The Year Book
by Hugh Fox

Description

Although Fox wrote this book during a year in Michigan, he brings in all the richness of his life lived growing up in Chicago with all of its rich cultural ambience, his first trip to Europe in his early twenties, his marrying a Peruvian poet and starting yearly trips to visit family in Peru, his two years teaching in Caracas, his visiting all the pre-Columbian ruins in the Andes, his year teaching in Mexico, two years in Brazil, his year studying Latin American Literature at the U. of Buenos Aires, his year in the Chilean Andes doing archaeological investigations (five published works on archaeology), his year in Spain….very strange, exotic, enriching, all based on the progress and changes of the year, but in a total worldwide context filled with historical references to world cultures and literatures. Really nothing else quite like it ever written. Real life, real time in universal cultural ambiences.

Comments:

“Fox writes the way he talks: a rapid fire stream-of-consciousness, full of anecdotes….and arcane esoteric references from his seventy-five eclectic years.” (from a review by Doug Holder of Ommmmmm: A Collection of Plays and Monologues, on Ibbeson Update, 1/28/07)

“The poetry of Hugh Fox suggests a sort of mythical exploration of experience, how a particular moment can serve as a coming together of the eternal—cross cultural and cross experiential….” (from an essay “Hugh Fox—More Than a Poet,” an interview-essay by Mahlon Coop that appeared in Potpourri, Prairie Village, Kansas, Vol.8, No.1, 1996)

Excerpt:

Permanence becoming instantaneous, the mountains around

me, Ollantaytambo, the eternal Urubamba River, the road

winding from the Atacama Desert down to the Chilean coast,

all night moon and mountains that wear down, crumble,

deserts that were seas, the just-born Earth, and then now,

ages of ice and then now, always trying to get the right colors, windows and walls, the right Japanese maples and cypresses in the garden by the pond with the perfect fountain in it, the right friends and neighbors, lovers, husbands, wives, books, plays, music, as if someone were keeping track, counting, recording, as if the bones I found yesterday in the desert had names, bon jorno, bon jorno, bon jorno, a gravestone, a hundred, thousand, million years, and Time itself still young.