just judging his bio on the back flap

just judging his bio on the back flap, which includes the sentence

“The Josephine Baker Story is Ean’s third book for Sanctuary Press,

following his successful Born to Swing―The Story of Big Bands

and George Gershwin―His Life and Music”, you’d be excused

for assuming you held a piece of quality workmanship in your hands.

to be sure, ean wood is an above average writer,

capable of impressing one with his concinnity

of domino-like subordination, striking but not

flashy phrasing, and unexpected yet right on

conclusions, as in this paragraph from

the 2000 work in question:

“Heroine she may have been to a new generation of blacks, but she was increasingly out of sympathy with the new crusading attitude evolving in that American era of ‘black power.’ As she said in an interview printed in The Chicago Sunday Times in September 1970, ‘Don’t talk to me about black power. All power is power. I don’t like discrimination. I’m shocked when I hear our own people saying “black people this,”’ “black people that.” It just shows you we haven’t come very far. They’re so frightened of everything in America.’ Her own attitude was that race should be ignored, not asserted, and she missed the fact that this new rhetoric was simply the emergence of a new self-confidence which was then going through the period of overstatement common in all new movements.” (305)

yet, what transpired, at the author’s end,

the publisher’s, or both, to produce a book

with as many typos as this one has?

here are but eight, out of who knows how many in all:

“She was picked up from the Nelson Theater after the night’s performance by Fräulein Landshoff and a gentleman friend, and was and taken to the party.” (99)

“She won them back, though; facing them regally, she admonished them: ‘Je croyais, pourtant, être en France’ (I though I was still in France).” (139)

“On the first, night Joséphine made a point of greeting all of her guests personally, and entranced them by having a baby pig in a pen brought onto the small stage, picking it up and feeding it from an infant’s feeding-bottle.” (199)

“‘We love her assured, penetrating, emotional voice… and we do not tire of of that gentleness, that affecting desire to please, which in Joséphine is more touching than any coquetry…’” (203) [from an otherwise eloquent account of a performance by Colette]

“But these visits only served to make clearer them both how far they had drifted apart.” (217)

“As he was the only Jew in the school, most of whose pupils were, of course, Catholics.” (278)

“He followed up his call with a letter proposing that they married ― not in the conventional sense of setting up a home together, or even of making love, but married in spirit, each continuing to live a separate life, but each knowing that the other was there to lean on and share thoughts and feelings.” (306-307)

“Her eldest son, Akio, attempted to set her right, but she this only bewildered her further until at last she burst into tears, sobbing: ‘What’s going to become of us’” (313)

some of those yield their mistakes

only with repeated rereadings,

like curved grocery store products

that take the check-out clerk several swipes,

held at slightly varied angles,

before the laser groks their bar codes and beeps.

what’s on the page curves away from us,

even when we don’t realize it,

and so does what’s before us in real life.

our mistakes are often as inexplicable

as, up close, culled from the text they marred,

they are forgivable and harmless;

the plasticity of humanist understanding

trumps the rigid, unoriginal hand of grammar

time and time again, like the ocean flowing over enclosures

each time the tide comes in.

what a richness we’d lose, of unpredictable topography

demanding we grow toward the lows and bend over backward

to see all the highs, if everything were edited down to a shiny nub.

nothing planned can create such a beautiful thing,

nor break the mind into awareness so effectively,

as that which pricks with burrs picked up

on a walk through the tall grass outside

the home we can’t believe we’ve never lived inside.

ask ean wood, or the young up-and-comer joséphine baker:

“She was petrified with nerves before going on, but got through ‘Dinah’ on sheer guts, and her bravery won her a stand-in’s ovation.” (64)