DISCOVERIES

Wideawake Field

Poems

Eliza Griswold

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 76 pp., $23

THE poems in this debut collection are explorations of what Eliza Griswold, a journalist and poet, calls in her poem “Hope” “the unclenched heart asking what now.” Loneliness, the many failures in communication, the distractions of ambition are her subjects. More people leave (the end of love, death) in her poems than return. Some of the poems are rough and straightforward, youthful in their toughness; others remind a reader of William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence” and “Songs of Experience” -- sweet, simple, mature. “Let us tumble. / Let us laugh at our grip. / If these are last days / let them not catch us sleeping / but awake in this field, and ready.”

On Being Ill

Virginia Woolf, introduction by Hermione Lee

Paris Press: 64 pp., $20

VIRGINIA WOOLF lived with severe headaches, fevers, faints, arrhythmia, insomnia and depression (“melancholia”) her entire life. She was frequently prescribed the sedative chloral, as well as digitalis, veronal and potassium bromide. She was forced by doctors to take rest cures, which often precluded writing or any excitement whatsoever. “On Being Ill” was written in 1925, when Woolf was 43 (“Mrs. Dalloway” and “The Common Reader” had been published earlier that year), for T.S. Eliot’s New Criterion, appearing in the January 1926 issue along with stories by Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence and Gertrude Stein and essays by Cocteau and Ada Leverson. In July 1930, the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press published it in pamphlet form, with art by Virginia’s sister Vanessa Bell.

Hermione Lee writes in her introduction that Virginia believed her illnesses were “partly mystical. Something happens in my mind.” “On Being Ill” is, indeed, a strange essay, full of fabulous, floating images and small conversations between the author’s sick and healthy selves, reminiscent, Lee writes, of De Quincey’s essays on illness. Meditations on petals falling from a rose or “the heavy sunflower, who proudly acknowledges the sun at midday and perhaps at midnight rebuffs the moon” sound almost Shakespearean, as if Woolf, in her mystical state, were returning to the very roots of her language. One of the great joys of this essay is watching the writer settle into and explore a state of mind that has become familiar and, therefore, less terrifying to her over time: “That snowfield of the mind, where man has not trodden, is visited by the cloud.”

Life on the Mississippi

Mark Twain, introduction by Bill McKibben

Modern Library Classics: 390 pp., $9.95 paper

STARTING when he was 22, Samuel Clemens (he did not adopt the pseudonym Mark Twain until the Civil War years, when he settled in Virginia City, Nev., and began writing for newspapers and magazines) worked for four years as a Mississippi River pilot. “The loneliness of this solemn, stupendous flood is impressive -- and depressing,” he later wrote in “Life on the Mississippi”(1883). “League after league, and still league after league, it pours its chocolate tide along, between its solid forest walls, its almost untenanted shores ... majestic, unchanging sameness of serenity, repose, tranquillity, lethargy, vacancy -- symbol of eternity, realization of the heaven pictured by priest and prophet, and longed for by the good and thoughtless!”

Such passages are quintessential Twain -- incantations into which he packs all the disparate, diametrically opposed qualities of human beings and their endless longings. In his descriptions of the river, the writer placed all his favorite contradictions side by side: The book is a kind of tipping point between darkness and light, happiness and despair, in his writing life. Twain was proud of himself, Bill McKibben writes in his introduction, for learning the river and becoming a good pilot. The book is imbued with that confidence.