|
|
(knows she's famous / in a tiny, tragic way. / She's not / daft, / after all. - 'The Girl With The Ink-Stained Teeth'.)
It is impossible for me to tell if this is a 'good' book or not. All I know is that it often feels like Lindenberg is writing my ow...more
(knows she's famous / in a tiny, tragic way. / She's not / daft, / after all. - 'The Girl With The Ink-Stained Teeth'.)
It is impossible for me to tell if this is a 'good' book or not. All I know is that it often feels like Lindenberg is writing my own poems.
There's reading people's lips as they speak to you, standing slightly outside your body and wondering at these flesh-and-blood beings and the things they want to share with you.
'Losing Language: A Phrasebook'
....
He'll always be with you You don't have to try so hard
You're so brave I wonder what it's like when you're alone
You're so strong I can see you've showered
You've handled it with such grace You've done nothing that can't be repaired
Let me know if you need anything I won't come round again
....
There's working out what happens now, watching time stretch and shrink, watching things change, watching yourself change.
'Still Life With Movement'
Fruit ripens in
the argent bowl.
The pear's slow
blush comes
as the burnished
salmon spoils,
woolly eyes forget-
ful. The rabbit's
trapped soul swells,
fur amplified
in the convex
silver dish. On this
cedar table all
the quiet volition
of the world underway,
becoming, then
becoming anew.
And there are things that I feel, and things that I don't feel - things that make me curious about this woman, envious of her, sorry for her - things that I recognise, things that I don't understand, things that I want and things I am glad I do not have to have. Above all, there is observing and documenting, cataloguing and archiving. The difference between us, perhaps, is that I feel and then set free: Lindenberg feels and then memorialises.
'Catalogue of Ephemera'
You give me flowers resembling Chinese lanterns.
You give me hale, for yellow. You give me vex.
You give me lemons softened in brine and you give me cuttlefish ink.
You give me all 463 stairs of Brunelleschi’s dome.
You give me seduction and you let me give it back to you.
You give me you.
You give me an apartment full of morning smells—toasted bagel and black
coffee and the freckled lilies in the vase on the windowsill.
You give me 24-across.
You give me flowers resembling moths’ wings.
You give me the first bird of morning alighting on a wire.
You give me the sidewalk café with plastic furniture and the boys
with their feet on the chairs.
You give me the swoop of homemade kites in the park on Sunday.
You give me afternoon-colored beer with lemons in it.
You give me D.H. Lawrence,
and he gives me pomegranates and sorb-apples.
You give me the loose tooth of California, the broken jaw of New York City.
You give me the blue sky of Wyoming, and the blue wind through it.
You give me an ancient city where the language is a secret
everyone is keeping.
You give me a t-shirt that says all you gave me was this t-shirt.
You give me pictures with yourself cut out.
You give me lime blossoms, but not for what they symbolize.
You give me yes. You give me no.
You give me midnight apples in a car with the windows down.
You give me the flashbulbs of an electrical storm.
You give me thunder and the suddenly green underbellies of clouds.
You give me the careening of trains.
You give me the scent of bruised mint.
You give me the smell of black hair, of blond hair.
You give me Apollo and Daphne, Pan and Syrinx.
You give me Echo.
You give me hyacinths and narcissus. You give me foxgloves
and soft fists of peony.
You give me the filthy carpet of an East Village apartment.
You give me seeming not to notice.
You give me an unfinished argument, begun on the Manhattan-bound F train.
You give me paintings of women with their eyes closed.
You give me grief, and how to grieve.
So, I do not know if it is a good book. But it is a true book.(less)
|
Boy21
by
Matthew Quick (Goodreads Author)
|
|
So, at high school I hung out with jocks. I didn't meet a really smart boy until I went away to university. But I met a lot of well-built physically talented young men, and you know - those fleeting times are fleeting.
Anyway. All this has left me wit...more
So, at high school I hung out with jocks. I didn't meet a really smart boy until I went away to university. But I met a lot of well-built physically talented young men, and you know - those fleeting times are fleeting.
Anyway. All this has left me with a serious weakness for sports novels and movies. Don't even get me started on Friday Night Lights. 'Boy21' is a bit of a twist on the traditional sports novel though: the focus is on friendship, but not friendship that leads to the championship play-off. Rather, friendship that requires sacrifice and leads to healing.
I could recount the plot, but that seems pointless - try this instead. The thing that really touched me about the book was the relationship between Finley (the book's protagonist, the only white boy on his high school's basketball team, a kid with little natural talent but all the determination in the world) and his girlfriend Erin, the star player on the girl's team, and their hope - via a scholarship for Erin - to get out of their Irish-mob dominated neighbourhood on the outskirts of Philadelphia.
While for much of the book I felt like Quick was overreaching, in his descriptions of Finley and Erin together I felt a thrill of recognition. Here's Finley doing the classic think of your Mom, think of your Mom:
Sitting there on the grass, looking at her beautiful stomach, I start to think about making out with Erin, running my hands up and down her abs. So I have to think about where my pop's legs end just below the thigh -- his stumps, because that always wipes the sexy thoughts from my mind -- and, just like that, my head's right by the time the custodian opens the gym door and says we can come in.
Every year at the start of the basketball season, Finley and Erin break up so they can focus on their game. Every year, Erin asks if they can stay together. And Quick captures the beautiful bit of teenage boy reasoning, which I so remember from my youth (and, let's admit, my not-so-youth):
Erin and I have this conversation every year.
She argues that our schedules will keep us so busy that it won't even matter if we are together or not, but I believe that during basketball season, a romantic relationship is a distraction, and there's no way I can simply be friends with Erin. If I see her at lunch or before school or at my locker every day, I'll get horny, and I won't be able to focus one hundred percent on the season. I love Erin as much as I love basketball, which is a conflict of interest. And if we kiss on the roof or hold hands -- these things will most definitely take my mind off my goals. With schoolwork and Pop to take care of already, I can't mentally afford to have a girlfriend during basketball season.
As someone who was once pre-emptively dumped, I feel for Erin here. That 'conflict of interest' is a clincher - I can completely imagine a 17 year-old tossing that one out. The next paragraph though feels remarkably unrealistic, and captures the unevenness of this book for me:
I love making out with Erin, and holding her hand, and the peachy smell of her hair after she showers -- almost as much as I love the sweaty leather smell of a gym in winter, being part of a team, and working out with the guys. And while having a girlfriend and being on the team aren't mutually exclusive, both fill a need -- maybe the same need. Basketball and Erin make the rest of the world go away -- focus me, make me forget, and get the endorphins flowing. It's best to be addicted to one or the other. This will be the fourth season Erin and I have taken a break, and we've always gotten back together in the past, so why do I have such a strange, dreadful feeling tonight?
Because you're a dick, Finley, that's why. But I forgive you, because you're just a boy. And a authentic, confused, secretive, quiet teenage boy protagonist is a rare thing, and one to be grateful for, even in a slightly overworked setting.(less)
|
|
|
The Spirit Level contains my favourite of Heaney's work, the 'Mycenae Lookout' sequence, based on the stories of the Iliad
Some people wept, and not for sorrow - joy
That the king had armed and upped and sailed for Troy,
But inside me like struck sound ...more
The Spirit Level contains my favourite of Heaney's work, the 'Mycenae Lookout' sequence, based on the stories of the Iliad
Some people wept, and not for sorrow - joy
That the king had armed and upped and sailed for Troy,
But inside me like struck sound in a gong
That killing-fest, the life-warp and world-wrong
It brought to pass, still augured and endured.
I have loved Heaney's mixture of nature rhapsody, old English words (trindle, thrawn), family history and Irish history for years now. I have a thick collection on my shelves that I dip in and out of, but you get such a different feeling from reading a slim collection that is carefully put together, here spanning Heaney's life and experiences, from the Troubles to his childhood. This time round, it's the energy and the word-spills that capture me, as in these three poems.
The Rain Stick
Up-end the rain stick and what happens next
Is a music that you never would have known
To listen for. In a cactus stalk
Downpour, sluice-rash, spillage and backwash
Come flowing through. You stand there like a pipe
Being played by water, you shake it again lightly
And diminuendo runs through all its scales
Like a gutter stopping trickling. And now here comes
a sprinkle of drops out of the freshened leaves,
Then subtle little wets off grass and daisies;
Then glitter-drizzle, almost-breaths of air.
Up-end the stick again. What happens next
Is undiminished for having happened once,
Twice, ten, a thousand time before.
Who care if all the music that transpires
Is the fall of grit or dry seeds through a cactus?
You are like a rich man entering heaven
Through the ear of a raindrop. Listen now again.
A Dog was Crying Tonight in Wicklow Also
When human beings found out about death
They sent the dog to Chukwu with a message:
They wanted to be let back to the house of life.
They didn't want to end up lost forever
Like burnt wood disappearing into smoke
And ashes that get blown away to nothing.
Instead, they saw their souls in a flock at twilight
Cawing and headed back for the same old roosts
(The dog was meant to tell all this to Chukwu).
But death and human beings took second place
When he trotted off the path and started barking
At another dog in broad daylight just barking
Back at him from the far bank of a river.
And that was how the toad reached Chukwu first,
The toad who'd overheard in the beginning
What the dog was meant to tell. 'Human beings' he said,
(And here the toad was trusted absolutely),
'Human beings want death to last forever.'
Then Chukwu saw the people's souls in birds
Coming towards him like black spots off the sunset
To where there were no roosts or nests or trees
And his mind reddened and darkened all at once
And nothing that the dog would tell him later
Could change that vision. Great chiefs and great loves
Obliterating light, the toad in mud,
The dog crying out all night behind the corpse house.
Two Stick Drawings
1.
Claire O’Reilly used her granny’s stick -
A crook-necked one - to snare the highest briars
That always grew the ripest blackberries.
When it came to gathering, Persephone
Was in the halfpenny place compared to Claire.
She’d trespass and climb gates and walk the railway
Where sootflakes blew into convolvulus
And the train tore past with the stoker yelling
Like a balked king from his chariot.
2.
With its drover’s canes and blackthorns and ashplants,
The ledge of the back seat of my father’s car
Had turned into a kind of stick-shop window,
But the only one who ever window-shopped
Was Jim of the hanging jaw, for Jim was simple
And rain or shine he’d make his desperate rounds
From windscreen to back window, hands held up
To both sides of his face, peering and groaning.
So every now and then the sticks would be
Brought out for him and stood up one by one
Against the front mudguard; and one by one
Jim would take the measure of them, sight
And wield and slice and poke and parry
The unhindering air; until he found
The true extension of himself in one
That made him jubilant. He’d run and crow
Stooped forward, with his right elbow stuck out
And the stick held horizontal to the ground,
Angled across the front of him, as if
He were leashed to it and it drew him on
Like a harness rod of the inexorable. (less)
|
|
|
I read this collection the weekend that my life changed. It is due back at the library today, and it feels like a good time to be doing this again.
The thing I noticed about Simic's poems was how he drops you into them. This doesn't happen with all of...more
I read this collection the weekend that my life changed. It is due back at the library today, and it feels like a good time to be doing this again.
The thing I noticed about Simic's poems was how he drops you into them. This doesn't happen with all of them, and it is not a harsh or jarring experience, but often your eye falls on the first line and suddenly you are in the poem.
('A Letter')
Dear philosophers, I get sad when I think.
Is it the same with you?
('To Helen')
Tomorrow early I'm going to the doctor
In the blue suit and shirt you ironed.
Tomorrow I'm going to have my bones photographed
With my heart in its spiked branches.
Often, I would find myself liking half a poem, and not the other half, and then discovering that the two halves were necessary to each other and could not be considered alone. (This sounds obvious, yet it is with poetry more than anything else that I will happily cling to a couple of lines that have meaning and assign all the other words to oblivion.) 'Frightening Toys' for example: the last four lines kill me, while the beginning of the poem repulses me a little. But you need them all:
History practicing its scissor-clips
In the dark,
So everything comes out in the end
Missing an arm or leg.
Still, if that's all you've got
To play with today ...
This doll at least has a head,
And its lips were red!
Frame houses like grim exhibits
Lining the empty streets
Where a little girl sat on the steps
In a flowered nightgown, talking to it
It looked like a serious matter,
Even the rain wanted to hear about it,
So it fell on her eyelashes
And made them glisten.
I don't find Simic to be a beautiful or endearing poet - he's more coolly intellectual for me. Yet he has a way of phrasing images that puts them straight into my mind. This was especially the case with 'William and Cynthia' (again with that great parachuted-in opening):
Says she'll take him the the Museum
of Dead Ideas and Emotions.
Wonders that he hasn't been there yet.
Says it looks like a Federal courthouse
With its many steps and massive columns.
Apparently not many people go there
On such drizzly gray afternoons.
Says even she she gets afraid
In the large exhibition halls
With monstrous ideas in glass cases,
Naked emotions on stone pedestals
In classically provocative poses.
Says she doesn't understand why he claims
All that reminds him of a country fair.
Admits there's a lot of old dust
And the daylight is the color of sepia,
Just like this picture postcard
With its two lovers chastely embracing
Against a painted cardboard sunset.
And I am puzzled and intrigued by 'The White Room'
The obvious is difficult
To prove. Many prefer
The hidden. I did, too.
I listened to the trees.
They had a secret
Which they were about to
Make known to me,
And then didn't.
Summer came. Each tree
On my street had its own
Scheherazade. My nights
Were a part of their wild
Story-telling. We were
Entering dark houses,
More and more dark houses
Hushed and abandoned.
Therew as someone with eyes closed
On the upper floors.
The thought of it, and the wodner,
Kept me sleepless.
The truth is bald and cold,
Said the woman
Who always wore white.
She didn't leave her room much.
The sun pointed at one or two
Thinfs that had survived
The long night intact,
The simplest things,
Difficult in their obviousness.
They made no noise.
It was the kind of day
People describe as 'perfect'.
Gods disguising themselves
As black hairpins? A hand-mirror?
A comb with a tooth missing?
No! That wasn't it.
Just things as they are
Unblinking, lying mute
In that bright light,
And the trees waiting for the night.
Casting about online when I first read the collection, I found Simic's poem 'The North'. I have been wanting to share it as I have been sharing other poems, but for various reasons I have not. And so I have decided to put it here, to bring the time I have spent with this book to a close, and to open up new books and new times in its place.
The ancients knew the sorrows of exile:
If you weren't hanged, they'd pack you off
To the far ends of the Earth,
To go on grumbling, writing endless petitions
That would never reach the Emperor.
The North always the place of punishment:
Unforgiving cold, rags on your back,
And the company of a few sullen barbarians
At day's end when the wind parts the clouds
And the stars seem to be mocking.
Every few years a garbled message from home.
Memory paying a call in the wee hours:
A mother's face; the company of merry friends
At the long table in the garden;
Their wives baring their throats in the
afternoon heat…
"The sages suffered, too, exiled from truth,"
That's what you tell yourself…
Not many are meant to retrace their steps
And behold the splendors of the capital
Even more seductive than when you knew them.
The North always the place of punishment.
Deep snow. Blue-veined trees and bushes
Rising against the pink-colored morning sky…
So that briefly, in that one spell,
Your heartache hushes at the beauty of it. (less)
|
|
|
For years I've loved the name of this book, but never known who it was by or what it was about.
Stella Gibbons (1902-1989) studied journalism at University College London, then worked for newspapers for about 10 years. It was while writing book revie...more
For years I've loved the name of this book, but never known who it was by or what it was about.
Stella Gibbons (1902-1989) studied journalism at University College London, then worked for newspapers for about 10 years. It was while writing book reviews that she noticed the growing number of rural numbers in the Lawrentian style, groaning with laboured sexual metaphors and metaphysical musings.
Cold Comfort Farm, Gibbon's first novel, is a parody of this style of writing - passages of the texts, marked with **, are pure sarcasm. But Gibbons also writes with the elegance and lightness of Waugh (perhaps less full-creamy) and Wodehouse, beautifully capturing voices and, in particular, describing place and landscape.
Flora Poste - cool, calm, strong-minded - is orphaned at 19, and decides to take her 100 pounds a year and go live in the depths of Sussex with her mysterious relations the Starkadders, ruled by the mysterious and mighty figure of Aunt Ada Doom. A figure very like Austen's Emma, Flora sets about putting the Starkadders to rights - but unlike Emma, she is not made to learn anything about herself, and receives an easy and happy ending.
The best parts of the book might be the descriptions of the infamously odd Starkadders, or fondly disdainful observations about bright young London society (reading books written in the 1920s and 30s often has the effect of making me think we are far more strait-laced today than we beli've our recent ancestors to have been). Like Miranda's relationship wih "A Wrinkle in Time' in Rebecca Stead's 'When You Reach Me', Flora has her own vade mecum which she relies on in sticky moments, and Gibbons has a terrifically snobbish couple of sentences about book sharing:
'Flora did indeed know. The quote was from Shelley's Adonais. One of the disadvantages of almost universal education was that fact that all kinds of persons acquired a familiarity with one's favourite writers. It gave one a curious feeling; it was like seeing a drunken stranger wrapped in one's dressing-gown.'(less)
|
|
|
I feel like I need a standard disclaimer for these poetry reviews. I'm groping my way into the world of poetry; I didn't study it at school or university. As a result, all I can do is read and think and read and think, trying to slowly push my way ou...more
I feel like I need a standard disclaimer for these poetry reviews. I'm groping my way into the world of poetry; I didn't study it at school or university. As a result, all I can do is read and think and read and think, trying to slowly push my way outwards and backwards, tackling the things I find hard or abtruse or unpleasing as well as the poems that slip into me easily, delighting my ear and catching at my heart.
I picked this book up off the shelf at the library for the same reasons I pick up almost any poetry book - because it's slim, and because I trust the publisher. Originally published in 1934, Bennett extended the book in the 1950s to add Andrew Marvell to her original line-up of Donne, Herbert, Vaughn and Crashaw, but, as she says in her foreword, 'in some ways, [her] approach may be said to belong to the nineteen-thirties'.
As a child of the post-modern age, there is something I find distinctly soothing about art criticism from the 1930s and 1940s. It is solid and unfashionable; it is based on close reading; it avoids flights of fancy, its rhetoric is plainly stated and the writers rarely struggle to assign labels like 'good', 'bad' and 'mediocre'. I find this all rather restful.
So, what did I learn from Mrs Bennett, Fellow of Girton College? Well, I learned to read slowly enough to enjoy the poems from this period (the shorter ones, anyway - god knows if I'll ever be able to tackle Shelley and Byron). I learned that John Donne is sexy, that George Herbert is godly, that Henry Vaughn is an unabashed reworker of other poets' writing, but also a man who 'expresses himself in terms of light and stars and running water; these were the stuff of his daily experience.' That Richard Crashaw, with his icky lingering over bodily fluids and wounds, gives me the creeps. And I found out that Andrew Marvell is - well, if he was a scientist, I would call him a poet. Make of that what you will.
One of the thing that startled me about reading into this period (I picked up Helen Gardner's anthology of metaphysical poetry to dip in and out of along the way) was the sheer sensuousness of it. Tears and blood, hair and milk, dew and grass and flowers, eyes and hands and mouths.
From Marvell's The Garden
What wondrous life is this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine, and curious peach,
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons, as I pass,
Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass.
Crashaw on St Theresa's consummation of her martyrdom
O what delight, when reveal'd LIFE shall stand
And teach they lipps heav'n with his hand;
One wish thou now maist to thy wishes
Heap up thy consecrated kisses
or from The Weeper
The dew no more will weep
The primrose's pale cheek to deck;
The dew no more will sleep
Nuzzled in the lily's neck;
Much rather would it tremble here,
And leave them both to be thy tear.
Herbert, in Dulnesse, comparing a poet writing for love of a woman to a poet such as he, writing for the love of God, with the same intensity of emotion and physicality:
The wanton lover in a curious strain
Can praise his fairest fair;
And with quaint metaphors her curled hair
Curl o’re again.
Thou art my lovelinesse, my life, my light,
Beautie alone to me:
Thy bloudy death and undeserv’d, makes thee
Pure red and white.
Or Herbert again, chafing under the collar:
I know the ways of Pleasure, the sweet strains,
The lullings and the relishes of it;
The propositions of hot blood and brains;
What mirth and music mean; what love and wit
Have done these twenty hundred years, and more:
I know the projects of unbridled store:
My stuff is flesh, not brass; my senses live,
And grumble oft, that they have more in me
Than he that curbs them, being but one to five:
Yet I love thee.
Donne encapsulated for me this surprise that God and physical love could be written about in the same ways. From Holy Sonnet XIV
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you'enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish me.
And I think the following lines, from Elegie - Going to bed', are my most favourite thing I have read this past week
Licence my roving hands, and let them go,
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America! my new-found-land,
My kingdom, safeliest when with one man mann’d,
My Mine of precious stones, My Empirie,
How blest am I in this discovering thee!
[And by the by, I learned a wonderful new thing. In one of Herbert's poems there's the lines 'For, if I imp my wing on thine / Affliction shall advance the flight in me.' To 'imp', in falconry, is to 'engraft feathers on a damaged wing, so as to restore and improve the powers of flight'. Lovely.](less)
|
|
|
Surely spring has been returned to me, this time
not as a lover but a messenger of death, yet
it is still spring, it is meant tenderly.
A slim little book that circles around death, and loss, particularly women loved and forsaken or lost: the voice of t...more
Surely spring has been returned to me, this time
not as a lover but a messenger of death, yet
it is still spring, it is meant tenderly.
A slim little book that circles around death, and loss, particularly women loved and forsaken or lost: the voice of the poet herself (presumably), mixed with that of Eurydice, Dido, Penelope, and the men that left them; Aeneas who has enough love already in the very blood that runs in his veins; Orpheus (I have lost my Eurydice, / I have lost my lover, / and suddenly I am speaking French / and it seems to me I have never been in better voice) and the unnamed 'you' that a number of the call-and-answer poems address.
I find Gluck's poems here lurched for me between transcendent and strangely cliched: sometimes the words spring off the page, and sometimes they feel well-used and unremarkable - well-known thoughts delivered in well-known words. And yet a number of the poems did sing out to me, particularly those around Dido. I've always had a soft spot for Dido and been appalled at her fate: a strong women, the leader of her people, horse-traded by two goddesses, finding love in a cave on the mountainside, having a brief period of ecstasy and then having the story come in and rip her love and her life away. It always felt so dreadfully unfair. Why could Aeneas have just not landed his damn ship someplace else?
So, 'The Queen of Carthage'
Brutal to love,
more brutal to die.
And brutal beyond the reaches of justice
to die of love.
In the end, Dido
summoned her ladies in waiting
that they might see
the harsh destiny inscribed for her by the Fates.
She said, “Aeneas
came to me over the shimmering water;
I asked the Fates
to permit him to return my passion,
even for a short time. What difference
between that and a lifetime: in truth, in such moments,
they are the same, they are both eternity.
I was given a great gift
which I attempted to increase, to prolong.
Aeneas came to me over the water: the beginning
blinded me.
Now the Queen of Carthage
will accept suffering as she accepted favor:
to be noticed by the Fates
is some distinction after all.
Or should one say, to have honored hunger,
since the Fates go by that name also.”
And then most of all, 'The Burning Heart'
"... No sadness
is greater than in misery to rehearse
memories of joy ..."
Ask her if she regrets anything
I was
promised to another -
I lived with someone.
You forget these things when you're touched.
Ask how he touched her.
His gaze touched me
before his hands touched me.
Ask how he touched her.
I didn't ask for anything;
everything was given.
Ask her what she remembers.
We were hauled into the underworld.
I thought
we were not responsible
any more than we were responsible
for being alive. I was
a young girl, rarely subject to censure:
then a pariah. did I change that much
from one day to the next?
If I didn't change, wasn't my action
in the character of that young girl?
Ask her what she remembers.
I noticed nothing, I noticed
I was trembling.
Ask her if the fire hurts.
I remember
we were together.
And gradually I understood
that though neither of us ever moved
we were not together but profoundly separate.
Ask her if the fire hurts.
You expect to live forever with your husband
in fire more durable than the world.
I suppose this wish was granted,
where we are now being both
fire and eternity.
Do you regret your life?
Even before I was touched, I belonged to you;
you had only to look at me. (less)
|
|
|
Sebald's 'After Nature' had strong overtones of my of my favourite A.S. Byatt novel's, 'The Biographer's Tale'. Like Byatt, Sebald threads his way through three lives; the 16th century German painter Matthias Grunewald, the 18th century explorer/scie...more
Sebald's 'After Nature' had strong overtones of my of my favourite A.S. Byatt novel's, 'The Biographer's Tale'. Like Byatt, Sebald threads his way through three lives; the 16th century German painter Matthias Grunewald, the 18th century explorer/scientist Georg Wilhelm Steller, and a contemporary narrator who stands in for Sebald himself, a German in England in the 20th century.
Through the three stories, Sebald tackles intertwined themes of memory, culture, history, migration in both straightforward and glancing ways. The first two poems are sometimes very beautiful, occasionally visceral - the last is less so, perhaps because it doesn't have the mystery of the far-past.
From the section of Stellar:
On the other side of the river, in the famous
botanical gardens of the Marine Hospital,
Stellar escapes the city's bustle.
Neatly he walks the paths
between the flowerbeds, marvels at
the hothouses, filled with tropical plants,
learns one new name after another
and is almost beside himself
with so much hope
when, from the half-shadow
of the mustard tree by the aviary,
the Patriarch of Novgorod,
Archbishop Theophon, steps towards him
with a tiny yellow parakeet in his hand,
and in the course of a Latin conversation
tells him the legend from the region of Dolyi,
which relates that God quite suddenly
and as though out of the blue came
into being on a lungwort leaf.
It's hard to judge a translation, I guess, but I'm not entirely sure though why this had to be a prose poem. I think it could have been just as moving, and a little less jolting, without all the line breaks to navigate.(less)
|
|
|
|
I believe this makes it official. George R.R. Martin has no fucking idea how to finish this series.
|
"You know - it maybe should have been a graphic novel from the start.
"
|
Sign in with Facebook
to:
to:
to:
to:
