4 sequences about the poet's dead wife. The first was written in Crete where "Bread, torn for lack of a knife,/ and three oranges make/ sufficient picnic/ by the side of the road" and "Slopes of haggard boulders frown down at the road" - which sounds like prose. Then there's
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Glib analogies! Makeshift rhymes! Please pardon the crimes of your husband the poet, as he mazes the pages of his notebook, in pursuit of some safe way out. |
which is easily paraphrasable.
I liked the first part of the "The Unfinished" section, about the last moments. In part 3 there's more prose - "The hospice bed/ bearing my wife/ stood in a hushed/ back room, moored fast/ to the physical facts/ of this singular life". I liked the title poem. It begins " I expect you've seen the footage: elephants,/ finding the bones of one of their own kind/ dropped by the wayside, picked clean by scavengers/ and the sun, then untidily left there,/ decide to do something about it.// But what exactly? They can't, of course,/reassemble the old elephant magnificence;// they can't even make a tidier heap. But they can/ hook up bones with their trunks and chuck them/ this way and that way. So they do". You can see where that analogy's going though. I liked "Soul". "Flowers in Wrong Weather" is has a terza rima rhyme scheme, unmetred. "Exasperated Piety" is 20 lines of abba rhyming, even-lines indented, unmetred.
The final sequence, "Lucinda's Way", includes
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But I never saw you in either Shakespeare or Chekhov, your two great loves. I never saw you in the parts they wrote for you. Nobody did. Brave trade: to step into that box of brightness and be someone utterly else. An object. An opposite. Is that why actors are so routinely mocked and reviled? |
Maybe, but why all the line-breaks? It's restrained eulogy; anecdotes leading to reflection and analogy. It's bound to be moving, but in comparison with prose counterparts would it stand out? He recalls the times that she looked like a ghost. He recalls what she wanted the garden to be like, how it is now. But it won the Costa and has been widely praised, so I must be missing something.
Other Reviews
- Adam Newey (Guardian)
- dovegreyreader
- Martin Turner
- Robert Peake
- Stephen Knight (Independent)
- Theodoros Chiotis (Hand and Star)
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