Thirteen Ways of Looking Colum McCann Random House, 2015; 256pp The first words we read in Colum McCann’s 2015 collection of stories are Wallace Stevens’s: “Among twenty snowy mountains / The only moving thing / Was the eye of the blackbird.” Stevens’s poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” provides the epigraphs for each of the short chapters in McCann’s title story, and an oblique way in to understanding its philosophical intricacies. Its haiku-like fragments dictate the reader’s focus in ways that are continually refreshing and unexpected: “The river is moving,” he writes; “The blackbird must be flying.” “When the blackbird flew out of sight / It marked the edge / Of one of many circles.” In the same way that Stevens’s blackbird is often just glimpsed, the tiniest of details in the vastness of nature, so McCann draws attention to the poetic detail at the edge of the frame, the impulse or act that might hold the key to explaining a significant event. The event in question is the apparently random murder of an 82-year-old judge yards from his home on the Upper East Side. The story, suspended between the judge’s interior life and the geometry of his murder, captured obliquely […]