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By April Ossmann Virginia Woolf, in her memorable anti-introduction to Mrs. Dalloway, makes the following argument. “The author's mind has another peculiarity which is also hostile to introductions. It is as inhospitable to its offspring as the hen sparrow is to hers. Once the young birds can fly, fly they must; and by the time they have fluttered out of the nest the mother bird has begun to think perhaps of another brood. In the same way once a book is printed and published it ceases to be the property of the author; he commits it to the care of other people; all his attention is claimed by some new book which not only thrusts its predecessor from the next but has a way of subtly blackening its character in comparison with its own.” Though one is ordinarily inclined
to view Woolf’s proclamations on the human condition as infallible, one is
inclined to question whether authors are not, in point of fact, a bit more
sentimental than hen sparrows are. Truth to say, in considering local author
April Ossmann’s newly published collection of poems, Anxious Music, one
positively hopes they are. The reason for our hope is that Ossmann, the long
time director of Farmington based, and nationally celebrated Alice James Books,
has been something of a day care provider, foster parent, and tutor, to the
chicks of so many other birds, that we cannot help but hope that the publication
of a volume of her own verse is the source of some lingering, and well deserved
pleasure. |
