"North in the world: Selected poems of Rolf Jacobsen" by Roger Greenwald (ed) (Univ of Chicago Press, 2002)

Greenwald writes that the Norwegian Rolf Jacobsen (1907-1994) "is now widely regarded as the poet who launched modernism in his country". The introduction makes several interesting points -

• "The subject [of railroads] seems inexhaustible for Jacobsen, and his meditations on it increased in complexity" (p.xiv)
• "Jacobsen's writing combines an ancient way of looking - a way that searches for connectedness - with an openness to the new" (p.xvii)
• "We learn only a little about his everyday life from his poems, and almost nothing about his personal relations" (p.xvii)
• "Nature is a powerful presence in Norway" (p.xviii)
• "Jacobsen attempts, "to create a balance between metaphor and myth, that is, between transformation and unity ... That this myth is empty is a basic condition in modernism and in the twentieth century" (Paul Borum)
• "when the poems fail, [personification] can seem to be little more than a device. But when the poems succeed, they capture a strange and delicate quality, and can sometimes give us the eerie sensation that we are being regarded" (p.xix)
• "In reading some of his early poems ... we may wonder whether the poet has detected a truth behind appearances or rather too readily fantasized an alternative existence and sailed off into it ... The notion ... crops up so often that it takes on the flavor of an escapist wish, quite aside from any insights it may offer" (p.xxii)
• "Poetry in Norwegian usually moves more slowly than poetry in English - in large part because of differences between the sound qualities of the two languages. The frequency of hard consonants, the clustering of consonants, the diphthongs and the long vowels combine to make Norwegian a language that gives one more to chew on than English does" (p.xxv)
• "Norway saw five official spelling reforms in the course of Jacobsen's lifetime" (p.xxvii)

I've never been to Norway, but I've spent a few days in Sweden. I can understand how trees, water and silence can be an intense influence, and how trains become significant, especially in winter.

He's happy to stretch a metaphor, sometimes all through a poem -

• The sky has rested its harp aslant on the earth/ and is moving the thousands of strings in deafening harmony ... Across the great, singing tapestry gentle hands weave speaking dreams. Rain was the first thing the senses grasped on the earth ("Rain")
• "The age of great symphonies is over now ... They rose toward the heavens ... Now they're pouring back down as rain ... every day on this earth that is thirsty and drinks them in again ("The Age of Great Symphonies")
• Our day ... moves off quietly for a little while,/ throws the blue coat around its shoulders,/ rinses its feet in the ocean and walks off;/ then it comes running back again, with roses on its cheeks,/ and with good, cool hands/ it lifts up your chin and looks you in the face ("Day and Night")

He likes flat lakes -

• the mirror image in the still lake ... Do I know where reality lies? Am I/ root or am I crown. Aren't these stars/ there too, made of faintly shining stone? ("The Inverted Summer")
• it's good for the mind ... to stand on your head down there a while ("Mirror Lakes")

There are Flash-like fables that can be paraphrased, with punchlines -

• "The Lonely Balcony" (from the balcony's PoV) - "it thought why can't the good Lord ... use me as a little shelf to put his knickknacks on ... they cut it down in less than 8 minutes and hung up a crackling red and blue neon advertisement for Scotch Whiskey"
• "The Archaeologist" - "when he ate his homemade sandwiches he thought slowly as he chewed that it was his own heart he was digging up today with teaspoons ... For people, he thought, have lived deep down in my darkness before me. ... Later he dug up an umbrella from an era when they didn't have umbrellas, and a monthly rail-pass to Blommenholm but that was surely his own"

Endings which are too easily mystical include -

• Sails are unfurled in the night - our dreams;/ unknown ships go by/ on oceans no one can see ("Thoughts upon listening in on a radio telescope").
• we can still manage to think ... that there's something [the woods are] hiding from us. Something they don't know yet. Beyond the sounds and sight. Truths beyond the truth ("The Media Poem")

Some miscellaneous imagery -

• And up in the light somewhere I, of course, stand and watch how/ the cigarettte's blue soul flutters like a chaste angel/ through the chestnut leaves towards eternal life ("Metaphysics of the City")
• Colors are words' little sisters. They can't become soldiers (the first line of "Cobalt")
• Express train 1256, eight soot-black cars,/ turns toward new, endlessly unknown villages./ Springs of light behind the windows, unseen wells of power along the mountains -/ these we travel past, only four minutes late/ for Marnardal ("Express Train")
• swallows dash out in wide loops in the air/ like silent strokes of a whip ("Mournful Towers")
• I believe in the dark churches, the ones that ... like deep red roses carry a fragrance/ from times that perhaps had more love ... Now they are ships ... there's no hope of being saved, but we keep sailing, sailing, sailing ("Stave Churches")
• Where do the streets go/ when there aren't any trolleys in them ("Where do streets go")
• The tree drinks its muteness from the earth,/ extends its enormous root down there like an elephant trunk/ and draws up silence/ and lifts it to the stars and the wind/ so they can taste it too./ The dead in their graves don't talk much ("Blind Song")
• Your hand at rest is an upturned boat/ pulled halfway onto the beach,/ and full of breathing as a conch's shell/ it waits for you to come back ("Small lights at sea")
• The old cities of Auvergne ... collect years as the bees collect honey/ and hide them away in their attics and in cool vaults./ They have towers that look like clenched fists/ and walls of forgotten sun ("Old cities in Auvergne")
• The veil of birds around the earth can not be seen from the satellites ... photograph our days like the orbiting spies, but they don't tell ... Seen from underneath everything is large. ... From the dead's point of view, it's you who are in heaven ("From above, from below, and from the side")

My favourite poems are "The Archaeologist" and "Some", followed by "Hallingskeid" and "The Sewing Machine".

"Chimera" by Alice Thompson

An audio book.

Prologue - Artemis has returned from a 9 month space journey, back to Jason. She's the only survivor. She recalls nothing. She decides to write a novel about being on the Chimera on a trip to Oneiros (a distant moon).

The ship goes faster than light. A tree grows in it. They're seeking bacteria that will consume CO₂ back on a dying Earth. There are 12 dryads (humanoid robots with DNA). Luther is the crew leader - he's neurodivergent because they're better leaders. Her father was a leading AI expert. In her childhood she was shielded from VR and remote learning. She's an expert on dreams at the neuron level. The 4 crew take anti-dreaming sleeping pills.

She used to do dream research with Jane. The Elite shut their project down. Jane killed herself. Artemis found out that the Elite had reacted to a tip-off from Jason, who'd recently become her boyfriend. She went mad for a while. The space mission is Jason's.

Bacteria appear on the ship's hull. Ivan, a crew member, studies it. It disappears, then he disappears. Armetis learns from Cressida (Mission Control) that 6 years ago the previous crew had disappeared on Oneiros. The dryads start questioning the team - they shouldn't be able to.

They land, and settle in the moonbase. Fabricators are there - less conscious than dryads. It's arctic cold. Ivan returns at the door. He recalls nothing about the missing days. She can hear churchbells. She has feelings for Troy (an android) and visa verca. Shadows fall over humans and they dream. The bacteria/shadows are somehow transferring human dreams to the fabricators. She finds a tunnel. In the tunnel she finds the brain-dead crew of the first expedition. Someone's attempting to transplant AI brains into the old and new crew. Troy injects Armetis, preparing her for an operation.

Epilogue - she thinks she has Troy's brain - the best of best worlds. She burns the draft of her novel.

Ivan's disappearance isn't explained. The plot (dream transfer) is suddenly revealed. So Cressida and Co planned it all? Did Armetis bring the bacteria and shadows back? Why not try transplanting human brains into androids? How was Oneiros discovered in the first place?

Other reviews

• Ash Caton (the book itself becomes a forceful chimera of old and new; its futuristic environment peopled with characters nominally hailing from antiquity. ... Novels about artificial intelligence are formally obliged to ask what it means to be human.)
• Jackie Law (this is an interesting take on the dangers of space exploration. Having said that, I retain reservations over the plot’s efficacy and my lack of investment in outcomes until the end.)
• Afric McGlinchey (There’s a sense of dissociation and disconnection throughout. The psychology and characterisation feel jerky, disorientating. There is minimal momentum, despite the drama of their situation, and mission. Instead, the focus is on Artemis’s almost clinical observation of the character traits and behaviours of crew members and dryads, which appear incongruous.)
• Alastair Mabbott

"Grey time" by Julia Webb (Nine arches press, 2025)

Poems from Atrium, Finished creatures, Poetry Wales, Under the radar, etc.

The notes mention about 10 poems by others that provided inspiration or a quote. They also point out that one poem is a centina (a form new to me) - 100 words, starting and ending with the same 3 words.

I like the first poem, "I have spent years falling out of each window", but not so much the sequences that soon follow it. I think I've a bias against sequences. They contain recurrent themes/phrases - e.g.

• "I remember nothing of the journey// Nothing even of the summoning phone call, though there must have been one." (p.20)
• "I think we might have taken the train home and come back again// but I can't be sure" (p.24)
• "I barely remember now/ the shape and colour of her coffin/ though I know I must have picked it out" (p.32)

When a poet feeds from the past as much as this one does, keeping the quality high is an achievement in itself. From about p.34 onwards, nearly all the poems have something to like - the title, the ending (on p.72, after his uncle died, her son feeds the caged guinea pigs, "the sunlight dancing across my son's face/ as he hunted for the lushest, greenest leaves"), sometimes an image or the idea of the poem ("When you tell me how you feel" is a specular poem whose theme excellently matches the form), sometimes the emotive content. There a several different reasons for the successes, which is good.

The prevailing themes are familiar - grief; expected responses; being a mother; being a daughter. Previous books haunt this one. The owls of "Bird sisters" are here. In "The Telling" there was the horror of domestic space invaded by water, a reconstruction of the mother from things around the house. Houses (as refuge), doors and windows (the latter not always a good thing) appear here -

• "I have spent years falling out of each window"
• "who was the stained-glass gift to the meanest window"
• "The same mother// who taught you to be a house and not a tree"
• "The house contained a hurricane ... It was a house that welcomed bad news/ and the grief that came with it"
• "The sun was trying to get into the house/ blue at the windows/ blue at the open door"
• "Mourning is a young horse/ careening wildly about the house"

My favourites are "I have spent years falling out of each window", "Mourning is a young horse", "I find my dead lover by the side of the motorway", "If", "without".

"All Fours" by Miranda July

An audio book.

LA. A woman (45; mult-media artist? Slightly famous) with partner Harris (record producer) have a kid Sam (they/their). When she watches them from a distance she wishes she felt the same way when she's with them. Her child was still-born, then recovered. She stil gets flashbacks about it - lots of blood. She and Harris sleep apart, having sex weekly. She's had ex-girlfriends.

She's planned a career-changing meeting with Arkanda, a superstar, but first she has a meeting in New York. She decides to drive - over 2 weeks away from home. She pays for an emergency $20k refit of the first room she stays in (room 321 of a motel), and fancies Davey, the 31 y.o. thick but pretty male partner of the female interior designer. Usually her male lovers are older than her. She realises that sex is a way to communicate with beauty. While pretending to continue her schedule, she stays in the room. The affair with Davey is slow. He doesn't want to be unfaithful. No sex, but some intimacy - he helps her change her tampon. He shows her his hip-hop dancing. She realises that he likes her because she's a bit famous. She wanted to be liked for what she was. He doesn't want to be liked just for his looks. She meets his mother who he shares his sex details with.

She returns home, having left the hotel room intact. She remains obsessed. She has signs of menopause and panics that she won't be able to have sex with Davey before her sex drive dips. They get a dog, Smokey.

She meets Audra, the best friend of Davy's mum. Davy had an affair with her for 2 years. She gets Audra to tell her the details of sex with Davy. They end up having sex together. She thinks that Harris is having an affair with 28 year-old colleague Kara. They argue. She has sex with a photographer. She and Harris agree to have a night away from each other once a week. Together they make the dog better. They explain to Sam about their lovers - the narrator's Chris and Harris's Page. Friends congratulate them on how well they've managed.

Arkanda, who'd called the meeting off, gets in contact again. She'd wanted to talk to the narrator because they'd had the same birthing experience. They plan to meet in Room 321 but it's occupied, so they meet next door.

Chris breaks up with her abruptly. A friend is doing a sculpture of a headless woman on all fours - not a vulnerable position, she says, a stable one.

4 years later she flying to New York as part of a book tour. She discovers that Davy is performing there - he's broken through as a dancer performing with a friend. She watches, wishing the rest of the audience wasn't there, or that the "performance" context would somehow be disrupted.

There are noteworthy passages -

• like Buzz Aldrin unloading the dishwasher
• "we walked clumsily close"
• "If I had tried to cash that word, the teller would have said 'we don't have enough money'. There was not enough money in the world"
• "One day when we were both ready I would reveal my whole self to Harris. This would be like presenting a sweater knitted in secrecy. 'Oh my God' he would say, 'how did you find time to do this?' 'Just here and there, whenever I could. Sometimes even with you right there beside me'. 'I didn't even know you could knit'. 'There are a lot of things you don't know about me. That's the whole point of this sweater metaphor'. Of course if you're knitting for years the sweater eventually becomes so huge that it simply can't be hidden"
• "She replied like a customer bot"

Other reviews

• Lara Feigel (July’s characteristic dry observational style can turn with equal ease to insouciant aphorism or to the lyrical eloquence with which she writes the extravagant, ungendering, transfiguring sex that takes the narrator to extremes of her own inwardness while forcing new kinds of contact and honesty
• Emily Gould (It’s impossible to overemphasize how debilitatingly horny the narrator is during this period of the novel. When she isn’t with Davey, she does little but jerk off to fantasies of him that become increasingly baroque. ... For every micro-loss, the narrator gains something more valuable on the other side of her break with convention.
• John Self (What becomes clear on this voyage of self-discovery is that our narrator’s past is not past. Both her grandmother and her aunt died after throwing themselves out of a window – the same window – and she worries “that I was next in this matriarchal lineage”. But most of all, she has never recovered from the trauma of Sam’s birth ... within one idiosyncratic story, this is a book of vast scope, taking in men and women, the mind and the body, and society and solitude. By giving her narrator some of her own biographical details, July is playing with the reader’s expectations )

"The Country Village Allotment" by Cathy Lake

An audio book.

When Liz (a teacher, 35) came home she saw her fiance and his personal trainer Pete having sex. She wants children. Her sister Nina has all that Liz ever wanted. When they were 10 and 3 their mother died. Their father was in a band. Liz decides to stay with Nina for a bit.

Zelda, 82, lives alone, tending to goats and chickens. The postman Marcellus talks to her.

Mira, 56, has 3 sons - Joel (a paramedic), Stewart and Dane. Her first husband John died when he was 25. Gideon, her second husband, has recently died. He was 56 and was a keen allotment owner. Mira meets Liz and Zelda by chance at the allotments.

Liz, Zelda and Mira belong to 3 generations yet they find they have things in common - Liz's recycling matches Zelda's ideas about waste. They compare and constrast their different griefs.

Liz decides to sell her share of the 4 bedroomed house she bought with her fiance, and rent a cottage that Zelda owns. In the loft that Joel helps her empty there's a chest. In the chest are love letters from Zelda's young fiance who died in a car accident when Zelda was pregnant. She lost the baby. She's kept quiet about the story for 50+ years and feels much better now it's out. They find her wedding dress. She wants to wear it at the end.

Mira and Zelda are threatened with eviction from their plots. They visit the allotment chairperson only to find that he has 3 baby triplets and is struggling. They offer help. He retracts his threat. They arrange a surprise birthday party at the allotment for Zelda. She has a heart attack. She comes home after 2 weeks. She's never going to be alone again. Her new friends have brought her joy and love. They popularize the allotment among the community. When Liz goes to at interview at the local school she suggests an allotment project. Liz and Joel eventually sleep together.

Very cosy and feel-good. Lots of repetition of insights from Liz in particular. The "heart" does lots of things.

“Bodies of light” by Sarah Moss (Granta, 2014)

Manchester, 1850s. Artist Alfred Moberley marries Elizabeth whose mother is a feminist/socialist (active in the Manchester Welfare Society) and whose younger sister is Mary. They honeymoon in Wales - "There is birdsong but no visible birds, as if the day sings to itself". They settle into a new house whose interior he has designed. But he's an aesthete and meanwhile they lack furniture.

He wants to painted her. She knows that he paints nudes. She has a baby, Alethea (Ally). She resists getting help because her mother thinks it's indulgent. She get depressed, has suicidal thoughts. He sleeps with a customer.

When Ally is 10, Elizabeth takes her and May to see The Home (though Alfred's against it). The girls talk about Aubery (their father's business partner) and RDS (an artist) staying in Venice and seeing a ghost. They start at a little school for girls only (previously their mother had home-taught them). The plan is for Ally to become a doctor. She models for Aubery and is photographed by him.

Elizabeth is moralistic, wearing jumpers rather than lighting fires. When Ally collapses - an attack of nerves? - her mother is angry. Religious texts and domestic chores are prescribed by the doctor. Alfred is more fun. Aubery is more fun still.

Elizabeth campaigns against laws in France (and later England) which penalizes whores (and single women out at night) while letting their clients off. She asks May to act as bait, so she can collect evidence. Amy refuses.

Amy goes to a Scottish island to be a midwife. Ally go to London to become a doctor, staying with aunt Mary, whose way of bringing up George and her other children shocks Ally. Amy dies at sea. Ally becomes a surgeon. George wants to be an engineer rather than going to Cambridge. He invites Tom, a light-house designer, to the house. Amy works at the London Women's Asylum. When patients die because of operations, she wonders if it's for the best, saving later suffering. She wonders how much the state of mind affects physical health and decides to work in an asylum. She and Tom marry. Her mother's disappointed that she's sacrificing her career.

Chapters are begun with entries about paintings (by Alfred and others), plus a description. Perhaps the most significant narrational feature is that the set-pieces are generally not dealt with in the present, if at all.

"The Love Letter" by Lucinda Riley

An audio book. Each section is introduced by a chess term (Castling, Stalemate, etc) plus a definition.

In the Prologue an old man, about to die, is trying to remember what he has to do. He promised to return a letter. He's so sorry.

1995. London. Sir James Harrington, greatest actor of his generation, has died. Charles is his only child. Charles' children are Zoe (an actress) and Marcus. Zoe had a child, Jamie, when she was 18. She was looked after by her grandfather after her father went abroad and her mother died. Jamie's father is a secret. Marcus is a failed film producer, short of money.

Joanna Haslun, 27, is a reporter. She goes to the funeral. She's just split with Matthew. She grew up on the Yorkshire Moors where Simon was a neighbour. He's still a friend. His partner Sarah is in New Zealand. At the funeral she meets an old lady, Rose, who has a bad turn. Joanna helps her home. Later, Joanna gets a letter from her saying that she has a dangerous secret. Rose dies. Joanna suspects murder. Her flat is ransacked. We later discover it was ransacked by MI5, and Simon works for them.

Zoe starts meeting Art. She tells him that he's Jamie's father.

Joanne interviews Marcus for her work. He invites her to the family house, where the archives are. She begins to think that Sr James changed identities. Marcus bares his soul to her. They sleep together.

Ian (Simon's boss) was at school with Marcus. He pays him to be an informaer.

On location, Zoe meets William Fielding, an old actor who was 9 when he first met Sir James. He tells her that Sir James had another name. The old actor used to give letters from Sir James to a woman called Alice, who in return gave him parcels. The old actor's flat is ransacked while he's there. He dies in hospital but not before he passes Zoe a signet ring.

Simon becomes Zoe's live-in bodyguard. She tells people that he's a relation, but when Marcus and Joanne visit she tells Joanne what she by then has worked out - that Simon's MI5. She also knows that Zoe's going out with Art - third in line to the throne. She promises not to tell her newspaper, but we know that her editor suspects there's a scoop (pressure has been put on him to suppress the story). Jamie tells Marcus a story about Ireland that Sir James told him. Marcus has been paid by MI5 to get info. When Joanne finds out she's furious.

When the news about Zoe and Art goes public, Simon is furious, thinking it was Joanne's fault. He's falling in love with Zoe - Sarah's met someone in New Zealand. Art and Zoe escape to Spain. Jamie goes missing from school. Zoe returns from Spain. Simon finds Jamie on Sir James' grave [a good scene]

Joanne follows the trail to Ireland. She learns that Sir James was there and got a girl pregnant. Simon, Ian (a drunk) and Marcus independently follow. Marcus saves Joanne from from Ian. Ian kills Marcus. Simon kills Ian.

Joanne then follows the trail to France, where Rose came from. A friend of Rose says that Sir James was employed as a double for the heir who had health problems and had to stay in Switzerland. While doing so he started sleeping with the heir's wife. When the heir was ready to resume duties, Sir James was sent to Ireland. The UK secret service hoped that the IRA would kill him - getting rid of a loose end and making the IRA more unpopular. But Sir James escaped, getting money from the government to buy his silence. He married a women from a good family who was mad and threatened to reveal Sir James past. Her death was faked - she ended up in a French sanitorium and was healthy enough eventually to attend Sir James funeral.

Joanne intends to publish the story. Simon shoots her.

Later, in Mexico, Simon meets Joanne. Her death was faked. Zoe gave up Art and is with Simon. Marcus appears - he recovered from the shooting - and pairs with Joanne. It's revealed that the heir's wife had Sir James' child so that Zoe and Art (Prince Arthur) were related.

It's an intricate plot with a few dodgy links. Enjoyable all the same.

Other reviews

• Laurie Is Reading (Because of the many characters, there is little time and space to get to know them in depth. They stay quite flat and usually character development is Riley’s strongest point. Furthermore, Joanna annoyed me a lot, because she is way too naive for her own good. This naivety can get her in serious trouble and personally I don’t think a journalist should be as naive like her.)
• She reads novels (This is a very different sort of book from Lucinda Riley…a combination of spy thriller, mystery and romance. I have to admit, I found the plot a bit far-fetched and not always very plausible, but it’s certainly a page-turner)