Six Facets Of Light

by Ann Wroe

‘She’s a genius, I believe, because she lights up every subject she touches.’ Hilary Mantel

A Spectator Book of the Year

Goethe claimed to know what light was. Galileo and Einstein both confessed they didn’t. On the essential nature of light, and how it operates, the scientific jury is still out. There is still time, therefore, to listen to painters and poets on the subject. They, after all, spend their lives pursuing light and trying to tie it down.

Six Facets of Light is a series of meditations on this most elusive and alluring feature of human life. Set mostly on the Downs and coastline of East Sussex, the most luminous part of England, it interweaves a walker’s experiences of light in Nature with the observations, jottings and thoughts of a dozen writers and painters – and some scientists – who have wrestled to define and understand light. From Hopkins to Turner, Coleridge to Whitman, Fra Angelico to Newton, Ravilious to Dante, the mystery of light is teased out and pondered on. Some of the results are surprising.

By using mostly notebooks and sketchbooks, this book becomes a portrait of the transitoriness, randomness, swiftness, frustrations and quicksilver beauty that are the essence of light. It is a work to be enjoyed, pondered over, engaged with, provoked by; to be packed in the rucksack of every walker heading for the sea or the hills, or to be opened to bring that outside radiance within four dark town walls.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Nature

320 pages, Paperback

First published June 2, 2016

About the author

Ann Wroe is a journalist and author - working as Briefings and Obituaries editor of The Economist. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Royal Society of Literature and the English Association.

Reviews

[Mark Broadhead · Rating 3 out of 5]

Obviously influenced by Sebald's The Rings of Saturn. Where Rings of Saturn was set in Suffolk, Six Facets of Light centres around the South Downs. Where Sebald's prose flutters from topic to topic, seeking to hide the years of study behind each segue, Wroe's prose moves more like a series of Google searches than the mind hiding its efforts. I could perhaps Google to see if she did research her topics that way.

[Pat · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a magical book, to be read slowly, one chapter at a time. Each of the six essays explores light through the eyes, words and art of painters, poets and artists of all types. To quote the author, “It is a series of musings on light, complied from wondering, observations and associations made while walking the luminous Downs of southern England between Brighton and Eastbourne.” You don’t have to been to any of the places she mentions to begin to experience though your mind’s eye the glistening, glimmering, sparkling light she evokes.

The first chapter evokes the dazzling chalk white of the Downs that so influenced the work of the artist Eric Ravilious, poet John Clare and Victorian nature writer Richard Jeffries and many others. Wroe notices everything from the drops of dew on grass to great boulders of chalk on the beach which have fallen from the crumbling white cliffs.

Her prose is exquisite. In the chapter “Among the Birds” she describes how “birds, as they fly, carry brightness with them in the sheen of a breast and the turn of a wing.” She describes lark rise surprising her on an early morning walk. A sight that the poet Robert Blake found to be “ a moment of supernatural visitation ad inspiration.” In the chapter “Catch as Catch Can” she explores the struggles of painters to capture the effect of light.

This book is a meditation on light that leads you to open your eyes and become more aware of the play of light in your surroundings, to be more conscious of what you see and how you see.

[tara · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gem of a book. Definitely one to return to.

[Peter B Waddell · Rating 3 out of 5]

The poetic writing and meticulous detail slowly shifts in effect from sublime and profound and often beautiful to longeur/catalogue/thesis/obsession. Pity, as almost all sections reward in isolation.

[Carmen · Rating 2 out of 5]

The writing was good but I found myself getting bored and wondering how much longer each section was. I may go back to it, but probably not.

[Philip Weaver · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ann Wroe's love letter to light - looking at how light sparkles in the work of artists like Ravilious, Traherne, Blake, Coleridge, Whitman and many others - and in her own life and poems.
Ann is speaking at the Traherne Festival on 3 June 2017.
See the Traherne Association site for information.