Yesterday at the Goodwill, despite the suicide-inducing Christmas-ditty soundtrack, I unearthed two fine books: Eudora Welty's The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays & Reviews and Robert Bernard Martin's Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart: A Biography. The Welty book includes her essays on Austen, Bowen, and Woolf, about whom I have also written, as well as on Henry Green, about whom I have also meant to write. And naturally it gives me great pleasure to imagine that I am the only person in the eastern half of the North American continent who would be thrilled to find a used biography of Alfred Lord Tennyson at the Goodwill.

Moreover, in yesterday's mail I received a copy of Gray Jacobik's new collection Little Boy Blue, another CavanKerry publication that I also happened to copyedit. This was great good fortune for me, as it is one of the best books I have read in a very long time . . . a page turner, in fact, which is not something one often says about poetry. Tomorrow I plan to write a more considered review, rather in the style of the letter I wrote about Baron Wormser's book last week. I feel that, as both a fellow poet and a hired-gun checker of minutiae, I have developed a peculiar relationship with these books, so I hope you don't mind watching me try to figure out my reactions to that connection.

Dinner last night, which Tom cooked while I was popping corn in the school gym and trying to avoid the roving eye of an icky ref: clam chowder with fresh quahogs.

Dinner tonight: teriyaki steak, spiced jasmine rice, roasted carrot salad.