It’s all there, from the introduction to America of a literary avant-garde to Rosset and Grove’s tilting against the country’s Puritanism, the focus being on how Grove’s legal victories helped spur the cultural revolution of the 1960s. 

The book, from Arcade Publishing, makes use of Rosset’s papers at Columbia and numerous interviews.

A Two-Fisted Lawyer’s Life

Speaking of litigation, Martin London, a retired trial lawyer who spends summers in Montauk, has self-published a memoir, “The Client Decides,” with a loaded subtitle hinting at his courtroom exploits and client list, from the beautiful to the brawlers: “A Litigator’s Life: Jackie Onassis, Vice President Spiro Agnew, Donald Trump, Roy Cohn,” and if that weren’t enough, from the advertising world: “and More.”

The title proper, it’s worth noting, comes from the words of another heavyweight attorney and colleague, the late Simon H. Rifkind: “We do not decide what kinds of cases we try; the client decides that for us.”

Mr. London leads with this: “How did the kid from Carroll Street between Schenectady and Utica Avenues in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, end up doing a tour of duty as the chairman of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, one of the nation’s, indeed the world’s, leading law firms?”

He doesn’t return to that question until the back of the book, in a section simply dubbed “Personal,” but in the intervening pages a reader’s eye might well be drawn to a chapter on the author’s having butted heads with our current president, who in “Trumping Trump” is introduced with something he said to The New York Post in 1985: “The rich have a very low threshold for pain.” But Mr. London’s no one-note, and that tale isn’t one of successful strong-arming as much as waiting out, persevering until a bully, or at least his seconds, can be brought before a clear-eyed judge who will hear none of it.

“Liner Notes”

Loudon Wainwright III

Blue Rider Press, $27

The subtitle of the musician Loudon Wainwright III’s memoir, “Liner Notes,” leaves nothing to chance. A longtime visitor to East Hampton and sometime resident of Shelter Island, Mr. Wainwright’s memoir, published on Tuesday (his 71st birthday), is a lengthy rumination “On Parents and Children, Exes and Excess, Death and Decay, and a Few of My Other Favorite Things.” 

In “Liner Notes,” the artist, who in 2013 told this reporter that he had performed at the Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett perhaps 40 times, weaves tales of an oft-meandering career marked by deep ambivalence with candid admissions of personal shortcomings that closely tracked those of his father, the celebrated Life magazine writer and editor and a direct descendant of Peter Stuyvesant. 

Indeed, Loudon Wainwright Jr. looms large in “Liner Notes,” as the son frankly itemizes the father’s foibles — excessive alcohol consumption, infidelity, and a somewhat uncomfortable distance and coldness toward his flesh and blood. At the same time, the son’s reverence for his father is illustrated by the inclusion of several of the latter’s Life magazine essays, some of them deeply felt meditations on the “death and decay” of the son’s subtitle. 

Mr. Wainwright, with an affection tempered by that dysfunction, recalls a privileged upbringing in 1950s Westchester County, the son of a Northeastern blue blood and a “country girl” from rural Georgia. The tale gets more interesting in the 1960s, a coming of age that, like so many of his generation, included transcendent experiences with LSD and Grateful Dead concerts, which invariably led to a Summer of Love sojourn to San Francisco. 

“I hitchhiked across the country with a knapsack, a guitar, a sleeping bag, and one hundred dollars I’d made selling pot,” he matter-of-factly recalls. 

Living communally in the Fillmore district, dropping acid and attending concerts, he puts his own music on hold, selling his guitar to pay for yoga lessons. The era also includes a surprising anecdote about Donald Fagan, later of Steely Dan fame but then “a quiet, geeky wannabe hippie,” blowing minds with an impromptu performance of a Ray Charles song on “an old, out-of-tune upright piano” at the Good Karma Cafe. Elsewhere, he takes in a 1964 performance by the Isley Brothers featuring a spellbinding young guitarist named Jimi Hendrix. 

At the outset of his career a half-century ago, the singer-songwriter was one of many to which the “new Bob Dylan” tag was affixed by a music industry that, even in that era of unbridled creative exploration, apparently preferred assembly-line product to artist development and originality. (Years later, he playfully confronted this history in a most Dylanesque song called, naturally, “Talking New Bob Dylan.”) When his third album finally yielded a hit, a novelty song called “Dead Skunk,” the artist suffered from the industry’s same default tactic, to categorize. When he did not return to the formula, the record label’s enthusiasm waned. For so many artists, some version of this story is a sad refrain to their careers.

Hence an ambivalence, though Mr. Wainwright concludes his memoir with a deep affection for “the 75-90,” the minutes of the performance itself that make worthwhile all that accompanies the musician’s life: the endless travel, the rootless existence, the many temptations to self-destruction, usually through sense gratification of one sort or another. 

Along the way, Mr. Wainwright freely admits, he freely indulged, acting out the traits of his father as he entered and departed relationships characterized by too much drinking, quarrelling, and, inevitably, going astray. In the process, though, Mr. Wainwright demonstrated a remarkable penchant for making his collaborations musical. He and his first wife, Kate McGarrigle, the Canadian singer-songwriter, who died in 2010, produced Rufus and Martha Wainwright, each a successful musician, the former a resident of Montauk. He and Suzzy Roche, who with her sisters perform as the Roches, have a daughter, Lucy Wainwright Roche, who is also a singer. His sister Sloan is a singer and songwriter, and another sister, Martha (known as Teddy), served as his manager.

In 49 mostly brief chapters, Mr. Wainwright intersperses sometimes-lengthy excerpts of his song lyrics alongside the prose. Initially, they are somewhat tedious, a literal retelling of the subject he has just observed, and, if one is unfamiliar with his music, they may seem mundane, void of reflection, metaphor, or even poetry. Paired with his considerable gift for melody, however, the words on the printed page spring to life, and when put to music are revealed as the essence of our shared, tangled human experience — guilt, fear, joy, sorrow, and all the rest. The author dedicates “Liner Notes” to “the family, and all we put us through.”

“The most important people in my life, the principal players, if you will, are members of my family,” he writes. “To a degree, it’s important to escape your family in order to achieve some autonomy in the world, but the reality is that you never quite get away from your ‘loved ones.’ I’m often asked why I’ve written so many songs about the people in my family. The answer is: How could I not? They are the ones who have meant the most in my life, and they continue to have a hold on me, even those who have died. Especially those who have died.”

The excerpt that follows, from a song called “So Many Songs,” underscores the artist’s approach to his life and work, which of course are themselves inexorably intertwined. 

I’ve written so many songs about you

This is the last one, after this I’m through

It’s taken so long to finally see

My songs about you are all about me.

Loudon Wainwright III will perform “Surviving Twin,” a show of songs and stories, at Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor on Sept. 15 and 16 at 8 p.m.

After the hubbub of the season, here’s a sane respite, and it’s free: Poetry Pairs is back at Guild Hall’s John Drew Theater on Sunday, with staged readings by Stephen Dunn, a winner of a Pulitzer Prize in poetry, and Jill Bialosky, an editor at W.W. Norton, novelist, and author of a new memoir, “Poetry Will Save Your Life.” 

That book traces the comfort that poems by Ben Jonson, Emily Dickinson, and W.H. Auden, among many others — often offering insight into the experience of bereavement — have provided Ms. Bialosky throughout her life, from the premature death of her father to her sister’s suicide to two failed pregnancies. 

Family life and the inevitability of loss are also central to “The Players,” from 2015, the latest of her several collections of poems. She lives part time in Bridgehampton.

Mr. Dunn won a Pulitzer in 2001 for “Different Hours,” his 11th collection, which in plainspoken language explores the mysteries of the everyday. He attended Hofstra on a basketball scholarship, the Guild Hall website notes, narrowly escaped a constrained life in advertising, traveled to Spain, and eventually earned a master’s degree in creative writing at Syracuse, where he studied with the poet Philip Booth (speaking of unadorned language). 

He is distinguished professor emeritus of creative writing at Stockton University in New Jersey. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and numerous journals. 

The readings start at 3 p.m., and reservations are required. Poetry Pairs is organized by Fran Castan, a past Walt Whitman Birthplace Association Long Island poet of the year.

“The Great Nadar”

Adam Begley

Tim Duggan Books, $28

The title of Adam Begley’s amiable and readable new biography, “The Great Nadar: The Man Behind the Camera,” might provoke a couple of questions. The first is “Who?” Nadar (the nom de plume of a 19th-century Parisian photographer, writer, illustrator, and balloonist christened Félix Tournachon) may or may not be familiar throughout France, but he’s hardly Monet or Victor Hugo. 

And “Great” in what ways? As an artist or, as the title suggests, as a showman? He seems to have been both. 

As to his artistic merit, you can decide on the basis of the dozens of his photographic portraits, and a wealth of accompanying testimony from his contemporaries, that Mr. Begley presents. He had a large, enthusiastically reviewed one-man show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1994, so obviously there is something in his work to respect and admire, but how much of his success while he lived was due to his skill and talent and how much to the novelty of photography itself is a moot question. 

He had the largest photographic studio in Paris, and his subjects included everyone of note in French culture — writers like Baudelaire, George Sand, Dumas, and Hugo; the actress Sarah Bernhardt; the artists Gustave Doré and Daumier, and hundreds of others. But whether he truly succeeded in capturing “in every portrait an intimate and compelling psychological likeness,” as Mr. Begley claims, is a matter of individual judgment. 

In my own judgment, several of his studies are truly haunting and fascinating — portraits of Baudelaire, of his mother as she lay dying, of the poet Théophile Gautier, of the gorgeous Bernhardt at 20, and (my favorite, but unaccountably absent from the book) a full-length view of Victor Hugo at his desk that embodies the essence of the writer’s power and conviction. 

Other pictures, though, seem run-of-the-mill. In his defense, Nadar was practicing an art in its infancy; cameras themselves were clumsy affairs, and the process of recording images involved dipping plates in a witches’ brew of chemicals and exposing them for relatively long periods of time, during which the subject had to remain immobile. It isn’t surprising, then, that some of them came out looking more like Mme. Tussaud’s waxworks than living people. Whatever spontaneity and psychological acuteness these pictures reveal may be due as much to the sitters’ ability to retain some natural expression of face and body as to Nadar’s talent in posing and capturing them. 

And he wasn’t above fudging the details: When he photographed George Sand, no longer young and never beautiful, he obligingly retouched the work at her request, removing some of the wrinkles and chins. The movie actress Anna Magnani understood better than Sand or Nadar how a face acquires character and mirrors the psyche; she told her makeup artist on “The Rose Tattoo,” “Please don’t retouch my wrinkles; it took me my whole life to earn them.” 

Mr. Begley seems, at times, too heavily invested in Nadar, too eager to establish his credentials as a worthwhile biographical subject. He claims, of his “extraordinary hero,” that “proof of his genius, the portraits are his own ticket to the pantheon of great artists.” But if you spend the word “genius” on Nadar, what’s left for Diane Arbus, Annie Leibovitz, Yousuf Karsh, Richard Avedon, or Henri Cartier-Bresson?

There was more to Nadar’s résumé than his picture taking, though. For several periods in his life, he left the business in the hands first of his brother, Adrien, and later of his son, Paul. At 20, Nadar was a penniless Bohemian, homeless and often hungry, but he had a flair for writing, and became a highly successful journalist, producing short, gossipy pieces called feuilletons that appeared regularly in widely read newspapers — blogs, in effect. 

Nadar also had a knack for illustration and began to produce satirical political cartoons to accompany his writings in an inimitable and original style. Looking at his wickedly accurate caricatures with their accompanying texts, you could claim him as the inventor of the political cartoon, prefiguring Thomas Nast and Gary Trudeau, and even of the comic strip, in the vein of Jules Feiffer or Art Spiegelman.

And as if all this weren’t enough, he was a pioneer in the new craze for ballooning. Committing oneself to a voyage of unknown duration and destination, riding in a wicker basket under a bag filled with flammable gas, was both a stunt for daredevils and a path to new technologies of travel. In this, Nadar was almost clairvoyant: Despite his commitment to balloons, he believed, correctly, that the future of air travel was in flying machines that could be guided easily and landed safely. 

With Jules Verne and others, he founded the Society for the Promotion of Heavier-Than-Air Locomotion, and in 1863 Nadar announced, “It’s the propeller — the sainted Propeller! — that will carry us into the air.” And so it was.

All this was decades before the Wright Brothers, of course, so those who wished to soar with Nadar had to be content with the balloon, which, once aloft, was at the mercy of the elements; winds could carry it out to sea or smash it to earth. With characteristic bravura and a keen taste for spectacle, Nadar built the largest balloon in the world, the accurately named Le Geánt, which boasted a wine cellar and a lavatory. 

Its maiden voyage was a comedy of errors. Its second almost ended in tragedy: As it quickly climbed, its pilot released too much gas and it plummeted earthward. A gale was blowing on the surface, and the gondola in which the passengers rode bounced along “like a crazed comet,” as Nadar described it, narrowly missing a train, spilling its passengers out, and at last coming to rest in a grove of trees. The nine voyagers, including Nadar and his wife, suffered various degrees of injury, but no one, miraculously, was killed. 

Chastened, he nonetheless persisted in ballooning, and when Paris was besieged during the Franco-Prussian War, he organized a complicated scheme whereby balloons were used to observe the enemy from a safe height, and the intelligence gathered sent back via carrier pigeon.

Nadar’s last years (and they were many; he was born in 1820 and died in 1910) were comparatively uneventful. He lived to see the invention of the airplane, of course, and before his death, the incomparable Jacques-Henri Lartigue was documenting his own life and times through photographs that are truly breathtaking. 

But Nadar deserves his place in history. Mr. Begley shows that he did us the great service of illustrating, in several mediums, and in his multifaceted and theatrical way of living, a century that was like no other in its artistic and scientific accomplishments, particularly in France. And Mr. Begley deserves our thanks for bringing this singular pioneer to our notice.

Richard Horwich taught literature at Brooklyn College and New York University. He lives in East Hampton.

Adam Begley is the author of the biography “Updike.” A former writer at The Star, he is a regular visitor to Sagaponack, where his parents have a house.

“Iowa”

Lucas Hunt

Thane & Prose, $21.99

Lucas Hunt’s new book of poems, “Iowa,” is a somewhat uneven collection that shows the poet engaging his subject matter through use of precise evocative imagery, while other poems — notably his shorter ones — fail to engage because they neglect to provide readers with surprise or illumination. So there is much to admire in this collection and much one wishes Mr. Hunt had further revised. 

The physical book itself seems something of an anomaly; poems are printed on the recto pages only, an affectation that belies the poet’s simple, honest, and direct statements. Rear cover copy informs the reader that this volume is “the first of five books in an autobiographical collection of cinematic poetry.” This reader hopes the poet will improve upon his work by adding poetry to what is only cinematic.

What does this mean? Too many of Mr. Hunt’s shorter poems seem to lack poetry’s transformational energy, never leaving behind the literal or the cinematic for the figurative. Here, for instance, is “Walking” in its entirety:

With dogs on a gravel road

dust from passing

truck plumes

into a cloud over

the soy and corn fields.

Obviously, the title is meant to be read as part of the poem’s sentence. But what is the point of a poem that offers only an observation? Where is the poetry? Yes, the poem offers an image, and one may argue it offers an image as practiced by Williams and Pound. But this type of Imagism lacks the touch of modernist ambiguity or figuration found in Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow” or Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro.” What would the Williams poem be without the ambiguity of “So much depends / upon”? What would the Pound poem be without the final metaphor of “petals on a wet, black bough”?

In another short poem, “To You,” Mr. Hunt tries to add the figurative but confuses his reader. Here it is:

Suspended hair feathers

wave like leaves;

nature’s hand

applauds in the trees.

Here, Mr. Hunt unsuccessfully mixes his metaphors. First, hairs are not feathers; second, it takes two hands to applaud, unless, of course, Mr. Hunt is using “hand” in its meaning of to applaud, as in “let’s give him a hand,” which, of course, would make the verb “applauds” in the final line a redundancy. East Hampton’s own Allen Planz used to say at his readings that short poems were more difficult to write than long poems; I’m inclined to agree.

This reviewer also noticed a number of poems in which Mr. Hunt uses punctuation inconsistently or commits a number of grammatical or mechanical inconsistencies. Mr. Hunt needs to be more careful in his use of language, as every poet must. I’d be remiss if I didn’t call him out on these failings. True, some readers may accuse me of being too fastidious, but poets — especially poets — need to honor their language and its rules because mistakes detract from the work’s efficacy. 

The poem “Tornado,” for instance, contains several errors, including “In nearby towns, or farther off, / A city candidates visit to get the vote.” What’s needed here? For the article at the beginning of the second line to disappear or for the poet to add an apostrophe and an s after city? Later in the same poem, Mr. Hunt writes, “Hits someone on the head and blood / soaks their face, / they run for cover . . .” I’m not maintaining that civilization will collapse (it hasn’t yet!) as a result of faulty pronoun agreement, but the rules exist for a reason. I also don’t get the sense that the rule is violated on purpose to mimic the voice of a speaker who doesn’t understand that “someone” is a singular pronoun and doesn’t agree with “their” and “they.”

As for punctuation, poets may decide to dispense with it entirely or use it to influence rhythm or use it as a grammarian might. Whatever choice a poet makes, readers will wish that the poet would follow his choice consistently, at least within each individual poem. In “Calling,” Mr. Hunt confounds this reader with his inconsistent comma usage. Here’s the first stanza:

Lake borne urges come to fruition

ripe watermelon juice down

both cheeks, pink rinds

smile from a sink a friend

calls late at night to talk about love.

Clearly, Mr. Hunt has decided to use commas in this poem, and in this first stanza we note the comma as caesura after “cheeks.” Perhaps Mr. Hunt has chosen to disregard the use of commas at the end of his lines; one would expect a comma, mechanically speaking, at the end of line one. Poets, however, often employ line breaks as commas, a contemporary convention. But Mr. Hunt does use the interior comma; so why include a comma after “cheeks” but not after “sink,” where another comma is expected to separate the two images? This inconsistency occurs elsewhere in this poem and in other poems in this collection and is simply maddening.

But I’m done playing the stuffy pedant with his picayune complaints. Mr. Hunt has a real eye for the apt image. The book is chock-full of effective imagery. The book’s third poem, “Cornfield,” recreates on a blank white page the complexity of a field, with its energies and subtleties, in a distinctly sensuous way. A single sentence broken over nine lines, here’s the poem in its entirety:

Emerald waves applaud midsummer’s

undulant hills, honeyed kernels,

amber tasseled stalks inert,

wind-wisped leaves stir earth’s aroma,

slow circling suspensions of time transpose

a dust blown cloud, adagios of air,

granular infinitudes above

a gravel road, long grassy ditch lined

with barbed wire fence that goes nowhere.

This poem is worth our time and scrutiny. It’s not only the cornfield that Mr. Hunt skillfully recreates here but also the sense of open space above and around it. The poem’s first line conveys motion and metaphor. The poem is rich in visual imagery and interesting diction (“granular infinitudes”). The language is fresh, the picture is clear, and the poet utilizes effective closure — the fence that goes “nowhere” offers a counterpoint to the image of the field and the space above and around it in slow, perpetual movement. 

Even Mr. Hunt’s use of “inert” in line three seems apt; my dictionary defines this word as “not having the power to move itself.” So, while the field appears to sway, the ears of corn will not move unless another agent — like the wind — acts upon them. Readers smell the earth in line four, and the addition of a term of musical direction, here made plural, “adagios,” bolsters the sense of movement and auditory imagery within, around, and above the cornfield.

Immediately following “Cornfield” is “70th Avenue,” another strong poem dependent almost entirely upon imagery. But Mr. Hunt put this poem together without wasting a word. He also includes unexpected verbs, as poets must, and the verbs in this poem elevate the poem out of mere descriptiveness to the figurative level that distinguishes poetry from prose. The lines that simply describe place us firmly in the Midwest and are often fragments, like the opening two lines: “Barbed wire fences / overgrown with weeds.” But the poem’s final two lines rescue the rest of the poem from the mundane: “Fields roll under power lines / and harvest the sky.” That’s lovely closure, especially Mr. Hunt’s use of “harvest.” We expect the field to be harvested, but here the field performs the action of the verb, and this seems both true and new.

Many other poems like this exist in this collection, including “Dollar an Hour,” “Hired Hand,” “The End,” “Leaving the Farm,” and “Buena Vista Road,” just to name a few. These poems are economical, descriptive, and employ interesting metaphors or use verbs in surprising ways.

A favorite poem is “Cicadas.” Here Mr. Hunt employs wonderful poetic music, which is too often, in this reviewer’s opinion, missing from this collection. Mr. Hunt mines a wider vocabulary here for its sonic properties. The imagery is as precise as in “Cornfield,” but in this poem form and content most effortlessly merge. After all, this poem concerns the cicadas’ sound, a “unisonic / hum,” and Mr. Hunt uses alliteration, assonance, and consonance most effectively. This poem, therefore, seems to bristle with energy. It’s a pleasure to read multiple times, especially aloud.

I’m hoping Lucas Hunt will hone his editorial eye and begin to write short poems that will rise above the banal to surprise and engage as well as some of his longer poems do in “Iowa.” I’ll be watching for new work from him to gauge how he improves. With a talent like his, there’s no doubt he will. 

Dan Giancola’s books of poems include “Part Mirth, Part Murder” and “Songs From the Army of Working Stiffs.” He teaches English at Suffolk Community College.

Lucas Hunt, formerly of Springs, is the author of the collections “Lives” and “Light on the Concrete.” He will read from “Iowa” at Harbor Books in Sag Harbor on Sunday at 5 p.m.

“Poetry Will Save

Your Life”

Jill Bialosky

Atria Books, $24

In 1939, W.H. Auden famously asserted that “poetry makes nothing happen.” Jill Bialosky seems to offers a diametrically opposing view in her unusual and affecting new memoir. Using 51 poems, ranging broadly from nursery rhymes to a Shakespeare sonnet, she sets out to demonstrate how reading and remembering poetry can provide a kind of salvation. 

The informing, seismic event of Ms. Bialosky’s childhood was the sudden death of her father when she was 2 years old. There were subsequent aftershocks: her mother’s active dating life and her remarriage to someone fifth-grader Jill and her two sisters had never met; the birth of another sister; the faltering and eventual dissolution of that second marriage, followed by her mother’s retreat into depression. 

All of these incidents were out of Ms. Bialosky’s control, yet she identifies strongly with Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” the poem that commits her to a love of poetry when it’s read aloud by her teacher. She sees her own story in it. 

“There are two roads one might travel: The road where families are whole and not broken, and fathers don’t die young, and mothers are happy — where everything seems to fit together like pieces in a puzzle; and the road I travel, which is crooked and not quite right, with bumps along the way.” Of course she can’t change the past, but she looks to the future, to choosing the right path — in effect, to the power of autonomy. She quotes Frost: “Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.”

The narrative of “Poetry Will Save Your Life” moves back and forth in time in the present tense (which enhances its fluidity) between the writer’s youth and her adulthood, with the touchstone of beloved poems as a constant. In one chapter she’s contentedly married, a burgeoning poet and editor; in another she’s still single and lonely, anxiously seeking love and purpose. In both circumstances, she’s instructed and consoled by lines of passion and despair by, among others, Louise Bogan, Gerald Stern, Denis Johnson, Sharon Olds, and Sylvia Plath. 

And then there’s the discovery of Emily Dickinson, whose works make Ms. Bialosky “feel smart to think I understand them,” although the poems she cites, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes,” with its crushing line “This is the Hour of Lead,” and “ ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” clearly reflect her own tenuous passage from grief to happy possibility.

As a self-conscious, fearful, and introspective girl, Jill Bialosky claims books as her “secret companions.” The characters in favorite novels “inform my envy, my empathy, my courage, my consciousness.” She relates easily to Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women,” whose heroines grow up in an all-female household, and to the concentration on mothers and daughters in “Pride and Prejudice.”

It’s not surprising that she feels a similar shock of recognition on reading Dickinson’s playful “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” and poems of self-realization by Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Louis Stevenson. Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room” brilliantly recounts her own first awareness of the dichotomy of separateness and belonging. “But I felt: you are an I, / you are an Elizabeth, / you are one of them.” And Stevenson’s “The Swing” “recalls that same frightful realization of one’s own solitary self, sailing over the lip of the horizon ‘up in the air and down.’ ”

Ms. Bialosky suffered major losses as an adult, which must have reignited the pain of that first catastrophic loss, the death of her father. Two pregnancies resulted in the stillbirth of a daughter and the death of a premature son. And her cherished youngest sister, Kim — who she helped raise in a fatherless home during their mother’s emotional absence — committed suicide in her 21st year, a tragedy related in an earlier memoir, “History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life.”

Again and again, poems come to mind, offering their shared experience of bereavement, and their words of solace: Ben Jonson’s “On My First Son,” which opens “Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy”; Auden’s “Funeral Blues,” which orders: “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,” and, inevitably, Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” about enduring and mastering loss. Poetry and daily ritual help to mitigate grief, but, we’re told, “Eventually I find comfort in the idea that there are no clear answers.”

When Ms. Bialosky and her husband finally bring home a living child, a baby boy, they’re unprepared, without a crib or even a diaper — “We are still living in the aftermath of ravaged promise.” Feeling “selfish and voracious,” she wants to be her child’s only caretaker. Yet, “My psyche will not quite allow itself to feel the happiness and love that is flooding through every cell of my body. I keep expecting something terrible to happen.” 

She compares herself to the narrator of Plath’s “Nick and the Candlestick,” which begins, “I am a miner. The light burns blue.” Ms. Bialosky writes: “Like the speaker in this magical poem . . . I am a miner excavating a rich new world, but always now with hesitation and awareness of life’s fragility.” 

There are chapters in this book dealing with friendship, memory, shame, faith, danger, and mortality, and each subject becomes a part of the author’s own history, deftly illuminated by particular poems. Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool,” which we are advised “should be taped on the refrigerator of every house with a teenager,” reminds Ms. Bialosky “with its nod to the rhythms of the street” and its devastating last line, “We / Die soon,” of jumping rope with her best friend, Marie (a future suicide), to the hypnotically repetitive verses of “Miss Mary Mack,” and “of all the perils and vulnerability that growing up held.”

During the recitation of the 23rd Psalm at her grandmother’s graveside, “I think of my father in his dwelling place and his mother, my grandmother, now with him,” she writes, “and that one day I too will be dwelling in the house of the Lord forever.” She wonders if the psalm may be only a “myth of consolation,” but concludes that it is sustaining nevertheless, and that poems may be the same as prayers.

Poems about fathers have special importance to Ms. Bialosky, and “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden “evokes memories and reverberations of the complicated ‘austere and lonely offices’ of a collective childhood, whether rich or poor, where a father wields his tender and cruel power.” 

Two poems about mothers stand out as well: “My Mother’s Feet” by Stanley Plumly (who was Ms. Bialosky’s teacher) and Lucille Clifton’s “Fury.” The former is a love letter from the poet-son to his mother, and the latter a “scalding” depiction of a woman’s ambition and sacrifice. Ms. Bialosky’s earlier ambivalence toward her own mother seems to be contained in this pair of poems. We learn from her narrative how beautiful her mother, now in her mid-80s and living in a care home, still is, and that her daughter has come to terms with past difficulties between them, and with their current reversal of roles. “Now I am my mother’s keeper. . . . As once my life depended on her, now hers depends on me.”

Two additional poems are rendered to illustrate this familiar phenomenon: Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Child Is Father to the Man” and Wordsworth’s “My Heart Leaps Up,” from which Hopkins borrowed his poem’s title.

Auden’s words “For poetry makes nothing happen” are from his poem “In Memory of W.B. Yeats.” That line is preceded by “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. / Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still.” The madness Auden refers to is political strife. When Ms. Bialosky boldly declares that poetry will save your life, her meaning is more personal. “We’re all born mortal. We have to contend with the idea of mortality.” The closing of her own poem “Terminal Tower” (not included here) tells us, “I saw through the stone into the abyss. It was dark and splendid.” 

Like the weather and politics, the human condition isn’t altered by poetry, but this lovely memoir poignantly and credibly shows how it can inspire our acceptance of it. 

Hilma Wolitzer’s novels include “An Available Man” and “The Doctor’s Daughter.” Her poems have appeared in New Letters, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. She and her husband were part-time residents of Springs for many years. 

Jill Bialosky, an editor at W.W. Norton, lives in Manhattan and Bridgehampton. She will read from her new book at BookHampton in East Hampton on Friday, Aug. 25, at 5 p.m.

“Dodge City”

Tom Clavin

St. Martin’s, $29.99

For such a small town, Dodge City had an outsized reputation. The cow town sat in southwest Kansas, the last stop before the Great American Desert, the huge swath of mostly unexplored land that stretched to the Rocky Mountains. On the edge of the frontier, it was known as the “wickedest town in the West.” 

Cowboys driving their cattle north from Texas took a pit stop in Dodge City, where the 16 saloons and 47 prostitutes could quickly lighten their wallets and get them into lots of trouble. Gamblers, bandits, and other outlaws were also there to greet them. A transitory spot filled mostly with young men drunk on alcohol and heavily armed, Dodge City was a tinderbox in search of a match. Nearly every night, the town exploded in whiskey-fueled gunfights.

This “den of thieves and cut throats,” as one Kansas newspaper described it at its highpoint — or low point, depending on whom you asked — in the late 1870s, is the subject of Tom Clavin’s new book, “Dodge City: Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and the Wickedest Town in the American West.” Mr. Clavin, a journalist and author of several well-regarded books, is an expert guide to the lawless place, but the book’s real contribution is how Mr. Clavin cuts through the myths and mystique that have accumulated around the town’s two most famous names in order to tell a more accurate history of Earp and Masterson.

It’s a daring proposition, not only because the fantasies and fictions Americans have crafted about the Western frontier are so firmly lodged in our national psyche, but also because stripping Earp and Masterson’s story of its embellishments might yield a tale not worth reading. The two lawmen, after all, had been active participants in the mythmaking of their biographies, so perhaps even they understood that their lives needed some narrative spicing up to become a story that lasted. 

But, as so often is the case, Mr. Clavin shows that the truth is more compelling than fiction. In his author’s note, he writes that his book is “an attempt to spin a yarn as entertaining as tales that have been told before but one that is based on the most reliable research.” On this ground, he largely succeeds.

Before they became partners taming the streets of Dodge City, Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson had met during a buffalo hunt on the prairie. Masterson was quickly impressed by the serious and taciturn Earp, who was five years his senior. He decided to model himself on his new friend, a decision that profited him well in their new life in law enforcement.

As lawmen, they made a striking pair. Wyatt Earp was tall and slender, with piercing blue eyes and a fair complexion; Bat Masterson had darker hair, a stockier build, and stood a few inches shorter. Both men were all muscle. But it was their close friendship and commitment to each other that best characterized their partnership.

Neither man had planned for a life in law enforcement, but they took their responsibility seriously once in the role. Wyatt Earp’s leadership had significant consequences not just for Dodge City, but also for how justice was administered across the emerging Western frontier. Earp recognized that his small team faced difficult odds against the hundreds of armed and rowdy men who prowled Dodge City’s streets.

Because of this he gave his team three rules to help maintain their control and de-escalate the violence that had so easily gotten out of hand under previous lawmen’s watch. First, they were to attempt to reason gently with a man, a tactic that had surprising success in cooling off a hotheaded cowboy before he turned violent. Second, if a law officer had to shoot, he should do it carefully and with precision because so often the first man to fire did not hit his target. (Mr. Clavin’s story is filled with innocent bystanders who were killed by stray bullets shot by careless gunmen brandishing unreliable firearms.) 

Third, if shooting at a man, the officer’s goal should always be to wound him rather than kill. While Earp and Masterson were both sharpshooters known for their fast draws, they actually preferred using the other end of their guns in a technique called “buffaloing,” in which they would knock a man out by striking the handle of a gun on his head.

Such practices brought a measure of peace to Dodge City and earned Earp and Masterson fame and respect across the West. But they also tamp down some of the excitement one might expect in a story about justice in the Wild West, since Mr. Clavin’s truer retelling has a lot less violence than legend had invented. Still, the book’s cast of characters, including big names like Doc Holliday, Billy the Kid, Wild Bill Hickok, and Fred and Jesse James, but also lesser-known personalities like Prairie Dog Dave and Hurricane Bill, along with Mr. Clavin’s great narrative talents, keep this a page-turning book.

One of its most notable accomplishments comes from elevating Bat Masterson to stand alongside Wyatt Earp in importance, a significant correction to the long narrative tradition in which Masterson has played second fiddle. As the author shows, Masterson’s “life was as adventurous as Wyatt’s . . . but Bat did not have a gunfight in Tombstone to burnish his legend to an iconic glow,” as Earp did. In Mr. Clavin’s telling, Masterson feels as vital to the history of Dodge City as Earp, if not also the more compelling and complicated man.

Carved on Masterson’s gravestone in the Bronx — he had finished his life working as a newspaperman in New York — were the simple words “Loved by Everyone.” That probably wasn’t true for the outlaws who found themselves face to face with Masterson. But it also may have been the truest legend ever to come out of Dodge City. 

Neil J. Young is the author of “We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics.” He lives in East Hampton.

Tom Clavin will take part in the East Hampton Library’s Authors Night on Aug. 12. He lives in Sag Harbor.

The fund-raiser called “the premier literary event of the Hamptons” is bound to be a good time. The 13th annual Authors Night on Saturday, benefiting the East Hampton Library, offers a chance to mingle with favorite writers and illustrators under a tent at 4 Maidstone Lane in the village. The evening will kick off at 5 with a book signing and reception complete with hors d’oeuvres and wine.

More than 100 authors will be present, signing and selling a diverse range of books. History lovers, for example, will find Phil Keith with “Stay the Rising Sun,” Michael Klarman with “The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution,” and Jeffrey Lyons with “What a Time It Was! Leonard Lyons and the Golden Age of New York Nightlife.”

To learn how to whip up a new dish, attendees can visit with John Gilman and his “God’s Love We Deliver Cookbook,” Amy Zerner and Monte Farber and their “Signs and Seasons: An Astrology Cookbook,” or Marissa Hermer, who will be on hand with “An American Girl in London: 120 Nourishing Recipes for Your Family From a Californian Expat.”

Molly Haskell and “Steven Spielberg: A Life in Films,” Steven Lee Myers and “The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin,” and Jeffrey Sussman with “Max Baer and Barney Ross: Jewish Heroes of Boxing” will be wielding pens and selling their biographies, and Gerard Schwarz will attend with his autobiography, “Behind the Baton: An American Icon Talks Music.”

When it comes to picture books, children might enjoy Cynthia Bardes’s “Pansy in London: The Mystery of the Missing Puppy,” Susan Verde’s “My Kicks: A Sneaker Story!” or “The Nutcracker in Harlem” by The Star’s T.E. McMorrow. Among The Star’s contributing photographers, Doug Kuntz will be at a table with his children’s book, “Lost and Found Cat: The True Story of Kunkush’s Incredible Journey,” and Durell Godfrey will discuss and sign copies of “Color Your Happy Home,” her second coloring book for adults. 

A complete list of authors can be found on authorsnight.org.

After the reception, guests can continue on to one of more than 30 dinners featuring writers at private houses here. At one of them, Alyssa Mastromonaco, the author of “Who Thought This Was a Good Idea? And Other Questions You Should Have Answers to When You Work in the White House,” will pull back the curtain on the day-to-day operations at the Oval Office. From the other side of the political aisle, Ann Coulter, the provocative television commentator, will host a dinner with her book “In Trump We Trust.”

Elsewhere, Elizabeth Vargas, the ABC News journalist, will present “Between Breaths: A Memoir of Panic and Addiction,” which chronicles her battles with anxiety and alcoholism, and Malcolm Nance, a counterterrorism and intelligence officer frequently seen on MSNBC, will explore “Hacking ISIS: How to Destroy the Global Jihad.” 

Tickets to the reception cost $100 and are available online and at the door on the day of the event. Dinner party tickets cost $300, and guests can choose which to attend. The dinners start at 8 p.m., and those tickets include entry to the book-signing reception and are also available online.

Those who can’t make it to the book signing can tune in to WPPB 88.3, where Bonnie Grice will be interviewing authors live.

First, Virginia Walker, a poet and professor from Shelter Island, donated all the sales of her last collection of poems, “Neuron Mirror,” a collaborative work with the late Michael Walsh, to the Lustgarten Foundation for pancreatic cancer research. So far that total is $9,000.

Now she’s holding a poetry contest to raise more money.

“One by one, poet friends from the East End community of poets succumbed to this deadly cancer, which has a six-percent survival rate,” Ms. Walker said in a release, referring to Antje Katcher, who with Mr. Walsh was part of the East End Poetry Workshop, Robert Long, who was an editor at The Star, Siv Cedering, and Diana Chang.

Continuing the tribute and fund-raising effort, three others from the poetry scene here, Carole Stone, George Held, and Mindy Kronenberg, will judge the contest, which has a theme of empathy. It is open to those 18 and over and closes on Sept. 9, with an awards ceremony at the Onyx Theater in Oakdale on Nov. 18. The first 100 entrants will receive a copy of “Neuron Mirror.”

Poems, with a $20 check made out to the Lustgarten Foundation, can be sent to Ms. Walker at P.O. Box 1032, Shelter Island Heights 11965. The website neuronwalker.com has more information.