Someplace new

The Promise by Anne Weisgarber

Just before I went on holiday I did a supermarket sweep for my kindle. The result was a random selection of books: serious, frivolous, fiction, non-fiction, classic, new. I can't remember why I chose 'The Promise' - perhaps it was a linked recommendation or it was on a list somewhere. I certainly couldn't remember anything about it and the problem with kindles is that there is no picture of the book cover, no blurb on the back or quotes from reviewers. Your only option is to read the book. And so it was that I started 'The Promise' without preconceptions.

The plot is slight but absorbing and you cannot tell which way it will end until it does. There are bright, fresh descriptions of a landscape I do not know and the people who lived there. Salt air leaks out of the book and clings to your fingertips as you read. It is about love, of course, but love looked at from many different angles so that it becomes anguish, fear, jealousy, courage. I want you to read this book too, so that you can wonder at the power of a writer to evoke a lost world. It will win prizes, I am sure of that, so read 'The Promise' now before it becomes famous and everyone has told you what to think about it.

Death's Other Kingdom

Gamel Woolsey was on the very edge of the Bloomsbury circle, she loved Llewelyn Powys (who was married to Alyse Gregory) but subsequently married Gerald Brenan (who loved Dora Carrington who loved Lytton Strachey) and helped bring up Miranda, Gerald's illegitimate daughter. Her early life was tragic and later on she became isolated and withdrawn, dying in 1968 from breast cancer, but in the thirties it was a happy time when she lived with Gerald in a small village outside Malaga. I came to this complicated life after reading "Death's Other Kingdom", published in 1939, and wondering about the author.

The book starts with an idyllic description of a day in their Spanish home in 1936 but quickly moves to the drama of fires in the distance, the city of Malaga burning at the start of the Civil War. Most of the foreign community leave immediately but Gerald and Gamel decide to stay, believing that they can save their house and protect their small community of servants and friends. Gamel writes a conscientious eye witness account and describes the descent into fear, violence and anarchy with great compassion, always trying to understand the motivations of people as they burn houses and kill their neighbours. At first, with my limited understanding of the brutality of the Civil War, I thought that her description was naive but I was wrong because the simplicity of the images are piercing in a way that more complex analysis can never achieve. Gamel writes with a profound love of the Spanish people and now, after finishing the book, I am left with a sense of grief for that lost Spain.

I fly to Malaga on Thursday and I can't wait to see the blue colours of the Mediterranean but there will be, at the back of my mind, those vivid descriptions of the flames as the city burned in the first frenzy of the Civil War.

No man is an island

We have been away.

We found sunshine, good food and time together as a family. I am very grateful for all of those things, especially the time together, and this was thrown into sharp relief by the news of the bomb attack in Boston.

I immediately thought of my friend, Naomi, who has just moved to that beautiful city, and of my readers who live there, or have family and friends who are affected.

Keep safe, my friends, keep safe.

*****

No Man Is An Island

No man is an island,

Entire of itself.

Each is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less.

As well as if a promontory were.

As well as if a manor of thine own

Or of thine friend's were.

Each man's death diminishes me,

For I am involved in mankind.

Therefore, send not to know

For whom the bell tolls,

It tolls for thee.

John Donne

'Silence is of different kinds'

The New Governess
Thomas Ballard (1836 - 1908)

*****

Villette
Charlotte Bronte

'Villette' is a study of love by Lucy Snowe, the loneliest of heroines, who recounts her life and examines the relationships of the people around her.

Lucy observes the love of a son for his mother, a father for his daughter, the faithful love of the bereaved, devotion to God and the poisonous love of money. As the story develops a conventional courtship and marriage is contrasted with a surreptitious affair which ends in elopement. Every relationship is a source of sound and light but Lucy herself is a point of silence and darkness, alone and unloved even by God, and it is only at the end that she flares into incandescence.

It would spoil the story and the multiple plot twists to say more but I urge you to read it and find out for yourself. I was absorbed by this novel because Lucy has an emotional detachment from the society that she lives in which enables reader and protagonist to stand together looking in at the fascinating and surreal world of Villette.

*****

image sourced from Hermes
whose blog, British Paintings,
provides a daily source of inspiration.

the pale, wet leaves

A Virginal

No, no! Go from me. I have left her lately.
I will not spoil my sheath with lesser brightness,
For my surrounding air hath a new lightness;
Slight are her arms, yet they have bound me straitly
And left me cloaked as with a gauze of æther;
As with sweet leaves; as with subtle clearness.
Oh, I have picked up magic in her nearness
To sheathe me half in half the things that sheathe her.
No, no! Go from me. I have still the flavour,
Soft as spring wind that's come from birchen bowers.
Green come the shoots, aye April in the branches,
As winter's wound with her sleight hand she staunches,
Hath of the trees a likeness of the savour:
As white as their bark, so white this lady's hours.

Ezra Pound


*****

A patch of lily of the valley
grows by my front door.
The fragrance hangs in the warm air
and makes me smile as I walk past.

*****

This post is for Kathe,
a dear blog friend
who loves lily of the valley.

... bunting colours ...

L.S. Lowry
The Football Match

Between plunging valleys, on a bareback of hill
Men in bunting colours
Bounced, and their blown ball bounced.

The blown ball jumped, and the merry - coloured men
Spouted like water to head it.
The ball blew away downwind -

The rubbery men bounced after it.
The ball jumped up and out and hung on the wind
Over a gulf of treetops.
Then they all shouted together, and the ball blew back.

Winds from fiery holes in heaven
Piled the hills darkening around them
To awe them. The glare light
Mixed its mad oils and threw glooms.
Then the rain lowered a steel press.

Hair plastered, they all just trod water
To puddle glitter. And their shouts bobbed up
Coming fine and thin, washed and happy

While the humped world sank foundering
And the valleys blued unthinkable
Under depth of Atlantic depression -

But the wingers leapt, they bicycled in air
And the goalie flew horizontal

And once again a golden holocaust
Lifted the cloud's edge, to watch them.

Football at Slack
Ted Hughes

*****

sometimes an unexpected coincidence
brings a poem and an image together.

it is a private pleasure.

bear with me.

This Is Just To Say...

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

Larkspur

Words roll free from a tongue sometime
From a sometime, tongue-tied tongue,
Words that were heard by the stream and the bird
When the world and the wild were young,
When the world and the wild were young, sometime…
(Larkspur, marigold, ebony, lime) .

Sounds that were born in sweet young breath
In a bubble-sighed, trouble-tried time,
Sounds that were found by a child at the breast
In a bubble-tried pantomime,
In a bubble-tried pantomime, no less…
(Nightshade, cinnamon, green watercress) .

Love is the sound of a word, soft-said
From the lips of the love you too,
Love is the dove of the bubble-thought read
Soft sift from the me to you,
Soft sift from the me to you, soft said…
(Homespun, empathy, marmalade, bread) .

David Lewis Paget (1973)

...and then the snow melted...

The House in Norham Gardens
Penelope Lively
Jane Nissen Books (2004)

"'...it is extremely dull,' said Aunt Susan tartly,
'to grow old with nothing inside your head
but your own voice.
Tedious, to put it mildly.'"

I am ashamed to admit that I am a very intolerant reader
and I am trying to teach myself to read again.
I want to break my habit of skim-reading
which has developed because I am so impatient
if the plot is lazy, characters are flat or descriptions florid

This was the perfect book to start my new reading diet.

Penelope Lively has examined the inner world
of an orphaned teenage girl living with elderly aunts
and you must read it slowly and carefully
so that you do not miss any detail
of the subtle descriptions of character and place.

The plot is feather light but you can hardly breathe
as you observe Clare comprehend the nature of love
and begin to take control of her life.

I would have been exactly the right age to read this
when it was first published in 1974
but I was probably devouring 'Gone With The Wind'
and scandalising the nuns at school.
I might have had better reading habits now
if I had stuck to slim volumes of immaculate writing.

Pale Shades

Note to the reader: this is not a poem

The pictures are falling from my walls
because the paint is too heavy.
Illusionary landscapes are real landscapes now.

No need for tonality or warmth of colour.
Now I write another poem that nobody will read.
There is loneliness in these words

I tell you the supposed reader in plain terms.
There is no need to hide behind poetry
I won't try to be clever with you.

Helen Ivory
Staying Alive ed. Neil Astley

*****

My husband tells me that the football is on,
that I must come and watch;
but I am too busy,
I am photographing roses
in the last of the evening light.

I did not see the iris move...

Iris xiphium
Pierre-Joseph Redouté

...This was the sequence of the flower:
First the leaf from which the bud would swell,
No prison, but a cell,
A rolled rainbow;
Then the sheath that enclosed the blow
Pale and close
Giving no hint of the blaze within,
A tender skin with violet vein.
Then the first unfurling petal
As if a hand that held a jewel
Curled back a finger, let the light wink
Narrowly through the chink,
Or like the rays before sunrise
Promising glory.

And while my back is turned, the flower has blown.
Impossible to tell
How this opulent blossom from that spick bud has grown.
The chrysalis curled tight,
The flower poised for flight -
Corolla with lolling porphyry wings
And yellow tiger markings
A chasing-place for shade and light:
Between these two, the explosion
Soundless, with no duration
(I did not see the iris move,
I did not feel my love unfurl.)
The most tremendous change takes place in silence,
Unseen, however you mark the sequence,
Unheard, whatever the din of exploding stars.

Extract from:
A Matter of Life and Death
Anne Ridler (1959)

*****

I found this in a slim book
on the shelves of my favourite bookshop.

Anne Ridler (1912 - 2001) came from a literary family
and married Vivian Ridler, publisher.
She was a friend of C.S. Lewis and influenced by T.S. Eliot
with whom she worked at Faber and Faber.

She is not a well known poet today
but the subdued elegance of her writing appeals to me
and gives me much to think about.

Christmas with the Savages

This is a peppermint candy-cane of a book.
You expect it to be sickly sweet
but it turns out to be minty fresh
and full of flavours of Christmas past.

The sprawling nursery of the Savage famiy
is observed from the inside by a cousin
who arrives unexpectedly for Christmas
from the privileged and silent world
of the only child.

Mary Clive writes an unsentimental record
of the capricious nature of children.
The chapters are full of hectic energy, noise,
small cruelties and fragmentary memories
and the descriptions are so truthful that it is clear
that she retained a vivid memory of her childhood
even at the end of her long and fascinating life.

I have decided to read this every Christmas
because it is joyous and funny
and seasonal sentimentality is banished
from the moment you read the first paragraph.

*****

Post Script
The chapter describing the play reminded me
of my own early directing career...

we had three bath towels...

blue towel...
my sister B who was Mary

yellow towel...
my sister D who was the Angel

brown towel...
that would be me, Joseph,
because I was the tallest.

Truly, the painful memories
of being the oldest child
never go away.

Wolf Hall changed my life...

Look at this pitiful blog!
It is reduced to pictures of leaves and bread rolls.

This is not giving the right impression…
there is more to me...
much, much more...
I have critical contributions to make to Blogland
and I am starting right now...
with Wolf Hall and what it has meant to me:

1.
It is hardback.
Big BIG Hardback
so it looked impressive when I was reading it.
No-one could miss the fact that I was reading
A Serious Book.
Excellent for Image.

2.
My daughter could see me reading a book.
Which apparently will help her confidence with reading.
It may be too little, too late but I’m doing my best.

3.
For the first time in my life
I have read the Man Booker Prize winner
BEFORE it is announced.
I am IN with The Literary Crowd.
I understand what they are talking about on Radio 4.
I can practically lecture on Modern Literature.

4.
I can discuss it casually with Hilary M.
When I next see Her.
(she is a friend of a friend...
Not that I am dropping names)

5.
I know how to pronounce her surname
ManTEL
(c.f. MANtel which is how I have pronounced it until now.
How embarrassing is THAT!)

6.
When the guide at Hampton Court
gives erroneous information about Cardinal Wolsey
I can gently correct him
and sound annoyingly authoritative.

7.
I can refer to the renewed interest in the Reformation
AND the reassessment of Sir Thomas More
I am sure that the History Department
will be contacting me any day to act as guest lecturer.

I am telling you
there is SO MUCH that is good about
Wolf Hall
that if I was the sort of person who did book reviews
I would give it 11 out 10.
It is THAT good.

Oh, and...

8.
We have a new doorstop for the dining room door.

a life rides...

Daddy Longlegs

Here, on fine long legs springy as steel,
a life rides, sealed in a small brown pill
that skims along over the basement floor
wrapped up in a simple obsession.
Eight legs reach out like the master ribs
of a web in which some thought is caught
dead center in its own small world,
a thought so far from the touch of things
that we can only guess at it. If mine,
it would be the secret dream
of walking alone across the floor of my life
with an easy grace, and with love enough
to live on at the center of myself.

Ted Kooser (1939 - )

Flying at Night: Poems 1965-1985
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005)

*****

A Daddy Long Legs in the UK is the crane fly
which is an insect and only has six legs.
In the US it usually refers to the harvestman
and in Australia it is the name for the cellar spider,
both of which are arachnids with eight legs.

*****

I have fallen head over heels in love
with the work of Ted Kooser;
with the economical observation
and the delicious Mid West voice.

Barbara and Hilary

Jane and Prudence
Barbara Pym

"'Paul is reading Geography,' (Jane) explained.
'It must be a fascinating subject.
All those tables of rainfall and the other things
- vegetation, climate, soil...'
She waved her hands about,
seeming unable to go any further
into the delights of Geography."

******

I thought that this book was too slight, too trivial.

I was wrong.

It is as delicate as a clear soup,
each flavour separate but carefully balanced.

The memory of this book lingers after reading,
fragments of writing bubble to the surface of the mind
and burst with rapid release of laughter.

It is like the smallest amuse bouche,
frivolous and foamy in a tiny bowl,
enchanting the palate and remaining distinct*
however nutritious the meal that follows.

*I hope so
because I am just about to start
a heavyweight, Booker nominated, good-for- me book.

Pass the indigestion tablets...

Winifred Nicholson (1893 - 1981)

Lily of the Valley, South Parlour

‘When one is young
one is satisfied with a flower petal or a sparkle.
Now I want more.
I want the rainbow scale of the flower
and the reason and the travel of the sparkle -
and most of all a long quiet time
of intense peace and uninterrupted thought
- none of which one can get.'

Winifred Nicholson to Jim Ede

Summer Stock

...Tell me (said I) prolifick stock,
Which do'st these fragrant treasures bring,
What is it can such stores unlock,
At Christmas as outvie the spring?

Thus ask'd, the flower of tinctur'd bloome,
Soon blush't into a deeper dye,
Cast stronger odours round the room,
And sweetly breath'd out this reply...

Extract from:
On a double Stock July-flower, full blown in January,
presented to me by the Countess of FERRERS.

Anne Finch, the Lady Winchelsea (1661 - 1720)

*****

I stumble across Anne Finch
while looking for poetry about summer stocks.
I am not sure that the poem is very appropriate
as my double stocks, creamy and heavily scented,
were grown in the summer, as they should be.
I don't even understand most of the poem
which is laden with classical references.
However, I am intrigued by her story
and admire her persistence as a poet
at a time when few women were published.
It forces me to examine my own motivation.

For the first time for two years
I am writing without readers
but that doesn't seem to matter
because the words still organise themselves
and march out onto the screen in neat rows.

I have discovered that for me
writing is as natural as breathing
and that is it is just as essential.

I write for myself.

And why not?

The Apple's Song

Tap me with your finger,
rub me with your sleeve,
hold me, sniff me, peel me
curling round and round
till I burst out white and cold
from my tight red coat
and tingle in your palm
as if I’d melt and breathe
a living pomander
waiting for the minute
of joy when you lift me
to your mouth and crush me
and in taste and fragrance
I race through your head
in my dizzy dissolve.
I sit in the bowl
in my cool corner
and watch you as you pass
smoothing your apron.
Are you thirsty yet?
My eyes are shining.

Edwin Morgan (b. 1920)