Two Reviewers

I trust and anticipate with pleasure the work of two book reviewers with steady newspaper gigs – Eric Ormsby at the New York Sun, and Joshua Cohen at the Jewish Daily Forward. Ormsby is a poet, critic, and scholar of Islam, and I have often praised him here. His reviews are models of wit and concision, his literary taste is impeccable, and his proclivity is to celebrate, not demean. In a recent piece about Thomas Gray, the 18th-century English poet who wrote the immortal “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," Ormsby said:

“Gray was an amateur in the original sense; he cultivated only what he loved. But in matters of mortality he was no amateur. Born in 1716, the fifth of 12 children, he was the only one to survive infancy; he too almost died from a fit but his mother grabbed a pair of scissors, slit open one of his veins, and saved him. When Richard West, his closest friend, died suddenly in 1742, Gray was bereaved and mourned him in verse for a decade. That grief nourished the great `Elegy.’”

What an admirable way to link a writer’s life and work, and what a powerful insight into a great poem many of us thought we knew. In a poem called “Garter Snake,” Ormsby describes the snake as “moving the way a chance felicity/silvers the whole attention of the mind.” For me, his poems and reviews are such “chance felicities.”

Cohen is a fiction writer, though I don’t know his work. In a recent review of Conversation With Spinoza: A Cobweb Novel, by Goce Smilevski, Cohen writes:

“I suspect that the current Spinoza obsession in America has much to do with our need to justify our secularism, in substantiating it as not just a modern dereliction but as an actual European creed, with history behind it, the bona fide of ages of thought on the nature of man’s relationship with God. Smilevski, being an Eastern European, seems to find in Spinoza a similar assurance brought to bear on a different concern: In a Godless Europe in which democracy was never native, it has become necessary to find a religious course that allows one to respect all creation without recourse to laws that necessarily issue from divinity as unified in one supreme intelligence.”

It’s news to me that the United States is in the grips of a “Spinoza obsession,” though that can only be good news. Cohen deftly links Spinoza, religion, politics and history, all in three well written sentences, and while I’m not certain I agree with him, he made me think and enjoy the process of evaluating his thoughts.

Much of the work of both writers is available online, though the Forward seems to have cleaned out its archives recently. Go here for Ormsby and here for Cohen.