On Leave: A book of anecdotes - Softcover

The ash which never fell from J.V. Cunningham’s cigarettes – the word ‘sward’ in John Wilkinson’s everyday usage – certain perspectives open up to alert eyes and ears. Have you forgotten that friendship may also be a pleasure of the text? Criticked into thinking those poems you read come from their makers sealed and airtight? Keith Tuma’s book of anecdotes is the remedy. What a shame his leave – and so this companionable writing – had to end.

A book of and about literary anecdotes, On Leave presents passing observations concerning the anecdote in a modular prose that tracks the events of a year on leave. Its cast of characters includes avant-garde poets, students, friends, family, and strangers encountered on travels in a year away from university work. Fragments of conversation with Bernadette Mayer, Tom Raworth, Trevor Joyce, John Wilkinson, Harryette Mullen, and many others lead onto informal commentary about poems by these authors and other observations about the reading and culture of poetry, all offered in the form of daybook notation.