The arrival of 2005 was greeted with an unending series of images of an inexorable wave of destruction, something perhaps never before viewed by so many in such agonizing detail. An easy sunny morning for fishermen, churchgoers, and tourists dawned; then the sea rose into the air and pressed ashore with a speed and intensity that guaranteed the destruction of all it could reach. It dragged its victims away, only to return with even greater force to crush what remained.

How does one respond to such a calamity, especially with sensibilities dulled by repeated TV images? Some rush to help, others send money—and writers write. Frequently, though, quickly written responses are funneled through sentiment or political anger, easy answers when the mind is overwhelmed. A new collection of poetry, In the Arms of Words: Poems for Tsunami Relief, edited by Amy Ouzoonian, avoids these simple responses and gathers a strong group of poems by about one hundred poets in a beautifully bound volume. Poets represented include local favorites such as Donald Lev, Roberta Gould, and Sparrow, as well as the more famous, Diane di Prima, Ellen Bass, Marge Piercy, Marilyn Chin, and others among them.

The verse can be divided into several categories: poems of solace, poems of loss, poems in the voices of the victims, and poems that were written before the tsunami but relate to the power of nature to confound human life or provoke the range of emotion so necessary to comprehend the incomprehensible.

In the first stanza to her lyrical poem "Basket of Figs," Ellen Bass opens her arms to the sufferer: "Bring me your pain, love. Spread / It out like fine rugs, silk sashes, / Warm eggs, cinnamon / And cloves in burlap sacks." Evocative images of home and love continue, becoming a rich listing of appreciation for what has been lost. Finally the poet assumes the role of caretaker, sheltering the wounded "as a great animal might / carry a small one in the private / cave of the mouth."

The voices of the victims are heard in several poems. The prolific poet Lyn Lifshin writes as a mother speaking to her daughter in "We Were on a Train and the Train Screeched." These personal recollections are not devastating. Many poems have spiritual or other uplifting emotional tones. In one of the longer poems in the volume, "Not Our Sea," Jennifer Browne sails through the world of the tourist-observer into the experience of the lost, conveying the extraordinary difficulty of reconciling images we can see with the enormity of the occasion. Oddly, it is her light touch that lends emotional gravity to the poem, capturing the chasm between the observer and the observed, and immediate recognition on the reader's part.

Roberta Gould's "Miracle" stands out as a restrained, poetic slap at the powers who remain above the fray of poverty and destruction. The biblical simplicity of her first lines—"There is nothing to do but / Give to the poor / They abound as fish did / Even the division of bread / Into crumbs gives something"—belies the harshness of the poem's later condemnation.

The volume exceeds expectations with poems like Marilyn Chin's haiku-like sequence "Clear White Stream," David Oliveira's "Spring," Donald Lev's "Something for the New Year," "ellipses on the carpet" by James Warner, "Gathering in the North Wind" by Patricia Wellingham-Jones, and "total eclipse, new year: 2005" by Eve Packer.

The book is published both as a $16 paperback and a $30 collector's edition—hand-sewn, numbered, and signed by the editor. All proceeds from sales go to the International Rescue Committee for Relief and Aid of Survivors of Tsunami Devastation. It's a valuable aid for healing, in more ways than one.

When is a memoir not a memoir?

When it's written by a best-selling author so intensely private that he's never done a book tour, a signing, or even written under his "real" name. Trevanian is, like Christo and Madonna, an infamous one-name personality. But he shuns the spotlight, preferring the anonymity of life in the rural Basque region of France to center stage as a Big Name Author.

His best-known book was The Eiger Sanction (of Clint Eastwood movie fame) a spy thriller he wrote as a spoof of the James Bond frenzy of the '70s. He's written many books in his 30-year literary career, under several names and in widely ranging styles. His legions of fans will be thrilled to read this first-personal tale of the elusive and brilliant Trevanian. The Crazyladies of Pearl Street is the real story, at last. Or is it?

The story is told from the viewpoint of a spirited boy named Jean-Luc LaPointe, son of Ruby, a vivacious flapper, and Ray, a smart-dressing con man who's unable to accept the pull of the domestic ball and chain. The book opens on St. Patrick's Day 1936; Ray's just convinced Ruby to bring Jean-Luc and his sister Anne Marie to start over as a family in an apartment in Albany's Irish ghetto. But when they arrive, he's not there. They find party decorations and a note that Ray's gone to find a green cake.

He never comes back. Moored on Pearl Street by poverty and hobbled by Ruby's recurring "lung condition," survival is a struggle. Food is scarce, luxuries are nonexistent, and the neighborhood boys are ferocious. But Jean-Luc's a clever kid, his mother's "good right hand," and heir to her infamous "French and Indian temper," a gift that saves him from the bullying of children and adults alike.

His mother is a spunky survivor given to scrambled sayings like "Believe me you" and "Shrimp and save." She's an embarrassment to her son, and a secret burden; he'll be the one who'll tow their ship to the shore, she repeatedly declares. He'll be a doctor or a professor—never mind that he'll undoubtedly have to leave school as soon as he's able to work. The arrival of World War II strains further at their finances, but adds immeasurably to Jean-Luc's growing imagination. Radio war coverage thrills him, and he stages elaborate private theatricals, the genesis, perhaps, of spy novels to come. But his most persistent fantasy is about running away.

The neighborhood assortment of crazyladies populate the book without contributing much to its central theme of mother-son duty—though Jean-Luc's neighbors would add his mother to the crazylady list. Ruby eventually marries again, liberating Jean-Luc from captain duty, but sadly, she's become too embittered to enjoy this turn of fortune. And her son abandons her, as he always knew he would, to embark on the life of adventure he'd later mine for literary gold.

Trevanian's true identity is the subject of much conjecture: He's a former government operative, he's Robert Kennedy, he's an alternate pen name for Robert Ludlum. It's no surprise that The Crazyladies of Pearl Street is anything but a straightforward confessional. The book is officially classified as an autobiographical novel, and in a somewhat paranoid author's note, Trevanian declares he's claiming the characters and names are fictional in order to "thwart the litigious impulses for which Americans have become renowned." His true story at last? Maybe.

Ultimately, it's such a good read that verité doesn't matter. Trevanian fans will treasure this book's insights into the forces that formed the gifted storyteller, but even the uninitiated will enjoy it as a insightful, heartfelt evocation of a Depression-era Albany and a family in difficult times.

Alison is All That with a bag of truffles, gorgeous and smart. But it doesn't take long before her ventures into the so-called adult world of high fashion modeling lead her to discover that looks, even combined with brains, are no guarantee of any sort of safety. An adventurous soul–"I wanted to live like music," she tells us—her trust is badly broken by a Parisian mogul who uses her, abuses her, and kicks her to the curb without a second thought.

Recovering in New York, she takes a temp job with an advertising firm and meets Veronica—a "strange little figure," decades older and clad in plaid, a "nobody" in the eyes of the glitzy universe that Alison will soon re-inhabit. But despite Veronica's lack of status and Alison's reentry into the modeling game, theirs becomes a friendship that somehow lodges deeper in Alison's soul than her connections with the young and trendy. For all her 1980s glam, Alison's most redemptive relationship begins while word processing on the night shift.

And 20 years later, the older and wiser Alison who is telling us of these events—worn down with aches and pains and hepatitis C, as cynical as she once was naïve—finds that Veronica's presence has resonated in her life, a grounding point for reflections on love, friendship, family, and men.

Veronica, we learn, met a frightening end: She contracted AIDS from her bisexual lover, became steadily more irascible, and died with just her cat for company, with Alison as one of the very few people who still cared.

Mary Gaitskill has lived on both the right and left banks of the Hudson, in Ulster County as well as her novel's Manhattan. Her previous works include a novel, Two Girls Fat and Thin, and two widely praised and provocative story collections, Bad Behavior and Because They Wanted To. (As we went to press, Veronica's nomination for the National Book Award was announced.)

Gaitskill is a sensual writer in the broadest possible way, a mistress of metaphor: Music has colors, scenes evoke sensations, gestures or phrases evoke vivid, almost hallucinatory imagery. The voice of Alison's mother "ran and jumped, as if it were being chased by a devil with a pitchfork." A club is a "great night flower of fun, open and dark like a giant lily swarming with drunken fairies." Gaitskill's earthiness keeps this tendency from drifting off into the ether, and the story of Alison's life in the fast lane rocks along with a gathering depth, revealing much about the way human beings live together, or fail to.

Body image, homophobia, social class, aging, death, the fashion industry and the party life, how our families of birth continue to shape our lives as adults: This is a book that leads the reader to reflect on all kinds of topics and their interconnections.

Alison is a wonderful, multifaceted character. Beautiful and bright she may be, but not in a supercilious, above it all sort of way. She relates the circumstances that happened to her, largely as a result of being what is considered "beautiful," with a certain ironic distance; she's anything but shallow. Shallow people don't approach life so openly. Though her first encounters with Veronica are tinged with contempt, Veronica's offbeat, dead-on responses aren't lost on her as they would be on a vacuous bimbo or a materialistic creep:

"Imagine ten pictures of this conversation. In nine of them, she's the fool and I'm the one who has something. But in the tenth, I'm the fool and it's her show now. For just a second, that's the picture I saw." It is not a picture a vapid or cruel girl would ever glimpse.

I was 19 and hitchhiking across Europe. I'd thumbed my way from London to Rome, but hadn't prepared myself for the journey, other than to ready myself to greet the unexpected. I'd seen photographs of the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo, but this brief dip into the waters of art history hadn't prepared me for the oft-touted "wonders that were Rome," until a single wrong turn on an empty side street catapulted me back in time. Several centuries of Italian history merged with my own personal history to create a memory that I carry with me to this day. That is the power of architectural history. It is also part of the power of Byrne Fone's new book, Historic Hudson: An Architectural Portrait, published by distinguished regional publisher Black Dome Press.

There are many reasons, great and small, for reading Fone's profusely illustrated book, the first (but not foremost) being the generous number of historic photographs that accompany his text. Another compelling reason for reading this history of the city of Hudson is the sound of the past as it rings in the reader's ears, much as it must have done during the era of bell ringers and town criers, or when one of the Proprietors, Hudson's original master builders, struck a heavy blow against a wooden post to herald the noon hour.

Fone is an elegant writer. His sentences glide over the page like tall ships with stately masts as he tells the story of this architecturally distinguished New York community, founded in 1793 by New England Quaker merchants and whalers. They navigate the story of the rise and fall and rise of a great, though small, American city. Fone paints a vivid picture of Hudson—one of our nation's first planned communities, according to the author—from its heyday in 1784 as New York State's second most active seaport to the twisted tourism of its infamous houses of prostitution, wildly popular from the 1930s to the 1950s. Somewhere between the sloops of the whalers and the stoops of Hudson's early Dutch settlers, Fone relates a delightful story about a brief visit to the city by American novelists Henry James and Edith Wharton in 1901; they were turned away from dinner at the Worth Hotel because of the French poodle they had brought along. Needless to say, James and his party found dinner elsewhere, at a "cook shop" down the street, whose hospitality they described as "touchingly, winningly, unconditional."

Fast forward to today. Hudson is enjoying another revival as an important antiques center. Past and present have blended here to create a perfect recipe for economic and preservationist success. The heart of Byrne Fone's book is the city of Hudson's scores of architecturally distinguished buildings: its Nantucket-style saltboxes, Federal, Greek Revival, Gothic Revival, mid- and late- century Victorians, and other styles, dubbed by one modern architectural historian a "dictionary of American architectural design." In Hudson's churches, meeting halls, shop windows, mansions, and working-class homes is writ the changing face of America's small cities. This is no mean feat when one considers that other towns and cities in the Hudson Valley and Catskill High Peaks region are losing their architectural fabric at an alarming rate.

Like John Ashbery, who plucks poetry seemingly out of thin air, and whose foreword graces Byrne Fone's spiritually inspired book, I recognize the hostile instinct in some individuals to destroy what is "old and distinguished," but I choose instead to celebrate with the author of Historic Hudson and readers of his book "a whole range of small forgotten things...things intensely Hudsonian, more than Hudsonian." Things intensely American.