"Wheel of the Stars" (Ver Poets, 2016)

A Ver Poets (St Albans) anthology celebrating their 50th anniversary, with several familiar names - Martyn Crucifix, John Greening, Lotte Kramer, Carole Satyamuri, etc. Rik Wilkinson's "Flying Bombs" and Tricia Thorburn's "You won't swim for Ireland" were among the pieces that caught my eye.

"Behind you is the sea" by Susan Muaddi Darraj

An audio book set in Baltimore.

I didn't realise until too late that the book is interconnected stories, which complicates things because I listened to the book. I should have made more notes. The sections are "Ride along", “Hashtag”, “Mr. Ammar Gets Drunk at a Wedding” , "Behind you is the sea", “Cleaning Lentils”, “Gyroscopes,” “Worry Beads”, “Escorting the Body” and one other (but not in that order).

Marcus is a policeman whose mother died 14 years before. He saves a battered wife with child from more abuse. His 36 y.o. girlfriend Michelle wants them to get married. When he hints that they should break up she accidentally shoots towards him, grazing him. At the end Marcus has to break the door down to find the dead body of his father who he'd not seen for years. He has to take the body to Israel. There he meets Rita who's been looking after the family house. She'd been a hunger striker, ostracised, and Marcus' father had helped her. Marcus teaches her how to use a gun and marries her so she can benefit from the death.

In between, Amal (sister of Marcus) is planning to marry a black music Masters student. Her father is against it. Rania is trying to get her son Eddy into a normal school. A school play is being organised, rewritten so that the anti-Arab parts ae removed - like Disney's Aladdin remake. A cleaner has sex with a client. A woman who'd been divorced by a man because she didn't bear a child with him gets pregnant when at 39 she sleeps with another man. A woman is pregnant thanks to Tori. Her father is going to die soon. She has a job at a restaurant owned by a man who came from the same village as her parents. She is at high school. Tori's 2 years older.

Other reviews

• Charles Rammelkamp (Honor and shame are at the heart of their dramas. The nine chapters of the novel, each with a title of its own, read like the short stories that they are. Beginning with a birth and ending with a funeral, Susan Muaddi Darraj’s Behind You Is the Sea has a satisfying sense of completion by the end of the book, even as so many dramas remain unresolved)
• Kate Gardner (There are big time jumps between each chapter as well, so that by the end of the book decades have passed. Some chapters only have a small cast, others feature dozens of people ... They’re all Christians – though multiple characters are assumed by other people to be Muslim.)
• Molly McGinnis (It’s rare to find an author who can pull off such a feat, but Muaddi Darraj has assembled a cast whose members both create a clear sense of community and stand out for reasons all their own.)

"New and Selected Poems" by Denis O'Driscoll (Anvil)

Poems from Atlanta Review, Harvard Review, London Magazine, LRB, Oxford Poetry, PN Review, Poetry (Chicago), Poetry Review, The Southern Review, TLS, The Yale Review, etc. Seamus Heaney chose "Exemplary Damages" as a Book of the Year in 2003.

Overall, the poems that I understand seem too light to me. The features/subject-matter that critics like in his work might not be common in literary published poetry (the sort critics read), but they're in workshop poetry - and prose. "A Life Study ("Here is a woman on a bus/ half-way through a book/ entitled simply Life ... She seems to be enjoying it"), "Success Story" (a miniature version of "The Bottom Line" that I didn't get either), "Them and You" ("They get drunk./ You get pleasantly inebriated.// Their wives have straw hair./ Yours is blonde" etc), "Home", "Full Flight" ("Having retrieved their sliding cases from the carousel,/ they leave the steel-clad baggage hall, declaring nothing,/ follow trolleys to where tanned holiday rep,/ regional HQ driver or exiled daughter waits") and "No, Thanks" ("No, I haven't the slightest curiosity about seeing/ how your attic conversion finally turned out") don't impress me. "Churchyard View: The New Estate" seems far too long. "The Clericals" and "England" are the best - most sustained - of the longer pieces. I don't trust his indents or short lines.

Here are some quotable fragments -

• "Fulfilling the forecast on the breakfast radio,/ pods of hail were shelled on window ledges" (start of "Serving Time")
• "wrapped in a sheer white negligee/ you are a fog-bound landscape ... I can detect a sun-like breast/ already radiating through the chiffon dawn" ("Day and Night")
• "Summer is in heat again: gooseberry scotums swell,/ hard blackberry knuckles will soon ooze with blood" ("Home Affairs")
• "Like some class of transsexual,/ inhabiting the wrong body, you are/ trapped in an ungratifying job ... or is it an out-of-body experience,/ so this isn't really you" ("The Bottom Line [41]")
• "Water was first mirror,/ drinking images of beauty,/ showing their wrinkled future/ in the mildest breeze" ("Water")
• "Before this page fades from memory,/ spare a thought for Alois Alzheimer" ("In Memory of Alois Alzheimer (1864-1915)")
• "I look down on the snail as on a container ship/ seen from a plane, its slow pace an illusion/ caused by distance" ("Snail's Pace")
• "a love poet must somehow make love,/ if only to language, fondling its contours" ("To a Love Poet")
• "I stare at the graves/ like a sailor gazing out at sea" ("Churchyard View: The New Estate")
• "Playing tonight at the X-Ray-Ted Club,/ The Chemotherapies, drugged to the gills,/ the lead singer's pate modishly bald.// And who will your partner be?/ Alzheimer, the absent-minded type" ("Saturday Night Fever")
• "Life gives/ us something/ to live for ... Cannot imagine/ living without it" ("Life")
• "ice inching along roads,/ the slippery slope towards winter" ("Natural Causes")
• "Christmas is always on the cards ... / for siblings singing from different carol sheets, / raking over old coals at the hearth" ("Non-Stop Christmas")

Other reviews

• George Szirtes (It is O'Driscoll land. It is a place that at first sight appears to be bordering on Larkin country, though it is not entirely contiguous with it, for while the Irish poet is avowedly an admirer of Philip Larkin, he is a more tender, more playful and distinctly less xenophobic writer. ... The poet, in other words, is not there to tell people how they should feel but to try to understand, to share and to give shape to their feeling. That's a tall order, of course. Part of it, in O'Driscoll's case, is done in technical terms, so that when employing similes, for example, the comparison of the ordinary is frequently not to the extraordinary but to the even more ordinary ... O'Driscoll is a builder of lists. Where other poets use stanza, rhyme or conventional form to structure their imaginations, O'Driscoll's favourite trope is repetition)
• Bernard O’Donoghue (O’Driscoll shares with Beckett the capacity to present the deathly through humour. These poems are life-enhancing not only because they are true but also because they are funny. This quality is most evident in the sequence which is reproduced in full here, The Bottom Line (1994): 50 11-line poems, all woven out of the language of business and bureaucracy. And, even if it is not his most substantial subject, the sequence is his most original and sharpest achievement ... His capacity to revivify cliché recalls MacNeice and Beckett; often his observant “Martianism” remains faithful to the school of Craig Raine. He can sound like a more charitable Betjeman ... or, more often, like the “supposedly fouled-up Philip Larkin”.)

"Martha Quest" by Doris Lessing (Panther Books, 1966)

Africa. 1930s. Martha Quest's 3rd-person PoV, though we dip into various heads. She's 15. Her younger brother Jonathan's not as clever as her, but he's the one who's sent to school. She dislikes her parents, sometimes saying so to their face. They're not very rich. Her mother's friend is Mrs van Rensberg, Afrikaans, who has 11 children, including Marnie, who wears lipstick. Her father owns a plantation. Martha is reading Havelock Ellis (the Cohen boys lent her the book) and is (rebelliously) interested in Modern Art and politics.

At p.17 it's already a year later. Joss Cohen fancies her but she's stayed away. She's missed an important exam because of illness. Her father has diabetes. Their house "was original because a plan which was really suitable for bricks and proper roofing had been carried out in grass and mud and stamped dung". The furniture was made out of petrol boxes.

She lives miles from the nearest village - multicultural, with casual racism. She and her mother argue, her father a buffer. She visits Joss, wanting to see him again. Suddenly she moves to the city, getting a secretarial job (thanks to Joss) with Joss's uncle at a law firm. A man unknown to her, Donovan Anderson, asks her out - his mother had been contacted by Martha's mother. She meets his young friends. After a few weeks Joss pops in on the way to Cape Town university. Abraham, son of the boss, has joined the Spanish Civil War. Joss gets her in touch with the Left Book Club and with Jasmine. Her mother phones around and receives some bad reviews about Martha, who's enjoying herself. Mrs Gunn, her landlady, is supportive. Don helps her dress and helps with her make-up but she's still very much a virgin with a reputation for being clever and changing moods. The wolves (predatory males) are after her. She pities and hates them. She's soon bored of all-night parties, wondering whether to become an army nurse. She has sex with Adolph, an unpopular jew. She likes him best straight after sex, suggesting once that they marry. She's told that he says nasty things about her, that he boasts. Her friends have a word with him. They don't see each other again.

She meets Douglas, 30, one of the original wolves. She soon realises that he shares her views about the natives, etc. She can be natural with him. He resists her offer of sex, saying he's engaged to an English girl. She agrees to marry him in 10 days then regrets it the next morning. By then the town knows - he's been celebrating all night. They visit her parents, who give their consent and talk about Hitler. The couple are married back in town, in a flat.

The narrative viewpoint can be restless. On p.8 for example, in a paragraph when the landscape is being described, there's "In the literature that was her tradition, the word farm evokes an image of something orderly ... Martha looked over a mile or so of bush" (books, then Martha); "The fields were a timid intrusion on a landscape hardly marked by man" (narrator); "the hawk which circled in mile-wide sweeps over her head saw the house ... then nothing that a thousand generations of his hawk ancestors had not seen" (hawk then narrator).

The author uses various ways of showing that what people say isn't what they think - flashback, change of PoV, etc.

Martha doesn't want to follow convention. There's conflict between playing roles and being true to herself - it makes her appear self-contradictory.

There's lively language - e.g. "ears rioting out on either side like scrolls". And there's repetition at peak moments - "and the young woman at the other end of the table laughed, and they all laughed, and the rain fell endlessly, everything rushed and gurgled and swam, and they laughed again"

Other reviews

• "A Young Girl Reading: Martha’s Quest through Literature and Realism in Martha Quest" by Mavis Chia-Chieh Tseng

"The Glass Girl" by Kathleen Glasgow

An audio book.

Bella, 15, has a sister, Ricky, 7. Her ex Dylan dumped her. Her grandma died less than a year before. Bella blames herself - she found the body. Her non-judgemental grandma introduced Bella to drink. Her father's left her mother. Bella secretly drinks - covid isolation hadn't helped. In her grandma's now empty house there's booze. She forgets that she calls friends for help in the night. Ricky doesn't get on with her father's new girlfriend.

Bella drinks too much at a party (having promised a friend, Amber, that she'd stop). When she exposes a breast for a dare, she's video'd. She's hospitalised with alcohol poisoning. She smashes her face in a fall. At a family therapy session her parents argue. She goes to a rehab clinic in the desert to escape them. She lies on questionnaires, dislikes the physical exercise, meets people worse off than her. She's in denial. Staff and patients share life stories. A room mate dies. Another ODs as she's about to be released because she has nowhere to go. Someone tricks Bella to drink on her last day. She has to start all over again.

When she gets home she finds that her mother has a dog and has sold grandma's house. Her dad's girlfriend has left him. Her dad has beer in the house. She can't stay there. Her mother has locked up the medicine. She gets into a fight on her first day back at school because of the video. Some of her friends are distancing themselves, others are supporting her. Josh, a seemingly caring boy she'd met at the rehab centre, asks her out and gives her a beer. She can't cope. Then she finds a routine.

The rehab section sounds well researched - until then it felt like a standard teenage angst piece. The audio book reader gives an impressive performance.

Other reviews

• Mina Al-Dulaimia

"Northanger Abbey" by Val McDermid

An audio book.

Catherine Morland, 17, from Dorset, home-schooled, is invited to accompany well-off neighbours to the Edinburgh festival where she meets her brother and his friends. She's rather new to the world of dating and events. She's into The Hunger Games, various Zombie and vampire novels/films etc. There are some Edinburgh Festival in-jokes, and niche one (about William Letford!). There's lot of fuss about Catherine wanting to see Henry and avoid other men who just want to show their cars off. Henry Tilney's father, a general, lives in Northanger Abbey. He's rather old-fashioned, and doesn't allow WiFi. Catherine wonders whether his wife isn't after all dead - maybe she's imprisoned in a tower. Henry scares her with rumours. Catherine thinks his long-established family might be vampires (there's a bible with a bullet-hole, the list of family births it suspicious, etc). She confesses her suspicions to Henry, who forgives her. Catherine's brother James suddenly announces his engagement only for the girl to call it off and announce she's engaged to Freddie, Henry's brother - a scoundrel. But the girl says her phone was stolen by Freddie who posted malicious messages. Elli and Catherine decide to write a children's book together. The general suddenly sends Catherine home to Dorset. Henry visits her to apologise for her father, who doesn't like lesbians (he'd misunderstood Catherine's friendship with Elli). Henry wondered if Catherine was gay. Elli's angry, but eventually they make up.

I did Northanger Abbey for my O-levels at school, and I've recently listened to Persuasion. I'm not an Austen fan. This book increases my respect for McDermid's writing skills, though the style's nothing like that of her other books I've read. That said, it's a very cosy ride. The vocabulary and some of the morality seem rather stuck in the Austen era. Though Facebook, etc are mentioned, social media etiquette and strategies aren't deeply explored.

Other reviews

• Jenny Coglan (There is some delightful social skewering, and McDermid is clearly enjoying herself, but it feels as though there is nothing new to say on the subject)
• Laurel Ann Nattress (In the second installment of The Austen Project ... the author has really created a complete translation, scene for scene, and sometimes word for word ... a retelling instead of the reimagining that it was advertised as)

"Touchy Subjects" by Emma Donoghue

An audio book of stories.

• Touchy Subjects - Sarah, 38, flies from Seattle to a Dublin hotel to meet her friend's husband Paudrig. He's donating semen as a favour. He struggles to produce the goods, succeeding eventually. She's interrupted by room service when she tried to insemenate, ending up squirting semen on the carpet instead. She calls him back. This time he has to phone his wife to get excited.
• Expecting - When she starts chatting to an old man who's getting something for his pregnant daughter, she says she's pregnant too. Unable to admit she lied to him, she continues the story for months when they cross paths weekly. His daughter loses her baby. She avoids him. 5 years later she still has a prepared story in case she meets him, about having some children.
• The man who wrote on beaches - He wrote rude words in the sand as a kid. At 43 he suddenly becomes religious. He gets his partner of 10 years to marry him, then says he wants a child. She gets pregnant for him, miscarriaging 3 times.
• Oops - gay James thought that his tampering with his friends' birth control device caused the woman to have a daughter. James helps with the daughter's upbringing. When she's 18 he admits to the mother that it was his fault. She says that actually they'd been trying to have a child.
• Through the night - Ontario. Una is sleep-deprived, with a 2 month old baby Moira. Her mother looks after the baby for a night, so that Una can have a good night's sleep. It works well. The mother doesn't say that she laced the baby's feed with cognac.
• Do they know it's Christmas - Trevor and partner, both academics, treat their 3 dogs (Gide, Mallarmé, Proust) like kids. Trevor's sister has 3 kids - her family is welcomed by their parents whereas they discourage dog visits. Trevor thinks this is unfair.
• Domesticity - Lavender's Blue - LeRoy and Sheryl before marriage said they wanted a house painted Lavender blue. They have a child. They struggle to agree on the precise colour they meant - "Distant Haze"?
• The cost of things - Liz and Sophie started their relationship when they found Cleo, a cat. They argue about the vet bills and who cares most about the cat. They split a few months after a big argument that sorted itself out.
• Pluck - After 7 years together Rosheen and Joseph have a child. He stays at home to care for it. Joseph becomes obsessed by a hair on his wife's chin. He tries in vain to pluck it out with tweezers while she's asleep. He mentions it to her casually, hoping she won't be offended, and she plucks it out without any fuss.
• Strangers - good deed - Sam in Toronto passes a street-person who's bleeding. He wraps the street-person in his expensive coat and calls an ambulance, thinking he'd better go in the ambulance. Later the street-person self-releases. Sam doesn't expect the coat back but the hospital delivers it.
• The sanctuary of hands - She escapes to the Pyrenees, joins a cave tour. A group of handicapped people are there - she thinks of them as "specials". The tour-guide talks about apes, evolution and cave-men. She has to help a scared "special", holding his hand. The tour-guide points out ancient handprints, some with missing/incomplete fingers. The "special" tries to touch the prints (signs of old individualism)
• WritOr - A published writer gets a university job, hoping to use his time to write a novel. The budding writers who he has 1-to-1s with make standard beginners' errors. One of these presents an unbelievable child-abuse piece that turns out to be autobiographical. A girl presents a poem he'd have loved to have written. She's not impressed by it and isn't interested in being published, so she gifts him the poem. He wonders whether he's deluding himself the way the students do.
• Desire - Team men - Saul (who fluffed an important save when he was a goalie years before in a big match) coaches his son Jon's soccer team. A new boy, Davey, moves in, and plays centre-forward instead of Jon. Jon and Davey (both about 16) start having sex. When Davey says he's going to come out to his parents, Jon panics. But Davey doesn't mention his name when he come out. They'll be separated when they go to university anyway.
• Speaking in tongues - 2 alternating, overlapping PoVs. Lee, 17, a student at Cork has a reputation in her home town in Ireland - openly gay. Sylvia, 34, a poet living in Dublin, comes from the same town and keeps her lesbianism a secret. At a Galway conference they meet for the first time. Sylvia reads a poem written in Gaelic. They sleep together in the back of Sylvia's van, parking in a field. Both think they're too good for the other. Both think it could be love. When they kiss their tongues are slippery.
• The welcome - A woman's co-op in Manchester (9 woman living together) advertise for a new resident. Lucy criticises the ad's grammar. She moved in after she came out at 15. She's 18 and still a virgin - she's picky about partners as well as punctuation. JJ is chosen from the candidates. Lucy fancies her. JJ doesn't say if she's gay. She's evicted. Years later Lucy has a wife. She's kept a letter JJ sent her after she moved out that said she was born a man. Lucy re-reads the letter whenever she feels she understands life.
• Death - The dormition of the virgin - Student George is in Firenze for 4 days, looking at art. When he leaves the tiny hotel he realises that the landlady's been dead 3 days. He realises he can leave without paying.
• Enchantment - Peetr runs boat-trips in american swamps. He has competition. To attract custom he hires a portaloo, trains a Caiman, tells scarier stories. He's thinking of giving in when his competitor suggests a partnership.
• Baggage - Ninnyann flies from Shannon to LA - her brother Arthur was there and is still paying for storage area. Her luggage is lost. He's disappeared. She realised rather late that he's "not the marrying type". She tours the sites then flies home, her luggage waiting for her at the airport.
• Necessary Noise - May (20) and Marti (17) collect their brother Maz (15) from a party. Their mother left about 12 years before. Maz has taken something. They rush him to hospital. He's ok, but it was close.

Quite a few duds. I liked "The sanctuary of hands", and "The welcome" had enough jokes to keep me interested.

Other reviews

• Stevie Davies (Her touch is so light and exuberantly inventive, her insight at once so forensic and intimate, her people so ordinary even in their oddities, that she is able to exhibit the small shames, shortcomings, prevarications and betrayals that we hope to keep in the dark. ... a major theme in the collection, concerning privileged folk (of whom the reader is likely to be one) who think they're in a bad way, but find themselves bereft of human decency when they come into squirming contact with the truly afflicted.)
• Anna Scott