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)

Buy it from your local inde­pen­dent book­store or sup­port this site by order­ing a copy from Amazon.