Review: Sandgrain and Hourglass by Penelope Shuttle

First published in the Times Literary Supplement

Penelope Shuttle invokes Blake’s “world in a grain of sand” and “eternity in an hour” in her title, Sandgrain and Hourglass. These poems of loss and mourning, following from Redgrove’s Wife, pay tribute to her late husband Peter Redgrove’s love of “the microcosmic – / sandgrains, water droplets / chips of granite . . . ” and range across continents, from Penzance to Baghdad, by way of meditations on “Distance” and “Telling the Time”. With a glancing comparison to Rembrandt, “the Master of the Small Landscape”, Shuttle also ushers in allusive worlds of painting, literature, hagiography and folklore, into which her grief expands. In “Gifts”, she offers to take the sufferings of the famously unfortunate upon herself, but at the same time enters into a competition, as though challenging them: “Take my breasts / St Agatha / Take my tongue Philomela”.

Anne Boleyn, John Milton and Hannibal Lecter – Shuttle’s pantheon includes those who inflict pain as well as those who suffer – are rivals too and therefore they provide her with a yardstick of sorrows. But grief proves the mother of invention in this collection, as Shuttle dreams up more devices for quantifying memories and auditing the past.

Review: Dragon Talk by Fleur Adcock

First published in the Times Literary Supplement

The manufacturers of Dragon speech recognition software should be flattered by the title poem of Fleur Adcock’s most recent collection. “Dragon Talk” ought to describe an elderly matriarch’s sharp tongue, as Adcock later hints in a picture of her granddaughter and baby “just off to a lecture on Beowulf”. Instead, the discovery of this resource, which frees writing from fine motor skills, sparks a love affair with the program’s “phantasms” as well as its hardware: “Your microphone, kissing my lips, / inhaled my words”.

Adcock’s spirited appreciation of this new technology is in keeping with her lifelong habit of curiosity, which enlivens this largely autobiographical collection. Its longest section, “My First Twenty Years”, approximates a child’s outlook, with often hesitant descriptions of immediate circumstances. Adcock’s line of vision typically meanders through apparently straightforward, unrhymed lines, recalling inventions and fads with a mixture of clarity and awe. Meanwhile, she raises one eyebrow at the enduring innovations of her time: “case solved – I think” is her verdict on the post-1945 success of the Biro. The appended misgiving may have something to do with the fate of the less popular “Glitterwax”, which she calls “the apotheosis of modelling clay”. It is difficult to sing the praises of modern technology unreservedly, if tastes can be so unpredictable that “the world has decided to live without it”, this “plasticine of the gods.”

Review: The Gift of Boats by Jane Routh

First published in the Times Literary Supplement

An incomplete and often unreliable photographic record is the starting point for many of Jane Routh’s reflections in The Gift of Boats. Sometimes old snapshots are misleading. If the poet remembers “the exact shade of pink” her bike was painted, why is she “smiling and proud” next to a black Raleigh in “Memory’s Bicycles”? But when a picture could recover the lost “faces for names” in Routh’s notebooks, she finds “memory’s camera not even unpacked for ordinary days”. Getting the shot means being prepared at any moment and that is not likely, Routh suggests, in middle age, “when memory’s seen it before / and isn’t laying much down”. In these poems, taking a photograph is an event in itself, which alters its subject, except for the rare master “so light on his feet / as not to disturb even the air”.

While a poem on the page does not disturb the air, Routh’s poems ask to be read aloud, making much of plosive and onomatopoeic disturbances. Many begin with a jolt (“Better scuttled”, “World comes knocking”) and gather momentum through the modulations of alliterative lines (the “re-caulked and commodious hull”). With a broken photometer in her pocket, Routh embraces photgraphy’s imperfections and its blind spots. The darkroom replace associations “of endings, of night, of fear” with “the dark of beginnings / an orderly dark you know / your way round in” in “A Day’s Work”. Routh sees the risk in bringing something out of the dark or up from the depths. A boat would be better off “scuttled” than filled in with concrete and turned into a gaudy garden ornament amid a “square lobelia sea”, she insists in the opening poem.

Review: The Ache of Appetite by Rachel Hadas

 First published in the Times Literary Supplement

The Ache of Appetite is firmly rooted in the everyday, as the opening “Home Remedy” suggests: “if life’s a loaf, a poem is a slice”. Yet Rachel Hadas hesitates to make sharp divisions in her real or imagined experiences:

A poem need not be a diary
entry or letter, dream report, or shred
of the observations of the day,
nor thumbnail answer to what someone said.

The poems that follow work through many of these forms, as Hadas recounts a dream about her doctor, meditates on a set of coasters and weighs Keats against Kafka while giving blood, all with journal-keeping closeness. The sense of an event, meanwhile, is staved off in the more self-conscious poems, with abstract titles such as “Attention”, “The Flow” and “Event Horizon”.

Hadas’s preferred mode is the list, running details together without explaining their relations to one another, and often doubting their reality. Starting with “A sneeze; a gull; an argument”, detail accumulates in “Event Horizon” until the eye is lost in “Remorseless foreground, / no one thing more real than any other”.

Slicing life’s loaf is not just problematic but also painful in the second half of the collection, as Hadas comes to terms with her husband’s early-onset dementia. After the “dream logic” of a chance meeting with his doctor at a railway station, Hadas is recalled “to a maimed mind / Back to a lopped life”. Writing a poem is a way of reclaiming excised experience, though falsifying memory is among its risks and it is, the short “Mnemonic” warns, all too easy to “Abstract the daily / quota; spread out; re- / distribute into parcels of energy”. Hadas is, instead, at her best when dispensing the “strong medicine” of wry humour—contemplating the loss of her husband and parents she jokes, “I’m nothing / if not an equal opportunity misser” — making light of the new language of illness and officialese that has “infiltrated” her “glossary”.

Review: A Book of Secrets: Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers by Michael Holroyd


First published at The New Republic

WHEN IT COMES to reading other people’s diaries, biographers claim a sort of diplomatic immunity. In what he calls his final book, Michael Holroyd gleans salacious details from the life of Ernest Beckett, a womanising English nobleman (he inherited the title Lord Grimthorpe—a name Evelyn Waugh might have struggled to coin) and minor politician. “Ernest’s diary made it clear that an innkeeper’s beautiful daughter in Naples had fallen in love with him,” Holroyd writes half-admiringly. Yet the boundary between his world and Ernest’s is blurred when he discusses the diaries with Catherine Till, who believes that she may be the late lord’s illegitimate daughter. “I thought he was insufferably pleased with himself,” she tells Holroyd. “The diary was full of trite generalisations such as ‘Fringes and flirtations go together.’”

Personal links are in fact what drew Holroyd to Ernest’s story. Holroyd had already been entranced by Rodin’s bust of Eve Fairfax, Ernest’s abandoned fiancée, when he saw it in the early 1970s. Then he finds himself visiting the Villa Cimbrone, the palazzo in southern Italy where Ernest sought refuge from a disappointing career and financial embarrassment. He and Till search the house for clues to her paternity and drop in on Gore Vidal nearby. Holroyd returns seven years later at the invitation of Tiziana Masucci, who is organising a literary festival there. She is consumed by a passion for another of Ernest’s unacknowledged daughters, the novelist Violet Trefusis. “I don’t belong to them,” she says of her friends in Rome: “Violet is me!” Turning her “hypnotic gaze” on Holroyd, she convinces him of the novels’ importance.

This complicated, nebulous family promises more than a colorful cast of personalities. The family invites Holroyd to become one of the characters in its story, blending biography and autobiography. It is an irresistible invitation, as he has remembered that his first subject, the writer Hugh Kingsmill, “required of the biographer some account of his or her own life as a passport for travelling into the lives of others.” This spells the end of his diplomatic immunity, but the extended Grimthorpe family leads the way here too. Through their thinly disguised autobiographies and revisionist memoirs, they provide Holroyd with models of defensive secret-telling and keeping.

His book is named in honor of the enormous leather-bound volume that Eve Fairfax compiled over fifty years as a perennial country house guest. After her broken engagement, she drifted away from her family and lived on friends’ hospitality, “calculating exactly how long she could stay before her hosts became too irritated.” Each visit swelled her collection of autographs and wistful poetical tributes. Edith Sitwell’s ‘To Eve’ strikes the keynote: “I seek lost suns within your eyes;/ And find but wrecks of love’s gold argosies.” Hilaire Belloc, John Betjeman, and Somerset Maugham all left their mark on her book, as well as archbishops, generals and foreign royalty. Most intriguing perhaps is the signature of Mordaunt Milner—might he be Eve’s lost son, John Francis Mordaunt? Above all, Holroyd suggests, “this is a book of secrets.”

The potential for scandal in Eve’s book is contained by a web of tacit agreements and antagonisms, all of them relished by Holroyd. He is an expert reader of its “great empty spaces, its undergrowth of clichés.” This is partly because the biographer in him sympathizes with the book’s contributors. They were faced with the task of saying something insightful and original about Eve, but not so original as to be presumptuous, or so insightful as to be cruel.