![]() ![]() ![]() A bird has a name, though one might not know it, and sometimes bird - its fluttering, its feathered wings, its tiny beating heart, its flight - is enough, has to be enough. The effort, his effort, is translating what defies language into words. “Translation is a lossy process,” he writes. He brings Catullus into it, as well as Wittgenstein, Robert Hass, John Ashbery, and Anne Carson, among others. The moments West describes, the fragments and stories, the encounters and near-misses, have the feel of winter stars in a night sky, focused distillations of light burning through an unknowable amount of darkness. ![]() Structured to echo the “nine carols and nine tiny lessons” developed in 1880 by a Canterbury bishop for Christmas, the book, in precise and delicate detail, in short chunks of text, illuminates West’s relationships with alcohol and addiction, with depression, with desire, with his new daughter, with sobriety, bipolarity, resentment (“a name for a memory left too long in a warm, damp place”), with recovery, and with the tug between not wanting to be and not wanting to die. Depression and desire illuminated in new memoir of recoveryĪn inability to name what’s being felt makes feelings “seem not just unknown but unknowable,” writes John West in his lyrical and crystalline new memoir “Lessons and Carols: A Meditation on Recovery” (Wm. ![]()
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