Category: Book review
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Two families, alike in dignity: Christina Thatcher’s ‘How to Carry Fire’
Christina Thatcher’s How to Carry Fire (Parthian, 2020) is her second collection of poetry. It’s a fierce, impassioned, and (at times) scary collection that details the persona’s two families: her US family (mother, father, brother) beset by a range of tragedies, and her newly-forming Welsh family consisting of the persona and her husband. The literary…
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Anne Enright’s ‘Actress’ (part 2): the age of consent
In my first blog on Anne Enright’s Actress (Jonathan Cape, 2020), I connected it with the late Irish poet Eavan Boland (1944–2020) through the search for a female genealogy. Or, in simpler terms, both Norah in Actress and Boland in her prose and poetry are looking for their mothers. In this blog, I again read…
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Anne Enright’s ‘Actress’ (part 1): finding a mother
In this and my next blog (also on Actress), I’m going to focus on intertextuality. Intertextuality was described by Julia Kristeva as a mosaic of interaction between texts.[1] For Kristeva, this quite commonly takes the form of deliberate and explicit intertextual references—quotations, narrative nods, character types and names—but I am most interested in intertextuality that…
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Suzanne Collins’s ‘The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes’: Hobbes for the twenty-first century
Suzanne Collins’s latest addition to the Panem world of the Hunger Games, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (Scholastic, 2020), is a prequel taking place decades before the original trilogy. It follows school-leaver Coriolanus who joins the first cohort of Hunger Games mentors during the annual bloodletting’s tenth edition. As an informed reader will know—or,…
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(Post-)postmodernist elegy: Stephen Sexton’s ‘If All the World and Love Were Young’
Stephen Sexton’s If All The World and Love Were Young (Penguin, 2019) has proven phenomenally successful, having won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and being shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. And yet, it is not an easy poetry collection, proving both difficult in terms of its style and allusive references, and…
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Personal politics and the modern English language: Mary Jean Chan’s ‘Flèche’
There’s too much to praise in Mary Jean Chan’s Flèche: the characterful depths it presents of its persona, the problems they encounter with queer becoming, the gentle lyricism that appears straightforward but is anything but. It is about family, about love—and also about fencing. Of the topics that I could cover, I’m going to examine…