Reading Januaury to March 2026
Across a bunch of months I read by seeing what calls to me from ever-growing ‘to read’ pile stacked neatly between my desk and a bookshelf in the room where I write. I never set out with a theme, but inevitably one emerges. We’re pattern-making, story-telling creatures and our reading is as susceptible to this as our daily lives.
Across the books I’ve read from January to March is this burning question: What does it mean, if anything, to be alive? What is this life that is so unbearably fragile that we cling to with such ferocity? In asking this, slivers of lives are revealed, aspects of the world we live in are witnessed to, we travel with those facing death and those trying to solve mysteries that are ultimately existential. We see depths of despair, inhabit bodies not our own and learn how to listen to the wind.
Fiction
Irene Solà, I gave you eyes and you looked towards darkness
I loved Irene Solà’s previous novel. When I Sing Mountains Dance, in which a violetn thrunderstorm is one of the main characters and life in a rural Catalan community is raw and occupies a space between difficult everyday life and the mythic.
I gave you eyes and you looked towards darkness is just as strange and brilliant. In a remote farmhouse in the Guilleries, a Catalan mountain range, an old woman is dying. As those caring from her come and go, the house is also peopled by all the women who have lived and died in that house across generations.
And so we enter the stream of four hundred years of stories, beginning with Joana, who not only struck a deal with the devil to get a husband and heir, but also outwitted him. Sharp-eyed and intelligent, she got what she asked without forfeiting her soul. But the Devil wasn’t going to leave it that. And the loophole Joana exploits in their contract comes back to haunt each generation is a different way.
Despite this, the generations of women find ways to make lives against the odds and on this night of death the house rings with their tales and laughter, the scent of feasts hanging in the air with their suffering triumphs.
Innovative, distinctive and full of folk-tale, oral tradition and art, I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness is a novel of questions, a perspective that asks us to suspend disbelief and interpret reality in new ways.
Cynan Jones, The Long Dry
This was Jones’s debut novel and having previously read The Dig, which carries on the story of this mid-Wales farming family, it was fascinating to go back a generation, but both can also stand alone. his, The fragility of life is a thread that runs through all Cynon Jones work and his spare, lucid prose is perfect for the brooding atmosphere of a long drought on an already unforgiving farm.
The seemingly simply story follows Gareth as he searches for a wandering cow who is about to give birth. But the simplicity is a cover for the complexities of life, exterior and interior. Gareth’s wife, Kate, is depressed. Carrying the grief of miscarriages and her fears of ageing, she is also haunted by a secret. His teenage son, Dylan, is disenchanted with farm life and seems unlikely to pick up the thrid generation of the farm, and his elderly and beloved dog, in terrible pain, will be put to sleep that day.
As the tension of the single day mounts, the bright spot is his daughter Emmy. But even Gareth has not reckoned with how brutal life can be and how the smallest act can wreak ruin. Before the cathartic rain comes, there will be devastation.
Cynan Jones, Everything I Found on the Beach
I have loved every one of Cynon Jones’s novels and this was no exception, though the story moves to even darker subjects. The clarity of his prose, the ability to condense story and character so tightly and still give the sense of slow time between urgent passages is deeply immersive.
The story opens with a mutilated body on a beach before we meet tow characters whose hard work and dreams are constantly dashed against poverty, class and reality. Grzegorz is a Polish immigrant whose new life holds anything but promised. Indentured and working in a slaughterhouse his marriage unravels along with his spirit. Desperate and cornered, he takes on work ferrying illegal drugs.
Hold is a fisherman who can’t afford his own boat, so most of his income and catch go to the boat-owner. Trying to find a way to help the struggling family of his deceased friend, he thinks he’s found an answer. He will be paid to return the cache of drugs he finds washed up on the beach to its owner.
Both Grzegorz and Hold are out of their depth. Grzegorz senses ‘we can’t become anything new’. Hold clings to the fable of ‘one chance then I could change it around.’ If it doesn’t sound like the most inventive story, the language raises it to something fresh, sharp, and deeply empathic, while never avoiding the darkness. And the presiding metaphor of hunted and prey, whether in the slaughterhouse, while fishing, or between humans threads deftly through the book with searing impact
Torborg Nedreass, Nothing Grows by Moonlight
Strange and compelling, the novel opens with a man meeting a woman in a railway station. They are strangers and she fascinates him. There is something young about her, yet something old. She wants drink and cigarettes and he has both at his apartment. There, she rifles through his bookcase, telling him how she’d liked Boccaccio’s Decameron before recounting her own doomed love story through the night.
She comes from an impoverished mining town where the outlook for everyone, particularly women, was bleak. Desperate to find love, young and naïve, she was easily exploited and more easily tossed on life’s scrapheap.
She’s acutely aware of the dynamics, but continually caught up in vicious cycles:
The world has been built crookedly with some kind of arrangement that makes lots of people into hunted animals and a few people so swimmingly well off they can’t understand why everybody else isn’t happy for them and willing to be beaten to death for their purpose. I think even that is violating life. Nature didn’t mean for things to be that way. Nature has enough for everybody. There is something wrong somewhere because on this whole earth there’s enough of everything, for everyone.
Written in 1947, the crushing conditions of working-class life and the secual hypocrisy and social brutality towards women are vivdly explored. The protagonist has never been listened to and it takes this chance encounter for her to find a witness, and a man at that. Stark, unsparing and mesmerising, it’s the only one of Nedreaas’s novels to be translated from Norweigan to English.
Nolwenn Le Blevennec, As the Eagle Flies
Peirene Press publish novels and novellas in translation and have an eye for compelling, thought-provoking books. As The Eagle Flies is an accomplished debur about an unnamed protagonist who risks her settled life for an affair. She’s been with Igor for seven years, an older man who she met shortly after the death of his first wife, who he still idolises. They have two young sons and a deep, if odd, relationship. But when she meets Joseph she’s prepared to risk everything.
On the face of it, this could be a banal, done-to-death story. But the protagonist’s reflections, which include forays into literature and psychology and explorations of cultural mores, and of what we mean by love and family, make the novel stand out. In facing herself, the protagonist might discover what she is willing to sacrifice and who she wants to become
Seán Hewitt, Open, Heaven
I’ve previously known Seán Hewitt as a poet and his debut novel shows his lyricism and attention to every word. The opening is melodic and imagistic:
Time runs faster backwards. The years — long, arduous, and uncertain when taken one by one — unspool quickly, turning liquid, so one summer becomes a shimmering light that, almost as soon as it appears in the mind, is subsumed into a dark winter, a relapse of blackness that flashes to reveal a face, a fireside, a snow encrusted garden.
It’s the story of James, an awkward and lonely teenager who knows no one else who is gay and whose financially-struggling working class parents’ attempts at understanding only add to his sense of his isolation. The main story takes place over one summer, but is told by an older James, visiting the village he grew up in after his life has unravelled. Searching for evidence of the memories he has of that place and of Luke, who left such an impression on his life that their one summer is still reverberating through it.
It’s a story of self-discovery that is never quite realised, of deep yearning and of the projections and misunderstandings that we can so easily inflict on one another. As friends, as lovers, as parents, as children growing into adulthood…
The writing is beautiful and is elevated by a story that is told with tenderness, but is also unflinching in its observation of both human connection and all the ways we miss each other. It’s a remarkable debut and I’ll be looking out for where Hewitt takes his writing next.
Sarah Hall, Helm
Anovel of weather, power, and the uneasy intimacy between human bodies and the land they inhabit, Helm is set in Cumbria, above the Eden Valley across times and characters. The language is spare and supple as it tracks the arrival of a relentless wind, the eponymous Helm, and the disruptions it brings to both landscape and psyche. Moving between our contemporary climate crisis and deep time, Hall explores how we live with forces that are indifferent to us, yet inseparable from our lives.
Her writing is as elemental as her protagonist. Weather is not a backdrop but a presence — invasive, sensuous, and destabilising. Wind becomes language, pressure, breath; it enters houses, bodies, and memories. And at the centre of the novel, the key human figure is a woman grappling with professional responsibility and private disintegration, holding up a mirror to the wider breakdown of systems that once promised control: science, civil society, emotiona stability…
But the stories here are also braided — not only many people in many periods as well as Helm, but also narrative though lists: all of Helm’s speeds and their effects, related winds around the world. the ‘trinkets’ that Helm collects…
This is not a novel of comfort, but one that insists on uncertainty the permeability of human boundaries and the complexity of ecological grief. Hall asks what it means to live inside forces we cannot master, only endure and retain our morality. She says she spent two decades writing this book and it shows in the depth of research, the extraodinary characters and in voicing a named wind with such innovative, inspiring writing. An unsettling, deeply intelligent novel.
An Yu, Sunbirth
The novel opens with a prequel, the story of a monk in love with a woman. If she will love him, he will leave his vocation and to win her he writes a poem for each season. But the woman rejects the monk. Desperate, he tries a fifth poem:
It was another about winter, the real one in his home towards the far north. There, it was cold and bleak and quiet—the kind of winter the woman had always dreamed of but never experienced. She was moved by it. She accepted Shan Qi’s love, he renounced his life as a monk and together they settled down.
And then comes the winter. In Five Poems Lake, an isolated place surrounded by inhospitable desert, the sun is disappearing. It’s not cloaked by ash or growing dimmer, but physically deteriorating, slice by slice, faster and faster.
The protagonist is a young pharmacist whose father and grandfather are daily mourned. Her half-sister, Dong Ji, is a beautician and other characters become part of a mystery the sisters are trying to solve. What really happened to their father, a police-man still lionised by his younger colleague, Dong Yiyao? And what has his death to do with a strange new phenomenon in which people’s heads spontaneously become small suns, radiating the warmth and light that is increasingly absent from the world?
At heart Sunbirth is an existential novel about the human mind, our bodily fragility, where we place our faith, our motivations, the mysteriousness of those we think we know well and how we relate to the places we come from. It’s also a strange, ambitious and fascinating read.
Non-fiction
Polly Atkin, The Company of Owls
Most evenings, barring the wet ones when the owls can’t hunt because the rain interferes with their ability to hear the smallest prey, I fall asleep to the sound of tawny owls in the forest. They are our neighbours and their hunt keeps down the booming mouse population, a major vector by Lyme Disease.
They are Polly Atkin’s neighbours too and as she becomes more intimate with them through this gorgeously observed book, I learnt so much more about them. But the facts are only one thread, woven into relationship with the wild and with bodies, human and more-than-human.
Owls are very much themselves, yet they are also metaphors for aspects of the writers life. They are creatures of the night, but not because they are nocturnal, and she resonates with this as someone who often cannot sleep. Atkin has Ehlers-Danlos Sndromes (EDS), a complex and painful connective tissue disorder, which includes joint hypermobility, but effects so much more. On the borderlands between night, pain, vigilance, and the unseen, she recognises the owls ascreatures of hyper-perception, night-wakefulness, and bone-architecture, connecting them to her sensory experience.
And in a world where disability is seen as unproductive and unwelcome, she often prefers ‘the company of owls’. Part memoir, part nature writing, part nocturnal meditation, The Company of Owls immerses us in owl encounters and the landscapes they inhabit around Grasmere. But these are not simply wildlife observations, but portals into questions of illness, vulnerability, solitude, and attention. Something which is explored in depth through the use of words from Margery Kempe’s mediaeval mystical writings.
This is a deeply layered, intelligent book that has stayed with me.
Polly Atkin, Some of Us Just Fall
I was keen to read more Atkin after reading The Company of Owls, though Some of Us Just Fall was written first.
Dealing with chronic illness and her experience of Ehlers-Danlos syndromes (EDS), the chapters began as essays, giving the book a distinctive structure that begins with fracture and dislocation. Atkin’s earliest fracture occurs in toddlerhood, setting the tone for a life shaped not by sudden rupture from health, but by long familiarity with physical vulnerability. Diagnosis was long in coming and there is no cure.
The book hinges on genetics, diving deeply into ancestral patterns that, whilst they are neither chosen nor curable, form a network of bonds that refuse fatalism . Genetics becomes a fact that reshapes how time, risk, and responsibility are understood.
I was particularly drawn into Atkin’s sustained exploration of chronicity. What does it means to live without the promise of recovery. Chronic illness is not a temporary deviation from health, but an ongoing condition that demands new ways of organising work, care, and selfhood. And should demand new ways of organising society.
Turning towards maintenance and pacing, Atkin is not offering lifestyle advice, but an insight in to hard-won practices learnt from limitations, conserving energy, and valuing steadiness over progress. Hr attention is practical, ethical, and unsentimental.
Some of Us Just Fall does not offer redemption, but a challenge to a society that prefers recovery stories to chronic truth, written with the skill of a poet.
Patti Smith, Bread of Angels
Bread of Angels is a memoir shaped by apprenticeship — to art, to loss, to attention. It moves between Smith’s childhood — poverty, the unspoken, but also closeness and a freedom few children could imagine today — to her marriage to Fred “Sonic” Smith and all that came with it. Motherhood, grief, and her long, searching engagement with faith that is never doctrinal but deeply serious.
Unlike Just Kids, which is driven by youth, urgency, and artistic formation, this is a quieter book. Time stretches. Days are marked by repetition, illness, devotion, walking, reading, prayer. Smith writes not to dramatise suffering, but to sit beside it. Loss is not an interruption to life here; it is one of its conditions.
And yet the scale of that loss is considerable. Smith writes of the deaths of her husband, her brother, her first love, Robert Maplethorpe, later Maplethorpe’s partner, her close friend Sam Shepard and others. These losses accumulate, shaping the texture of the book. And alongside grief runs vulnerability. A serious head injury that took shook her confidence and forced a retreat from performance and public life for many years. But there are acts of kindness too, serendipities and what emerges is not a narrative of comeback, but of endurance.
Above all, the book’s coherence comes from Smith’s understanding of art as a form of spiritual practice. Writing, listening to music, visiting graves, tending memory — these are acts of care rather than self-expression. One line felt central as I read it. She asks what divinity might be and proposes: Presence in the face of suffering. Faith, like Simone Weil’s prayer, is not belief but attention — a willingness to remain.
Smith’s prose is simple, direct, and unadorned, but also layered, crafted and full of resonance. She trusts understatement. Grief is allowed its weight without being made exemplary. This is a story that honours fidelity, patience, and the long work of love.
Bread of Angels is not a book about transcendence., but about staying: with the living and with the dead, with art, with uncertainty. Its power lies in its refusal to turn pain into revelation, and in its insistence that presence itself — patient, humble, attentive — may be enough.
Anne Carson, The Gender of Sound
Anne Carson’s The Gender of Sound is a slim but resonant work, characteristic of her skill in braiding classical scholarship, philosophy, and lyric insight. The result is both intellectually rewarding and intimate. Exploring how Western culture has historically gendered sound, particularly the sound of women’s voices, she traces ideas begun in Greek literature, myth, and philosophy, to demostrate how the sound of women has been cast as dangerous, excessive, even shameful. This leaves any sounds a woman makes into noise rather than speech, excess rather than meaning.
Carson moves between Aristotle, Homer, religious tradition, and contemporary reflection with a lightness that belies the seriousness of her argument. Sound is never neutral: it is bodily, erotic, threatening, sacred. What makes this essay powerful is Carson’s refusal to flatten complexity. She does not argue polemically, but allows the reader to feel how deeply these metaphors are embedded in language and thought. Her prose is precise and spare, often luminous.
She opens questions about how voice, silence, authority, and the body are entwined. She shows how listening is political, and how ancient ideas continue to echo in contemporary assumptions about who is heard and who is dismissed.
This is a book that sharpens the ear as much as the mind, leaving the reader more alert to the ethics of sound, speech, and silence.
Val McDermid, Winter: The Story of a Season
In Winter: The Story of a Season, Val McDermid turns her storytelling skills to the rhythms, histories, and emotional textures of winter. It’s not a sentimental celebration of snow and cosiness, but a wide-ranging cultural and personal exploration of what winter has means to human lives.
Ranging across history, folklore, literature, science, and memoir, she writes about famine and endurance, ritual and superstition, winter illnesses and winter pleasures. The season emerges as both threat and refuge: a time of scarcity and danger, but also of storytelling, reflection, and recalibration.
What makes the book a pleasure is the use of personal anecdotes, often rooted in Scottish landscapes and childhood memories, to ground the season in a broader cultural narrative. And she is particularly strong on how winter shapes social behaviour: how communities adapt, how inequality is sharpened by cold, and how climate change is altering our relationship with the season itself. Winter, she reminds us, is not just a backdrop but a force that has structured labour, belief, and survival.
An engaging and thoughtful addition to the literature of this evocative season.
Angela Harding, Winter’s Song
Winter’s Song is a quietly beautiful book that invites the reader into close, attentive relationship with the winter landscape. Angela Harding’s woodcut illustrations, paired with simple, evocative text, celebrate the subtle life of the season: bare branches etched against pale skies, birds clustered in hedgerows, frost-patterned fields alive with quiet movement.
Harding’s strength lies in her ability to slow down and truly see. Her images are detailed, yet never crowded; encouraging the viewer to linger. Winter here is not empty or dead, but hushed, watchful, full of small resilience. Animals, trees, and weather coexist in delicate balance, rendered with accuracy and affection.
The text gestures toward folklore, seasonal rhythms, and ecological awareness without overstatement. Together, image and word create a contemplative experience.
Poetry
Polly Atkin, Much With Body
Much With Body is poetry of listening: to land, weather and the intelligence of the human body. Polly Atkin writes from within illness and place, but her vision opens outward, is full of intelligent humour and weaves together small moments of insight or strangeness alongside open field work with literary grounding.
At the heart of the collection is sequence responding to Dorothy Wordsworth’s writing on rain and illness. Atkin does not simply echo or reinterpret Wordsworth’s journals; instead, she fractures, reorders, and re-spaces language, allowing rain to become both substance and method, its repetitions mirroring the repetitions of chronic illness, not with self-pity, but attention. The lines thin, scatter, pool, dissolve. Reading becomes a bodily act — the eye slowed, forced to pause, to track rhythm as well as narrative flow.
This collection that rewards close reading. It is poetry of intense observation and deep feeling — a book that listens and responds with an acuteness I found mesmerising.
Gillian Allnutt, Wake
Wake is a poetry collection that inhabits thresholds: between life and death, speech and silence, the sacred and the broken. Gillian Allnutt writes with an austere tenderness, her poems shaped by mourning, spiritual inquiry, and attentiveness to language.
Allnutt’s lines are pared back to the essential, but carry immense weight. The poems are deeply meditative, informed by contemplative tradition that is both personal and collective and abundant in references, with many footnotes along the way, as well as substantial endnotes. Her allusions are wide — radio, songs, hymns, poems, ballads, music, art and philosophy as well as the Bible.
Biblical cadence and theological questioning run through the collection, but Wake is never doctrinal. Faith is wider than the certainty of a single religion and prayer is multi-layered and complex.
Allnutt’s techniques are so skilful that it takes a second reading to notice them. She uses sound exquisitely, as in ‘Stars’:
There are those who have not fled shame
the numberlessness of am
the innumerable one
in whom
the dark of the moon, as absence, abstinence, is home.
in shoals, in sheols, they will come
with mobile phone.Shalom
She can lean into aphorism. as in ‘Lindisfarne: the roughs’:
in gertrude jekyll’s garden
am drawn, an old reluctance, like the moon
the sea, for example, signs to itself alone its nunc dimittis
we are bound to one another, God, my own anon
and of our solitude we are the guardian
Or the combination of sound-play and anaphora in ‘abutment’:
but for the askance in her
but for the biding in abeyance of her
but for the clairvoyance that came to her like a grandmother
but for the expanse of love in her the lark in the clear air
but for the auld acquaintedness with violence in her
Wake asks the readerto pay attention, to sit with difficulty. Allnuutt is a poet who listens deeply, who keeps watch, and trusts the reader to do the same.
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Something about living
Reading a collection from the Palestinian diaspora that uses language as the lens into a history of silencing and obliteration often felt devastating.
All language is littered with corpses
of words, the shrouds we make
for them, the sacred oils we spill
to anoint, to embalm. Beit a home:
ancient breath and second
letter of ancestry. Home of unripe figs …
(from ‘Beit Anya’)
Apparently when the collection won the 2024 National Book Award in poetry Lena Khalaf Tuffaha said, “I don’t want to write anything that is a consolation.” And she is true to her word. Past atrocities are visited — the massacre of a whole village in 1948 (Tantoura Redux), and then mirrored in more recent outrages like the murder of a Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022. The cyclical nature of grief creating not just echoes, but strata of loss that feel geological.
But if this poetry doesn’t set out to console, it does give us a huge vocabulary of longing for life, yearning for joy and the persistence of love.
…Love
is paying attention, I remark, and you
repeat it to me. Love is also the father
who plants an olive tree for every newborn
trusting they will grow up to harvest it. …
[…] Love lives
in many rooms. In the kitchen where Nadia teaches
using only the Arabic names of ingredients…
[…]
Let the stars fall, I have no idea
what hope is, but our people
have taught me a million ways to love.
Tuffaha has described this book as “trying to think of how language disappears and erases us – not just shapes us… [it’s] bout the work that language can do to obfuscate, eliminate, and diminish, and the different ways in which we try to circumvent that or contend with that.
The power is in that circumvention and she does it with stunning rigour and skill.
Joelle Taylor, Maryville
The suppleness of language, formal dexterity and constant innovation leap off the page in this collection, which follows the stories of four ‘buth dyke friends’ (introduced originally in Taylor’s T S Eliot prize-winning collection C*NTO & Othered Poems). It’s ladi out in the manner of a TV series complete with Mis en Scène poems that each have a suggested soundtrack to play as your read. As someone who likes to read in silence, this was a challenge, yet it worked.
Following a fifty year arc from 1957 to 2007 in a fictional (but based on real places) bar called Maryville, Taylor insists on the importance of making the poems visual.
I want us to recognise that our exclusion from the mainstream was the very thing that gave us the space to rethink the potentiality of our lives.
She wants to change the view of lesbians, add more visibility, even it’s just an extra two minutes and,
create a visual record of who we are, what we have endured and how we turned suffering into a well-cut suit, a language of our own.
There are heart-sundering poems here — dust kings, tough kids, a sonnet crown of fifteen poems begins:
i
for bois slow dancing in snowglobes
moored in suits stitched from rainfall
who hold each other like eggs
from which they will hatch, punch-
curious, alert to the wild
as snow falls like empires;
grass grows through the dance
floor & bois are night butterflies.
everything cracks in the end.
but not this hand, this idea.
some nights it snows spare change
or saliva, handkerchiefs, or charge sheets.
dust kings & tough kids
we had nothing. & we shared it.
or the short, devastating ‘CUT AWAY SHOT’ following the Mis en Scène ‘Funeral for a Friend’, which is simply:
Angel is buried in a coffin sealed like an envelope,
this is all we know.
Threat, pain and violence jostle with joy, community and intimacy. Another extraordinary collection from a writer whose work is continually surprising, beautiful and brave.
Sarah Howe, Foretokens
Continuing a thread begun in her first collection, Loop of Jade, Sarah Howe explores identity and belonging through the lens of her mother’s story as an abandoned baby in China at the beginning of the Communist era. The long tail of colonialism follows the story, but along the way objects emerge from the rubble, perhaps omens, perhaps tokens of how stories might be transformed.
The writing is precise, the form continually adapting to content, expansive and allowing the light into the cracks between objects and story and allowing the story to move in new directions. As a mother herself now, Howe revisits her inheritance from a new perspective. What does she want to pass on to the next generation?
This is a collection of wonderings, rather than solutions, and one that does not minimise the legacy, as we see in Fore/mother:
Fore/mother
Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true;
Real becomes not-real when the unreal’s real.
– Cao Xueqin, Dream of the Red Chamber
What I know begins
outside/within
the limits of Shanghai.
A girl is born, youngest of many.
One day –
if it helps say the bowls are empty –
the girl is
sold to strangers.
If it helps say it sounds like a fairytale.
Did you see the look in her mother’s eyes?
This is what happened/happens
then/now
where money buys
desire/silence.
If it helps say her mother was dead.
What she went on to live, what she became
you
can
imagine.
*
A complex, moving and lucid collection.
John F Deane, Jonah and Me
‘Ireland’s foremost religious poet’ is perhaps not the most snappy marketing-copy on a poetry collection, even with a generous endorsement from Rowan Williams on the front and back covers, but as Williams points out, it’s not only the acuity of observation and a pause that this poetry offers but also that we’re invited
to look with the same patience and intensity into the mystery of memory … and the dark mystery of contemporary violence. These beautiful pieces, with all their clear and sensuous detail. are the work of a profound imagination…
Amen to this. The poems are exquisitely attentive, often finding the sacred in the animate world, in ordinary details that illuminate messy lives. A walk on a beach becomes a mediation on our relationship to the dead. (Presences)
And in a sequence for Holy Week, ‘On Human Flesh’ a chorus of voices range across nine poems that ask enormous questions without providing slick or easy answers.
So in ‘A Sea of Troubles: The Nun’s Story’:.
Today I refused
the Hours, and stayed outside, past matins,
past lauds and prime, chanting snatches
of old airs to thrush and buttercup
in sunlit torpor…
and in ‘Sins of the Fathers: The Nun’s Story (Thursday)’:
Today in the common room, the TV showed a child of
Yemen, not yet three, so much of suffering he has no lungs
to scream, the doctors cannot find a vein in that needle-thin
body.
I wept for him, of human flesh, who is all of the children,
face pressed to the hard earth of Gethsemene.
That’s not the point. For the most part these are life-affirming poems that seek not to explain the universe but, rather, to draw attention to its beauty, to bear witness to the mysteries of the world, the human soul.
There are many gardens in this contemplative, attentive collection that bridges the spiritual and material, that gathers memory and that faces mortality with grace:
In the high branches of the eucalyptus, a blackbird
watches, waiting; I, too, hold still by the window,
lingering. The lupins that stood high in pride.
are wilted now, assuming the sadder aspects of age;
all of us, waiting, in silence.
Reading gives us extraordinary access to history and the present, to cultures beyond our own, to experiences beyond our imagining, to an animate world… And it helps us to reflect on our own existence in a new light. What are you reading? is an existential question.
So, what are you reading?