Reading from April to June 2026
In a noisy world, whose voices we hear is so often mediated by systems of power and lack of it. The cacophony of a war-making, death-revelling elite may feel the loudest thing in so many lives, but then there are books — witnessing to other ways of being, refusing to be quiet or finding solace in a nourishing silence.
Novels that speak of ordinary lives in extraordinary times, of stories that don’t easily resolve, of the marginalised who refuse to disappear, of those who cling to love even in extreme circumstances… Memoir that holds up the multiplicity of lives in each of us, that interrogates memory with tender rigour, that comes to us from a tiny island on the edge of an edge, that confronts deep depression… Non-fiction that invites us to listen to the animate world so abused by our species. Poetry that will not hide of by-pass harsh lives, racism, injustice, absurdity, trauma or death, that above all will not go away, but resists.
Even in this noisy world there is a cloud of witnesses writing other stories — the voices on the edge, the voices of dissent, the voices of a different story.
Fiction
Natalia Ginzburg, 4 Novels: Sagittarius, The Road to the City, Family & Borghesia. All Our Yesterdays
I first encountered Natalia Ginzburg when I was doing my MA in Creative Writing over 20 years ago and The Things We Used to Say was on the reading list. It’s taut, deceptively simple and Ginzburg has a way of saying devastating things as though writing a shopping list, which heightens the impact. Reading Ginzburg is to enter a world where large historical forces — war, fascism, resistance, poverty — press constantly on ordinary lives, yet are rarely named with drama. Instead, they register in domestic shifts, silences, cramped rooms, failed marriages, conversations that trail off or circle endlessly.
Sagittarius centres on a mother and daughter whose relationship is both intimate and quietly devastating. The daughter watches her mother’s restless emotional life — her impulsive decisions, her desire to be loved, her blindness to consequence — with a mixture of loyalty and alarm. What unfolds is a kind of cautionary tale: a woman who insists on freedom without reckoning with cost, and whose choices ripple destructively through her family. It’s a novel about inheritance, not of money or status, but of emotional patterns and how we might shift them.
The Road to the City is tonally different. The protagonist, Delia, is passive, almost inert, drifting into an affair that promises escape from a constricting family life. But the city offers no transformation. Her lack of agency is stark, and the novel’s power lies in its refusal to redeem her story. Decisions happen, but they feel less chosen than endured.
In Family & Borghesia, Ginzburg sharpens her social lens. Marriage, money, and respectability form a tight grid in which desire is steadily neutralised. The tone is dry, at times bleakly funny, and the emotional damage is cumulative rather than dramatic.
All Our Yesterdays widens the scope to a group of young people growing up under fascism, moving — almost without noticing — toward war and resistance. Even here, Ginzburg resists heroics. History presses in through boredom, fear, missed chances, and belated courage.
Across all four novels, her prose is plain, exact, and deceptively simple. What she offers is not consolation, but clarity: a vision of how lives are lived from the inside, under pressure, with courage that is quiet, compromised, and very human. It was a delight to discover that Daunt books have republished Ginzburg in beautiful new editions and I have many more to go.
Deborah Levy, Swimming Home
A stranger walks into a the holiday of two families of friends and everything unravels. Deborah Levy is a consummate story-teller and Swimming Home is strange and tense from the outset. Levy draws characters with sharp, deft strokes and weaves stories with a light touch that looks effortless, but is hard to achieve.
Kitty Finch is a botanist, beautiful and perhaps unstable. But why does Isabel, a tough war-correspondent whose marriage to Joe is precarious, invite Kitty, a stranger, to stay with them after fishing her, naked, out of their villa’s pool? What is Joe’s untold history, a poet who was once a Jewish Polish child hidden in the woods? What will be the trajectory of Nina’s life as the teenager forms a bond with Kitty and watches her parents and their friends, Laura and Mitchell, whose marriage and business are failing fast, head for disaster? And what is the role of Madeleine, their 80-year old neighbour who has a history with Kitty and watches the story unfold from her balcony?
Complex, psychologically astute, and told from several viewpoints, this is a novel about how key moments can snowball into one another and about how the past always remains present.
Marlen Haushofer, The Loft
The Loft unfolds through a slow, unsettling act of retrieval. A woman in a loveless, dutiful marriage begins receiving yellow envelopes, each containing pages from a journal she wrote years earlier. Each day, she reads a section — and then burns it.
The journal records a strange earlier period in her life. Newly married, she had lost her hearing for no physical reason and was sent away to the countryside to recover. There, cared for by a hostile gamekeeper, she encountered a man known only as X — ugly, unhappy, volatile — who raged and shouted while she sat silently, observing. These scenes are disturbing not because of overt violence, but because of their emotional asymmetry: his fury, her enforced passivity, her watchfulness.
The protagonist is an artist, though her husband will only countenance this as a ‘hobby’. Her loft, where she paints birds and insects, is the only space that belongs to her alone. As the act of reading and burning the journal becomes a ritual of control, there is a sense of deciding what parts of herself may survive.
Haushofer’s prose is restrained, almost austere. There are no explanations, no psychological diagnoses. Instead, the novel traces how a woman learns to survive by dividing herself — by making observation safer than participation.
The Loft is not a mystery but a reckoning: a precise, unsettling exploration of what it costs to remain intact when one’s inner life has never been granted room.
Claire Fuller, Unsettled Ground
Fifty-one year old twins, Julius and Jeannie, live with their mother, Dot, in a ramshackle cottage owned by the local gentleman-farmer. Dot’s husband, Frank, died when the twins were twelve, a tractor accident that has always been blamed on Rawson, the owner of their cottage. They live on the margins of society. Julius gets bits of labouring work. Jeannie, who had rheutmatic fever as a child, missed most of her schooling and lived a circumsribed life with rheumatic heart fever. Dot and Jeannie grow veg and keep chickens and sell tiny amounts of the produce, and they live rent-free — Rawson’s compensation for Frank’s death.
But in the opening chapter Dot dies and everything unravels. Rawson’s wife claims that there was never free rent and thousands are owed. Friends in the village say Dot owed them money. Even Max at the deli had been paying Dot for veg she hand’t yet delivered.
As the secrets and lies pile up, Julius and Jeannie find themselves harried on every side. And as threats turn to violence, truths finally surface. A breathless, intense novel that says so much about poverty and injustice through deeply-drawn characters.
Cynan Jones, Stillicide
stillicide:
noun
- A continual falling or succession of drops; rain water falling from the eaves.
- Water falling in drops, especially in a row from the eaves of a roof, or from icicles or stalactites.
- Stillicidium: the right to collect such drops from a neighbor’s roof that overhangs one’s own property.
In a near-future Britain, water is so scarce that the inhabitants of London spray a chemical cleaner on themselves in lieu of bathing and leave their ‘soilets’ in the street to be collection by ‘soilmen’. The water train that arrives from Redcar, the north of the country not quite so parched, is heavily armoured — anything living shot on site as it passes — a dog, a deer, an eight-year-old boy… And protests erupt as whole communities are slated to be cleared to make way for a new ice dock — the calves of icebergs dragged across oceans to be thawed for water.
Jones writes of a desolate place in language as pared back as the desiccated landscape and he does so in a series of story fragments (originally written as separate radio plays) that come full circle. The horror of the first episode, a soldier policing the train, ready to kill, undergoing flashbacks and trauma… there at the end of the book, still unravelling, but in the name of something more human…
In between we meet characters who at first appear disparate, but slowly we make the connections between them and whilst the prose is spare, the emotional intensity is acute. A journalist whose obsessions no longer include his wife; a nurse considering an affair; a scientist who may have discovered a protected dragonfly that will halt the construction of the Ice Dock plan; a boy chasing his dog into a guarded area; a father distressed at his son’s work for the Water Train; a captain capturing the berg’s calf and weighing up the bids… And as the stories wind together it is not only loss that mounts, but resilience in the face of it, and — above all else — love.
Non fiction
Margaret Atwood, Book of Lives — a memoir of sorts
This is an enormous book and I’ve taken it in sections through the first six months of the year. Atwood is reflecting on herself with the precision and wit with which she normally reflects on her subjects and the result is penetrating, lively and often funny. The title is important. Atwood is clear that we are each a tapestry of personae and identities and she weave this tapestry by jumping through time. A childhood memory knocks into a mid-life tale rather than life proceeding neatly from A to B.
It’s all there, of course. Her unconventional childhood in northern Quebec’s backwoods with her entomologist father, her university days and writing career. But she digs deeper than chronology. Atwood explores how writing and life mirror and inform one another:
I move through time, and, when I write, time moves through me. It’s the same for everyone. You can’t stop time, nor can you seize it; it slips away.
She is generous in her exploration of craft and insightful about how process works for her:
This has been an experience I’ve often had: poetry breaks a subject open, fiction grows from the break.
There are, naturally, a lot of ‘ names’ discussions of the works that have most defined her. But what stands out is the mixture of warmth, especially when describing the contingencies and accidents that shape a writing life as much as talent or discipline, and intellectual rigour. Observations about family, friendship, science, feminism, and ecological threat sit alongside dry humour and moments of genuine tenderness.
Atwood notices patterns across decades: how stories repeat, how power shifts, how language both reveals and obscures. She resists mythologising herself, instead offering a record of choices made without certainty, and often without foresight.
Book of Lives is a generous, sharp, engaging memoir that values questions and curiosity over closure.
Victoria Chang, Dear Memory
An epistolary collection that explores memory and identity across generations, particularly in the shadows of silence and grief in a family where so much remained unsaid and unknown. Chang writes to her deceased parents and sister, to her daughters, to teachers (excellent and otherwise), to friends and to her body.
Chang’s parents moved from Taiwan to the US and the heritage of being an Asian immigrant child who was never taught how to speak confidently to white people. She tries to unravel a history from documents and images, many closed to her and fragmentary. Racism runs through the letters —
The racist act is not always the most harmful. It’s the surprise of it, the fraught waiting, each moment like a small trip wire. You never know when you might confront it, so to survive, you live your life in stillness, in self-perpetuated invisibility. And then there’s the aftermath of shame.
The writing is tender, but rigorous, written with a poet’s lyricism and economy and with a deep sensibility of what language does, and cannot do.
I think I am circling around you, Silence, your center, and the closer I get, the closer I am to shame.
[…] we should write to put language at risk I like that: what words will do to a poet.
Do I want to risk going into you in order to come out with words?
She returns frequently to the interplay of silence and language, and how this dialogue effects memory and the way we write (especially as poets). Her exploration of how teachers and writers taught her not to write from a pre-conceived idea, but to write poems as acts of discovery.
Excavating untold stories is a vulnerable undertaking, but her metaphor for the work (taken from Jeannette Winterson) is a the chisel. Like Michelangelo sculpting David by cutting away what wasn’t David there is a difficult, embodied, creative act going on in these letters:
…I pull out my imaginary chisel, listen to the words that come up, like eavesdropping, crane my neck into language, into memory into silence.
Intimate, intense and honest, this is an extraordinary book.
Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, Emergence Magazine, Vol. 6, Seasons
This huge A4 volume arrived in January and I’ve savoured it slowly. Images, poetry, lyric essays, interviews… This volume begins with a quote from Rumi:
Everything you see has its roots
in the unseen world.
The forms may change,
yet the essence remains the same.
Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, in an editorial on filmic paper sandwiched between black and white images of clouds, introduces the issue by talking about our long ancestory of cyclic, seasonal living and how mechanisation, colonialism and capitalism have interrupted these cycles. How now climate breakdown is throwing the seasons into flux, leaving us with questions of how we pay reverence to the seasons in a dying world.
The first section is ‘Requiem’, beginning with Ron C Moss’s haiku, each one set on a coloured page that fades into other colours, each one heartbreaking in its attention to fire and drought…
Bloodwood moon
a starving dingo pace
the rain shadow
Followed by a lyric essay from Susan Murphy Roshi on the haiku form in relation to new words for weather and climate that are freighted with words that would break the form. Yet she remains true to her title: ‘Alive in the skin of a river’s flow’ She notes:
‘Someone called nature the hole in the heart of our human world’
yet insists,
…haiku are a kind of open dreaming—mind and reality honing in on each other to touch something of the mysterious core of reality…
Terry Tempest Williams in ‘A Hollow Bone’ calls for us to be vessels that things move from, to know, like the buffalo, when to stand still, when to stampede. Zoë Schlanger explores the impact of climate change on raising food trees,
Apples and almonds and peach trees won’t flower without the memory of winter.
In the second section, ‘Invitation’, more exquisite haiku, a powerful and tender exploration of light and loss by Kerri ní Dochartaigh,
The earth is always speaking to us and I have begun to understand light as one of her most loving whispers.
There are so many treasures here including an interview with David Hinton, ‘An Ethics of Wild Mind’, poetry by Jane Hirshfield and, in the third section, ‘Celebration’ , an essay by Dara McAnulty about immersing into the animate world in ways that go beyond chronicler or observer: ‘The Thread of Belonging’. There’s a wonderful and hope-filled celebration of of revitalising and eco-culture in Ben Golfarb’s ‘A River Reborn’. A stunning complex essay that I keep returning to on form and season-words by Marie Mutsuki Mockett: Five Hundred Words’. And an interview with Robin Wall Kimmerer.
The Appendix — five studies in light, is largely a series of fascinating images — and the questions:
Does darkness have a shape?
Does light?
Across art forms and cultures, this is a cohesive, beautiful offering.
Tove Jansson (Tuulikki Pietilä, illustrator), Notes from an Island
I thought I’d read all of Jansson’s adult fiction and non-fiction (as well as a good chunk of Moomins), but discovered this gem only this year, (thank you Anne). When the island that Jansson has shared with her grandmother (Ham) and other family members begins to have too may summer visitors, she and Tooti, her life partner and an artis, move to Klovharun.
A fierce little skerry with a central lagoon that splits the island in two, where they build a hut with the help of a fisherman, Brumstöm. He tells them they should act quickly. While they are applying for permission to build some nasty-minded bureaucrat will scupper their plans unless they build it up to the roof beam immediately. The law is that no building this advanced can be pulled down.
So they race the oncoming winter, beginning by dynamiting a basement. And so begins a love affair with this ornery, windswept place across twenty-six long summers.
We dreamed about what our new cabin would look like. The room would have four windows, one in each wall. Towards the south-east we’d need to see the big storms that rage right across the island, on the east we’d see the moon’s reflection in the lagoon, and on the west side a rock face with moss and polypody ferns. To the north, we’ll keep watch for approaching boats so we’ll have time to get ready…
There life there is weather and the rhythms of the sea, fishing and mending equipment and the time and solitide to paint and write, draw and carve wood… Tooti’s monochrome ink wash paintings and copper etchings capture light and waves and rocks. The photographs have a sense of simplicity and Jansson’s lucid, spare prose adds to the picture of a life lived in a marginal place that allows them to quietly flourish.
Full of exquisite details and joy in living.
Diana Henry, Around the Table
I love my table. The wood moved on from life as a tree or trees to become floorboards in a mill somewhere in Yorkshire and, when the mill was refurbished or torn down, was reclaimed and made into a large table that will seat 12, maybe 14 at a push. It was bought when I moved from London to Swindon in 1992 and has since been hauled to houses in Birmingham, Tanygrisiau and a forest in Finistère. It’s wood is ingrained with family memories, writing courses, the conversations of friends and neighbours… and so much food.
I love cooking and reading about food and Diana Henry’s Around the Table is sumptuous. 52 short essays take us around the world in flavours, scents, comfort and atmospheres that made me want to run to the kitchen and see what I could rustle up. How we feed our bodies, how we nourish others – these are urgent questions that touch on ecology, culture, aesthetics and simply living.
Diana Henry is alert to all of this, but with a light touch and with a warmth and humour that encompasses everything from yoghurt to saffron. It’s not a cookbook, but a series of meditations on food, full of down-to-earth suggestions as well as lyrical joy. And full to of sense of place as she travels to the home of many of the dishes and ingredients she discusses.
A book to curl up with.
Jarod K Anderson, Something in the Woods Loves You
Taking a different creature (plant or animal) as the image for each chapter, Something in the Woods Loves You circles the difficult territory of how we reconnect with the animate world (sometimes lost to us after childhood) when we hit periods of depression, burnout, even suicidal ideation.
As a poet, Anderson writes lyrically, but always accessibly and there’s an honesty here that is compelling. Each creature has something to reveal to Jarod in his deep malaise, but this isn’t a simplistic nature-cure book. His path is complex and non-linear and his reconnection to the land he lives on, whilst deep and insightful, isn’t sold as a miracle or as the only aspect of his path towards a life he wants to lead.
The result is a book that is nor only deeply humane, but refreshingly non-prescriptive. He emphasises that his insights helped his particular life, though he never talks of a point where mental illness is ‘solved’. And he recognises that some of his story might resonate with some people on their own journeys ‘because we are all so closely connected’.
And he’s equally clear that the meaning he makes is deeply personal, but that this does not make it less meanginful:
The heron is exactly what the heron is to you in the moment you choose to give it meaning. It will be that meaning until you decide it means something else. That’s how meaning works. It’s a subjective act of interpretation.
[…] When I see a heron and interpret its behavior as a reminder for me to slow down and think about what actually matters in my life, that is what that heron means. Meaning, like many crafts, happens in collaboration between maker and materials.
Nor does it recoil from digging deep into some of the causes of his serious and life-threatening depression — issues of shame and toxic masculinity, for example.
Fro Anderson, imagination and paying attention are ‘paths to magic’ — they don’t solve everything, they don’t cure him, but they allow him, with the support of people and doctors…, to begin to tell another story.
Poetry
Margaret Atwood, Book of Lives — a memoir of sorts
This is an enormous book and I’ve taken it in sections through the first six months of the year. Atwood is reflecting on herself with the precision and wit with which she normally reflects on her subjects and the result is penetrating, lively and often funny. The title is important. Atwood is clear that we are each a tapestry of personae and identities and she weave this tapestry by jumping through time. A childhood memory knocks into a mid-life tale rather than life proceeding neatly from A to B.
It’s all there, of course. Her unconventional childhood in northern Quebec’s backwoods with her entomologist father, her university days and writing career. But she digs deeper than chronology. Atwood explores how writing and life mirror and inform one another:
I move through time, and, when I write, time moves through me. It’s the same for everyone. You can’t stop time, nor can you seize it; it slips away.
She is generous in her exploration of craft and insightful about how process works for her:
This has been an experience I’ve often had: poetry breaks a subject open, fiction grows from the break.
There are, naturally, a lot of ‘ names’ discussions of the works that have most defined her. But what stands out is the mixture of warmth, especially when describing the contingencies and accidents that shape a writing life as much as talent or discipline, and intellectual rigour. Observations about family, friendship, science, feminism, and ecological threat sit alongside dry humour and moments of genuine tenderness.
Atwood notices patterns across decades: how stories repeat, how power shifts, how language both reveals and obscures. She resists mythologising herself, instead offering a record of choices made without certainty, and often without foresight.
Book of Lives is a generous, sharp, engaging memoir that values questions and curiosity over closure.
Victoria Chang, Dear Memory
An epistolary collection that explores memory and identity across generations, particularly in the shadows of silence and grief in a family where so much remained unsaid and unknown. Chang writes to her deceased parents and sister, to her daughters, to teachers (excellent and otherwise), to friends and to her body.
Chang’s parents moved from Taiwan to the US and the heritage of being an Asian immigrant child who was never taught how to speak confidently to white people. She tries to unravel a history from documents and images, many closed to her and fragmentary. Racism runs through the letters —
The racist act is not always the most harmful. It’s the surprise of it, the fraught waiting, each moment like a small trip wire. You never know when you might confront it, so to survive, you live your life in stillness, in self-perpetuated invisibility. And then there’s the aftermath of shame.
The writing is tender, but rigorous, written with a poet’s lyricism and economy and with a deep sensibility of what language does, and cannot do.
I think I am circling around you, Silence, your center, and the closer I get, the closer I am to shame.
[…] we should write to put language at risk I like that: what words will do to a poet.
Do I want to risk going into you in order to come out with words?
She returns frequently to the interplay of silence and language, and how this dialogue effects memory and the way we write (especially as poets). Her exploration of how teachers and writers taught her not to write from a pre-conceived idea, but to write poems as acts of discovery.
Excavating untold stories is a vulnerable undertaking, but her metaphor for the work (taken from Jeannette Winterson) is a the chisel. Like Michelangelo sculpting David by cutting away what wasn’t David there is a difficult, embodied, creative act going on in these letters:
…I pull out my imaginary chisel, listen to the words that come up, like eavesdropping, crane my neck into language, into memory into silence.
Intimate, intense and honest, this is an extraordinary book.
Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, Emergence Magazine, Vol. 6, Seasons
This huge A4 volume arrived in January and I’ve savoured it slowly. Images, poetry, lyric essays, interviews… This volume begins with a quote from Rumi:
Everything you see has its roots
in the unseen world.
The forms may change,
yet the essence remains the same.
Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, in an editorial on filmic paper sandwiched between black and white images of clouds, introduces the issue by talking about our long ancestory of cyclic, seasonal living and how mechanisation, colonialism and capitalism have interrupted these cycles. How now climate breakdown is throwing the seasons into flux, leaving us with questions of how we pay reverence to the seasons in a dying world.
The first section is ‘Requiem’, beginning with Ron C Moss’s haiku, each one set on a coloured page that fades into other colours, each one heartbreaking in its attention to fire and drought…
Bloodwood moon
a starving dingo pace
the rain shadow
Followed by a lyric essay from Susan Murphy Roshi on the haiku form in relation to new words for weather and climate that are freighted with words that would break the form. Yet she remains true to her title: ‘Alive in the skin of a river’s flow’ She notes:
‘Someone called nature the hole in the heart of our human world’
yet insists,
…haiku are a kind of open dreaming—mind and reality honing in on each other to touch something of the mysterious core of reality…
Terry Tempest Williams in ‘A Hollow Bone’ calls for us to be vessels that things move from, to know, like the buffalo, when to stand still, when to stampede. Zoë Schlanger explores the impact of climate change on raising food trees,
Apples and almonds and peach trees won’t flower without the memory of winter.
In the second section, ‘Invitation’, more exquisite haiku, a powerful and tender exploration of light and loss by Kerri ní Dochartaigh,
The earth is always speaking to us and I have begun to understand light as one of her most loving whispers.
There are so many treasures here including an interview with David Hinton, ‘An Ethics of Wild Mind’, poetry by Jane Hirshfield and, in the third section, ‘Celebration’ , an essay by Dara McAnulty about immersing into the animate world in ways that go beyond chronicler or observer: ‘The Thread of Belonging’. There’s a wonderful and hope-filled celebration of of revitalising and eco-culture in Ben Golfarb’s ‘A River Reborn’. A stunning complex essay that I keep returning to on form and season-words by Marie Mutsuki Mockett: Five Hundred Words’. And an interview with Robin Wall Kimmerer.
The Appendix — five studies in light, is largely a series of fascinating images — and the questions:
Does darkness have a shape?
Does light?
Across art forms and cultures, this is a cohesive, beautiful offering.
Tove Jansson (Tuulikki Pietilä, illustrator), Notes from an Island
I thought I’d read all of Jansson’s adult fiction and non-fiction (as well as a good chunk of Moomins), but discovered this gem only this year, (thank you Anne). When the island that Jansson has shared with her grandmother (Ham) and other family members begins to have too may summer visitors, she and Tooti, her life partner and an artis, move to Klovharun.
A fierce little skerry with a central lagoon that splits the island in two, where they build a hut with the help of a fisherman, Brumstöm. He tells them they should act quickly. While they are applying for permission to build some nasty-minded bureaucrat will scupper their plans unless they build it up to the roof beam immediately. The law is that no building this advanced can be pulled down.
So they race the oncoming winter, beginning by dynamiting a basement. And so begins a love affair with this ornery, windswept place across twenty-six long summers.
We dreamed about what our new cabin would look like. The room would have four windows, one in each wall. Towards the south-east we’d need to see the big storms that rage right across the island, on the east we’d see the moon’s reflection in the lagoon, and on the west side a rock face with moss and polypody ferns. To the north, we’ll keep watch for approaching boats so we’ll have time to get ready…
There life there is weather and the rhythms of the sea, fishing and mending equipment and the time and solitide to paint and write, draw and carve wood… Tooti’s monochrome ink wash paintings and copper etchings capture light and waves and rocks. The photographs have a sense of simplicity and Jansson’s lucid, spare prose adds to the picture of a life lived in a marginal place that allows them to quietly flourish.
Full of exquisite details and joy in living.
Diana Henry, Around the Table
I love my table. The wood moved on from life as a tree or trees to become floorboards in a mill somewhere in Yorkshire and, when the mill was refurbished or torn down, was reclaimed and made into a large table that will seat 12, maybe 14 at a push. It was bought when I moved from London to Swindon in 1992 and has since been hauled to houses in Birmingham, Tanygrisiau and a forest in Finistère. It’s wood is ingrained with family memories, writing courses, the conversations of friends and neighbours… and so much food.
I love cooking and reading about food and Diana Henry’s Around the Table is sumptuous. 52 short essays take us around the world in flavours, scents, comfort and atmospheres that made me want to run to the kitchen and see what I could rustle up. How we feed our bodies, how we nourish others – these are urgent questions that touch on ecology, culture, aesthetics and simply living.
Diana Henry is alert to all of this, but with a light touch and with a warmth and humour that encompasses everything from yoghurt to saffron. It’s not a cookbook, but a series of meditations on food, full of down-to-earth suggestions as well as lyrical joy. And full to of sense of place as she travels to the home of many of the dishes and ingredients she discusses.
A book to curl up with.
Jarod K Anderson, Something in the Woods Loves You
Taking a different creature (plant or animal) as the image for each chapter, Something in the Woods Loves You circles the difficult territory of how we reconnect with the animate world (sometimes lost to us after childhood) when we hit periods of depression, burnout, even suicidal ideation.
As a poet, Anderson writes lyrically, but always accessibly and there’s an honesty here that is compelling. Each creature has something to reveal to Jarod in his deep malaise, but this isn’t a simplistic nature-cure book. His path is complex and non-linear and his reconnection to the land he lives on, whilst deep and insightful, isn’t sold as a miracle or as the only aspect of his path towards a life he wants to lead.
The result is a book that is nor only deeply humane, but refreshingly non-prescriptive. He emphasises that his insights helped his particular life, though he never talks of a point where mental illness is ‘solved’. And he recognises that some of his story might resonate with some people on their own journeys ‘because we are all so closely connected’.
And he’s equally clear that the meaning he makes is deeply personal, but that this does not make it less meanginful:
The heron is exactly what the heron is to you in the moment you choose to give it meaning. It will be that meaning until you decide it means something else. That’s how meaning works. It’s a subjective act of interpretation.
[…] When I see a heron and interpret its behavior as a reminder for me to slow down and think about what actually matters in my life, that is what that heron means. Meaning, like many crafts, happens in collaboration between maker and materials.
Nor does it recoil from digging deep into some of the causes of his serious and life-threatening depression — issues of shame and toxic masculinity, for example.
Fro Anderson, imagination and paying attention are ‘paths to magic’ — they don’t solve everything, they don’t cure him, but they allow him, with the support of people and doctors…, to begin to tell another story.
Poetry
Mary Ruefle, Dunce
In Dunce, Ruefle covers a vast array of ground, from the musings of Solomon on how to divide the baby between the disputing mothers to meeting an orange newt on a path, from a child learns to walk to plum trees. But at the heart of the collection is mortality and
the way we go on joining the dead.
Her mother’s death recurs in several poems, as in ‘Bath Time’
and a light rain
falling on my mother’s grave
comes back to me,
how it seemed
on that sans-everything day
to be the very pins
she carried in her mouth
to unlink a knotted chain for me
or affix a foreboding note,
Rain and funerals intermingle, one becoming the image for the other.
Language too, is a theme that runs through the poems, including in ‘Dark Corner’, which reads like an Ars Poetica
I was cleaning an empty drawer
I wanted to put things in.
Not much there—
a dead fly, a dark penny,
a straight pin, dust
in the back corners.
As I crimped my fingers
to pick up the pin
a poem came to me.
That is, it appeared
word for word in my mind.
How did it get in the drawer?
How long had it waited?
Had I put it there,
in holding?
Did it belong to the fly?
Did he drop it from some lonely height
onto this playground of refuse,
his own death
come out of nowhere?
There is darkness here and much that is bittersweet, but along the way there is also a sense of abundance — in the taste of apples, rosewater, and the clowns strewn by an exploding toy factory, in pinecones and butter and cake, in a ‘day of trembling joy’ and in the assertion that:
Night falls
and the empty intimacy of the whole world
fills my heart to frothing.
Tove Ditlevsen, There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die
The child within is constantly revisited in Ditlevesen’s poetry because it is she who goes on hoping and longing — as she writes in the title poem:
There lives a young girl in me who cannot die
until I tire of believing I once was her.
She stares back when I look in the mirror,
searching for something she longs to recover.
Ditlevsen wrote these poems between 1939 and 1976, when she died by suicide, some of them published posthumously. She grew up in a working class area of Copenhagen, married young, to a much older man, and subsequently went through other marriages and divorces, explored in the poems. She was constantly seeking a relationship that would make space for her writing and deep introscpection, but instead confronts a world of domestic labour, sex, failed marriages, abortion, motherhood, financial insecurity and addiction.
She writes of it all with candour and wit, with an observational eye and a depth that often belies the structural simplicity of the poems. She was also a memoirist and it shows in her use of time and the haunting ways in which the past is always present. The poems can be bleak, but the wry humour and sense of spirit shines.
Victoria Adukwei Bulley, Quiet
Quiet is a startling, challenging and beautiful debut collection. In a noisy world, where do we find quiet? In a racist world, where is the space for the dreams of black people?
In work that is formally creative and linguistically supple, pushing at the limits of what language can do, Victoria Adukwei Bulley explores these questions with energy and inventiveness.
Being none the wiser
we would sit there, still,
watching our mothers mix dreams
with a spatula; …
from ‘Girls in Arpeggio; 1. Early Intervention’.
There is a tremendous amount of pain in these poems, injustice that simmers with anger. The political is most definitely personal in this assured collection and the personal acutely political. And there is so much compassion and tenderness. In the poem ‘six weeks’ — a broken prose poem spread across five pages — a poignant meditation on early miscarriage. And in this:
There You Are
There you are
this cold day
boiling the water on the stove
pouring the herbs into the pot
hawthorn, rose;
buying the tulips
& looking at them, holding
your heart in your hands at the table
saying please, please, to nobody else
here in the kitchen with you.
How hard, how heavy this all is.
How beautiful, these things you do
which, although you haven’t said it yet,
say that you want to live.
Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds
Vuong’s debut collection is exquisitely crafted. The poems move from achingly tender or unwaveringly visceral, always with an intimacy that pulls the reader in. The language is supple, surprising, often luminous, as Vuong touches on migration, queerness, the Vietnamese war, uneasy family relationships and love.
Inherited trauma looms large in the collection:
An American soldier fucked a Vietnamese farmgirl. Thus my
Mother exists. Thus I exist. Thus no bombs = no family = no me.Yikes.
Vuong is able to conjure poems that are delicate, beautiful, yet pulse with violence or grief. The body is central in these poems — bleeding or making love, the sense of the creature is vital. Brutal or vulnerable, there’s a sense of permeability — to passion, to howling sorrow, to devastating devotion, to political landscapes that make survival a miracle. Suffering and delight walk hand in hand and there are no easy answers here, only exploration, depth, breath-taking images.
The form is often open, sometimes dense, always perfectly chosen to match content. The rhythms are confident. And wound through the collection are poems that repurpose Greek mythology to explore his family’s story. In ‘Night Sky’ Odysseus is left with PTSD. The recurring father figure in mythic poems is shattered, but always a ghostly presence, as in ‘Threshold’:
His voice —
it filled me to the core
like a skeleton.
This is poetry to read slowly, to return to.
Raymond Queneau, Cent mille milliards de poèmes
Yes — you read that right — 100 000 000 000 000 poems, 100 trillion in the English reckoning of numbers. And all within a slim volume of only 10 sonnets. The trick is each sonnet has 14 lines and each page is cut into these lines (like a children’s comic picture book) making this enormous number of combinations.
Full disclosure — I haven’t read the full 100 trillion poems this book offers. It’s a life time of dipping in and I’ve done so by reading each of the 10 base poems and randomly combining to read others. I haven’t even mapped a system that would ensure that if I live a very long life I could work through each possibility in order, because to do so seems inimical to the inventiveness of this collection.
Are all the combinations readable? Yes. Queneau didn’t only keep the rhyme scheme constant, but also fixed the grammatical and rhythmic architecture of every line position. So each of the 14 lines of the sonnet share a template that has the same characteristics. All the lines share a fixed metre of 12-syllable with a caesura after the 6th syllable (a French alexandrine)keeping the rhythm metrically interchangeable. And each sonnet shares the same rhyme scheme:
ABABBAABCDECDE
And, perhaps most cleverly, the syntax of each sonnet is designed to flow in any combination:
Line 1 contains a noun phrase that introduces a character or object
Line 2 is a descriptive clause expanding on line 1
Line 3 is the subject in action
Line 4 is a qualifying phrase
Lines 5–8 continue the narrative
Lines 9–14 are the volta — a rhetorical shift, a thought and the closing reflection
When Queneau published it in 1961 he described it as a machine for making poems — generative literature without a computer or an AI in sight.
The result is playful, sometimes absurb, sometimes magical. It doesn’t feel mechanistic, but full of wonder as odd characters emerge from a cast of
- a king who changes his mind
- an inspired poet
- two bar companions discussing their crises
- a young socialite full of illusions
- an angry old man with sad thoughts
- a beautiful girl with turquoise hair
- a failed poet
- a distraught child
- a brave knight who went to war
- a light-hearted man who travels by car
And as philosophical asides are thrown in and scraps of story surface.
A beautiful object and an inventive approach from one of the co-founders of the Oulipo movement.
Kim Hyesoon, Autobiography of Death
I have my youngest daughter to thank for this extraordinary, powerful collection. The colllection is set across 49 days (the time a soul wanders before it begins the next cycle of reincarnation) plus a 50th poem done as a closing sequence on pain and suffering. Kim Hyeseoon gives voice to the ‘ghost of collectivity’ — those who have met violent and unjust deaths in South Korea’s recent history. From a ferry full of children on a school trip, left in the cabins to die while the crew escaped, to torture victims following the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, the dead speak through the Shaman-poet.
The poems are unflinching, often using child-like imagery that is immersive and compelling, and often full of unsettling dysjunctions in their depictions of pain, starvation, violence and death.
In a fascinating closing interview, Hyesoon says:
Women’s language is a language of death. The body of a woman poet is a form of text. But it’s a text of the deaf, mute, and blind. That’s because the mother-tongue sits on the men’s tongue. […] Women’s body, the body of death, interacts with other bodies, endlessly changing and becoming. It does not objectify other bodies; instead, it wants to mix with them.
Accompanied by equally disquieting black and white line drawings that often depict the body under pressure; decaying, fragmenting, organs exposed… in ways that are shamanic, the poems have a metamorphic logic that breaches the boundary between life and death.
Weaving through bones, ghosts, dissolution, some poems are a mere two lines, others longer pieces with long lines, some are prose poems, form always mirroring content. The numbers and repetitions echoing mourning rituals.
Already
DAY TWENTY-EIGHT
You are already born inside death
(echoes 49 times)
There is a world of grief in these poems, but above this sings life-giving resistance that will not be quieted.
What are the books that you consider are witnessing to the voices on the edge, the voices of resistance?