1/ “Signals at Sea,” a poem by Annie Dillard built of passages from Cugle’s Practical Navigation and published in Mornings Like This:

(If the flags in A’s hoist cannot be made out,
B keeps her answering pennant at the “Dip”
and hoists the signal “OWL” or “WCX.”)

CXL Do not abandon me.
A I am undergoing a speed trial.
D Keep clear of me - I am maneuvering
with difficulty.
F I am disabled. Communicate with me.
G I require a pilot.

P Your lights are out, or burning badly.
U You are standing into danger.
X Stop carrying out your intentions.
K You should stop your vessel instantly.
L You should stop. I have something
important to communicate.

R You may feel your way past me.

2/ “ROMEO AND JULIET,” a poem by Hannah Weiner built of passages from the International Code of Signals and published in The Code Poems (now available in Hannah Weiner’s Open House, a new selection of her poems edited by Patrick Durgin):

MFD Juliet: Try to enter
KZU Romeo: I am in difficulties; direct me how to steer
OOX Juliet: You should swing and enter stern first
HBK Romeo: What is the nature of the bottom or what kind of bottom have you?
HAY Juliet: Double bottom
FHR Romeo: Stern way. Going astern
LK Juliet: Go astern easy. Easy astern
ODI Romeo: I am going full speed
HC Juliet: It is not safe to go so fast
KZY Romeo: It is difficult to extricate
BK Juliet: Is anything the matter
VLA Romeo: Cock broken or damaged
EHR Juliet: What do the cost of repairs amount to?
DF Romeo: With some assistance I shall be able to set things to rights

This weekend the New York Times Book Review finally gets around to reviewing Annie Dillard’s The Maytrees. (You can read it now here.)

Julia Reed, the reviewer, likes the book, but it takes half the review before she’ll admit it. First she has to work her way through familiar complaints about Dillard’s vocabulary and the by now commonplace quotation from Eudora Welty’s 1975 Pilgrim at Tinker Creek review. But Reed gets there, grudgingly, eventually calling the book “a near great one.”

Marilynne Robinson’s review of Annie Dillard’s The Maytrees gets the cover of this week’s Washington Post Book World. The Post also features a funny interview of Dillard by Daniel Asa Rose. For more reviews of the novel, click here.

The Maytrees, Annie Dillard’s new novel, is out. An ever-expanding list of reviews follows. Annie read a passage of the novel for NPR and talked a little about the book (whose original subtitle was “A Romantic Comedy about Light Pollution”) in a Publishers Weekly interview. She did another interview with the Washington Post’s Daniel Asa Rose. A chapter of the book originally showed up as “The Two of Them” in the Nov ‘03 Harper’s.

Here’s the list of reviews:

+Washington Post Book World (by Marilynne Robinson)

+New York Times

+NYT Book Review

+Boston Globe

+LA Times

+SF Chronicle

+Slate

+BookPage

+Publishers Weekly

+New York Observer

+New York Daily News

+Miami Herald

+Seattle Times

+Cape Cod Times

+Cleveland Plain Dealer

+Chicago Tribune

+USA Today

+Hartford Courant

+San Diego Union-Tribune

+Washington Post (where Annie runs neck and neck with Toby Keith)

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