A Pillow-Book: Notes from a Reading Life

Drawn from the notebooks he kept over the course of forty years, A Pillow-Book provides a welcome opportunity to listen in on the conversation poet Michael O'Brien maintained with the world in all its ravishing and rebarbative complexity. That world includes the writers he most valued, the art he practiced so devotedly, the painters and filmmakers that stirred him, the nation that sometimes confounded him, and the city he moved through with such unstinting regard.

Consisting primarily of bri...