Kathleen Jones Diary

Crime fiction is one of my addictions, so when you add in Italy, archaeology and opera, this book ticks quite a lot of my boxes. Donna Leon follows the conventional crime fiction path - her hero Guido Brunetti is a kind of Italian Morse, though his family life is happier (he does have one!) She develops his character with each successive book, and we learn a lot about the chaos and subterfuge of Italian police procedure. There are several police forces in Italy - the Polizia and the Carabiniere are constant rivals with overlapping territories; then there are the money police - the Guardia di Finanza; then the local police called the Polizia Municipale. Quite a minefield.

In Acqua Alta (high water), Venice is flooding with winter rain and high tides. The archaeologist lover of a famous opera singer is beaten almost to death, and the head of the Venice Department of Antiquities is murdered. A digital trail of bank accounts, telephone numbers and hotel bills links the suspects together. Tension is kept high by constant danger from the rising flood water and the shadowy presence of what the Italians call ‘the problem of the Mezzogiorno’ - the country’s troubled south. ‘They seemed to be moving north, coming up from Sicily and Calabria, immigrants in their own land.’ And they bring with them a level of violence to add to the casual corruption that keeps Italy ticking over.

Donna Leon illustrates this well in the novel. The archaeologist is American and doesn’t understand the way Italy works ‘in nero’ ie on the black side of the economy. Brunetti skirts past bureacratic restrictions with the ease and charm of a true Venetian, quoting ironic asides on the Italian attitudes to law and order. ‘The Germans, it was rumoured, saw the law as something to be obeyed, unlike the Italians, who saw it as something first to be fathomed and then evaded.’

You have to know how the system works in Italy - even nurses in the hospital have to be given tips to change the sheets on the bed, and back handers are regularly given to advance a patient up the queue for treatment.

Leon shows graphically the almost farcical results of this corruption - a hospital built without drains, lying empty and vandalised. ‘The opening cermony had been held, there had been speeches and the press had come, but the building had never been used……. it had been planned like this from the very moment of inception, planned so that the builder would get not only the original contract to construct the new pavilion but the work, later , to destroy much of what had been built in order to install the forgotten drains.’

This is the Italy of Berlusconi, where ‘Colpo Grosso’ - a kind of D-list celebrity strip show with lots of silicone - was the highest rated TV show.

Donna Leon is a Professor of English, married to an Italian and living in Venice. Her books are intelligent and well written and I can recommend them as a Good Read.

From Menton we said goodbye to Madame and ‘Spike’ the dog and set off very early. It’s quite a contrast to drive up from the hot south of rocky outcrops and maritime pine trees, to the flat prairies of central France with their massive grain silos like agricultural cathedrals.

And then up into the wooded farmlands of northern France, through a recitation of names in the Book of Human Misery. Amiens, Arras, Crecy, the Forests of Roland, the Field of the Cloth of Gold, Picardy, Ypres, Somme, Vimy Ridge, Calais. The landscape is scattered with war memorials that commemorate the ancient battles of Charlemagne, Joan of Arc, Henry Vth - to name only a few, as well as the graveyards of both First and Second world war victims. When you see how closely packed they are, you get the impression that the fields here must be soaked with the blood of over a thousand years of conflict.

The old car was doing very well and we were just congratulating ourselves when, just short of Reims, heading for the Calais ferry, one of the back tyres suddenly deflated and the rear end of the car began to dance across two lanes of the - fortunately quiet - autoroute before I could bring it to a halt on the Bande d’Urgence. Neil managed to keep his cool with great fortitude in the passenger seat! We had barely opened the boot to look for the jack when a breakdown patrol pulled up behind us with flashing orange lights and the mechanic had us back on the road again within twenty minutes. But by then we were both tired and not up for more adventures so we stopped at Reims.

It was a beautiful, lively place, though it was too late when we arrived to see much of it. We got up early the following morning to explore the cathedral. But typically (this always happens to me) the exterior was shrouded in cling-wrap for restoration! Inside, the stained glass windows are almost too big to take in. Very few of the originals survive - having been blown up in the 1914-18 conflict, but there are four huge rose windows in glorious medieval glass. The whole effect when they were all intact must have been incredible - though very dark.

The cathedral originally had a labyrinth like Chartres, Amiens, St Quentin and several others in this part of France, though it was destroyed in the 18th century.

Like these other cathedrals Reims is dedicated to the Virgin Mary and no one seems to know what the significance of it was, though some of the others also have Black Madonnas. Reims feels very female orientated and has chapels dedicated to Joan of Arc and to St Therese.

Taking photographs was difficult because of the light levels, but I managed one of the nave with its glorious stained glass as well as the modern windows of Marc Chagall.

On the ferry approaching England there was a long line of smoky haze overhanging the white cliffs of Dover. As we drove further north the haze deepened and by the time we reached Cambridge a line of darker cloud appeared on the horizon, growing wider and wider until the sun disappeared and the sky was uniformly grey. Welcome back to England!

I left a cold, grey Liverpool on Ryan Air, but when I arrived in Menton it was sizzling in over 30 degrees of heat. For the next few days I had clear skies, sunny days and balmy nights. This is the second time I’ve been there and, except for the fact that it is very expensive, I’m beginning to like it a lot. Menton sits on a narrow coastal strip at the foot of steep grey rocks - Monaco is a five minute drive in one direction and on the other side Menton strays casually in and out of Italy.

Just over the border, so technically Italian, are the Balzi Caves - originally a neolithic settlement with carvings.

In the town itself there is a cathedral on the summit of the rocky promontory, reached by a succession of stairways, a bay with a pretty marina and further up the coast a larger dock where the boats of the super-rich wait for their owners to turn up. Each one is worth more than the GDP of a small third world country. They’re owned by people like Roman Abramovitch, Mohammed Al Fayed, a couple of Greek shipowners, a pop star or two, and the odd banker - so no doubt there will be a few boats up for sale shortly!

We stayed in a little pension up in the hills where Madame vented her fury over it all. ‘Bankers are nothing but thieves - they have stolen our granchildren’s future. I am afraid for us all!’. Her husband seeemed frail and rather gaunt, but it would have been impolite to ask why, and there was an elderly boxer dog with a spiked collar straight out of a cartoon. The room was tiny, but clean, and the bed had froggy bed linen!

The conference dinner was being held at one of Menton’s nicest hotels, with a restaurant on the beach. We ate grilled sea bass and drank New Zealand champagne (courtesy of the ambassador) and listened to the sea lapping on the shingle a few feet away. The illuminated spire of the cathedral was beginning to strike up a relationship with a large crescent moon, just hovering over the bay and everything felt perfect. I even dared to go paddling.

The following day began at 8.30 and was tightly packed with events. There were several authors among the assembled scholars - well known in New Zealand and European circles perhaps rather than the UK. Vincent O’Sullivan - one of New Zealand’s foremost novelists and poets gave an eloquent and thoughtful view of Katherine Mansfield’s work. C.K. Stead, author of the novel ‘Mansfield’, whose poem ‘Nine Ways of Looking at a Fantail’ is in the current London Review of Books, talked about fictionalising real lives. The German poet Dieter Riemenschneider was there with his wife, New Zealand poet Jan Kemp, and novelist Kirsty Gunn opened the conference with a short story ‘This Place you Return to is Home’, written during a writer in residence post near the place where KM was brought up.

I also met, for the first time, Janine Renshaw Beauchamp, KM’s great neice, who was brought up by Katherine’s sister and who was able to give me a real sense of how Katherine’s family worked as a unit - an inside view of the family politics.
When you write a biography you worry that you will have got some small but important fact horribly wrong, or that there is something you have missed - however hard you try, something always slips through. I listened avidly to every talk, every reading, mentally editing and checking - and was totally exhausted by the time it finished. After a formal ambassador’s reception (more champagne) and a concert by the Menton children’s choir, we slipped off to have dinner - more modestly this time! - at a French Chinese cantina. We resisted the sweet and sour frog’s legs (the bedlinen engraved in our memories) and settled for scallops in sweet chili sauce with noodles. And mineral water. There is only just so much champagne one can take!

We slipped quietly into the pension very late, and were aware of Madame’s husband and the dog peering at us round the edge of a door in the dark recesses on the hallway.

For the next few days I’m going to be at a Katherine Mansfield conference in Menton, southern France - a few hundred yards from the Italian border. The event is being held at one of the beautiful villas built for the rich who used to migrate here in droves during the cold, northern winters.

I’m looking forward to French wine, French food, French coffee as well as sunshine and the delight of talking to lots of other Mansfield enthusiasts. The American novelist Linda Lappin is going to be there, promoting her novel ‘Katherine’s Wish’ , which is about Katherine Mansfield’s last days at Fontainebleau, and a young Australian playwright, Amelia McBride, is going to be performing her two man play ‘Something Childish but Very Natural’ (the other ‘man’ is going to be Julie Fryman). Unfortunately, internet access is uncertain - none at the venue and I’m staying in a tiny family owned Pension which doesn’t have internet either, so I may not be able to write anything on the blog until I get back.

Afterwards we are driving back across France in Neil’s ancient old banger. Who knows if it will make it?

The photos are, of course, just to make you all jealous!

I opened this book with great anticipation; I love John Banville’s writing - the way he uses words, shapes sentences. But initially I was disappointed, because I realised straight away that I had read the first chapter of the book already. This first section was published in 2007 as a short story in the Faber Book of Irish Short Stories. I loved it as a story - so much that I rushed out to buy The Sea and anything else of Banville’s that was in stock. So you can see that I have really looked forward to publication of The Infinities. After my first reaction, I swallowed my disappointment - after all what is to stop an author expanding a really good story into a novel? - and read on to discover how he was going to develop his ideas further.

The story centres on the Godley family - a dysfunctional Irish family - alcoholic wife - self-harming daughter - emotionally inadequate son - beautiful, though rather detached daughter-in-law - who have all assembled at the family home - a rambling, ramshackle mansion somewhere in Ireland - to wait for the death of Adam Godley, who has sunk into coma following a massive stroke. Adam is a world famous mathematician, who can deal with numbers but not relationships. He is celebrated for puncturing the pretentious ‘Theory of Everything’ as well as exposing the ‘relativity hoax’. Chaos Theory had already discovered that it wasn’t the perfect equations that were important, but the imperfect - the ones that mathematicians left alone because they couldn’t be worked out - the numbers that scuttled off into the dark mysteries of Infinity. Adam’s achievement was to place The Infinities at the centre of the universe, where they make perfect sense, causing the kind of revolution not seen since Einstein.

The action takes place during a single day in summer. Adam, deeply unconscious, can hear everything and reflect on his life and relationships. For the family, he is already dead and his presence, in the Sky Room at the top of the house, haunts the novel.

The narration is in the omniscient mode, but in this case the narrator really is god - the son of Zeus, who also features in the story - all the Immortals inhabiting a parallel universe. This initially bothered me and I had to struggle to bridge the credibility gap - I was fine when the author was inside the minds of his characters, but when the gods began to comment, Banville lost me. But then I began to realise that the novel really needed these Immortals. I can’t remember which author it was who wrote ‘Never discuss ideas except in terms of character and temperament’, but this is one of the uses John Banville makes of the deities. They are a device to discuss and comment on human behaviour, difference and the nature of reality. They also ponder on the benefits and drawbacks of immortality, which is, it seems, sometimes too much of a good thing. But no-one wants to die. Not Adam Godley, or John Banville, who thinks that life is like a wonderful party he doesn’t want to leave.

Consciousness of our own mortality is the thing that is supposed to separate us from the animal kingdom. The dog Rex, observes the way in which this knowledge affects human beings.
‘There is a thing the matter with them, though, with all of them. It is a great puzzle to [Rex], this mysterious knowledge, unease, foreboding, whatever it is that afflicts them, and try though he may he has never managed to solve it. They are afraid of something, something that is always there though they pretend it is not. It is the same for all of them, the same huge terrible thing, except for the very young, though even in their eyes, too, he sometimes fancies he detects a momentary widening, a sudden horrified dawning. He discerns this secret and awful awareness underneath everything they do.’

What is our place in the universe? At times the novel seems to suggest that we are the playthings of the gods who are capricious and fond of jokes. The Immortals have an additional function in that they do add humour (Pan is unforgettable) to what otherwise could have been a rather bleak situation. And they are also necessary to make the ending (no spoilers here!) work.

I still find it hard to look at the book as a whole - I can still see the first section as a story - densely written, beautifully shaped. The rest of the book is thinner, inevitably stretched. I can’t quite see it as the blurb promises ‘A gloriously earthy romp and a delicately poised, infinitely wise look at the terrible and wonderful plight of being human’, but the writing is everything you would expect from such a brilliant author.

John Banville talking about mortality on You Tube.

Riddle: - Wanted a New World

‘I am neither a short story, nor a sketch, nor an impression, nor a tale. I am written in prose. I am a great deal shorter than a novel; I may be only one page long, but, on the other hand, there is no reason why I should not be thirty. I have a special quality - a something, a something which is immediately, perfectly recognisable. It belongs to me; it is of my essence. In fact I am often given away in the first sentence. I seem almost to stand or fall by it. It is to me what the first phrase of the song is to the singer. Those who know me feel; “Yes, that is it.” And they are from that moment prepared for what is to follow.’
June 25 1920

Remarks on keeping notebooks. ‘It would be almost amusing to remember how short a time has passed since Samuel Butler advised the budding author to keep a notebook.’ Nowadays young writers rest ‘their laurels’ on them. ‘They shall be regarded as of the first importance, read with a deadly seriousness and acclaimed as a kind of new Art - the art of not taking pains’.
June 13th 1919
(Ironic considering that her notebooks contain much of her best writing and are nowadays what she is most famous for.)

‘Very often, after reading a modern novel, the question suggests itself; why was it written? ….. We cannot help wondering, when the book is finished and laid by, as to the nature of that mysterious compulsion. It is terrifying to think of the number of novels that are written and announced and published and to be had of all libraries, and reviewed and bought and borrowed and read, and left in hotel lounges and omnibuses and railway carriages and deck chairs. . . . .’
4th April 1919

KM laments the endless supply of novels all the same like freshly baked buns made from the same ingredients to be endlessly consumed, leaving the consumer empty:

‘We are quickly tired. Repetition - the charm of knowing what is coming, of beating the tune and being ready with the smiles and the laugh at just the right moment, no longer has the power to soothe and distract us. It wakes in us a demon of restlessness, a fever to break out of the circle of the tune, however brilliant the tune may be.
Jan 30th 1920

In ‘A Novel without a Crisis’ KM sets out what she is looking for in the plot of a novel.
‘… having decided on the novel form, one cannot lightly throw one’s story over the mill without replacing it with another story which is, in its way, obedient to the rules of that discarded one. There must be the same setting out upon a voyage of discovery (but through unknown seas instead of charted waters), the same difficulties and dangers must be encountered, and there must be an ever-increasing sense of the greatness of the adventure and an ever more passioante desire to possess and explore the mysterious country. There must be given the crisis when the great final attempt is made which succeeds - or does not succeed.’. Without this ‘central point of significance’, ‘the form of the novel, as we see it, is lost. Without it, how are we to appreciate the importance of one ‘spiritual event’ rather than another? What is to prevent each being unrelated if the gradual unfolding in growing, gaining light is not to be followed by one blazing moment?’
May 30 1919

Novels and Novelists - a collection of reviews by Katherine Mansfield which appeared in the Athenaeum between April 1919 and December 1920 edited after her death by John Middleton Murry.
More information on Katherine Mansfield’s life and work.

My imminent re-location to Italy has forced some very difficult decisions. At the top of the list, what would happen to our cat? Heathcliff (what else could Kathy’s cat be called?) has been my companion for almost ten years. He sits on one of the oak beams when I’m working, just to make sure that I’m not snoozing instead. Given the chance, he will tap out his own messages on the keyboard and has been known to crash the whole computer. I’ve tried to be a responsible owner (does one ever ‘own’ a cat?) and parting with him has always been unthinkable.

Before Heathcliff condescended to live with me, he belonged to another writer - William Scammell - an excellent poet and good friend, well known for his savagely truthful reviews in the Spectator, Literary Review and the Independent on Sunday. Friends were never spared, which could be something of an ordeal, but Bill’s judgement was always sound and fair. You could rely on him to tell you exactly what didn’t work as well as what did. Bill died in November 2000 and I still miss him a lot.

Heathcliff was his cat - a stray who walked through his front door one day and decided to take up residence. Being a companionable cat who loves comfortable places and good conversation, Heathcliff spent the next few months curled up on Bill’s duvet, as he lay in bed facing the grim realities of lung cancer. Bill wrote a poem about Heathcliff, which appeared in the Independent after he died (and more recently in a new anthology of Bill’s poetry).

We have been adopted by a black cat
with a white bib and paws.
Almost a designer cat,
who pushes his affections
into your stomach as though
he was making bread.
He’s come from nowhere,
the exact spot you yourself are headed for.

When Bill died we agreed to give Heathcliff a temporary home which gradually became permanent - or so we thought.

However, recently my life has changed in a way I never envisaged, one that is totally unfair to our beloved animal. During the last twelve months, as I commuted to a fellowship at one of the North eastern universities, spent weeks doing research for the book in New Zealand and tried to see something of Neil in Italy, our friends have heroically fed him for me, though he made his feelings very plain when I returned! This situation obviously couldn’t go on, especially as I’m going to be away for even longer periods in the near future. So, with two months of international travel in front of me, and unable to take him with us to the house we are borrowing in Italy, we have tried for weeks to find someone willing to look after him (bribed with a year’s supply of a certain famous cat-food).

Fortunately one of our neighbours has agreed to foster Heathcliff for us, and - after some sleepless nights, I have breathed a sigh of relief at the thought of him being properly cared for - and we still have visiting rights. It’s not a long term solution, but I know he will be well looked after in the immediate future.

Now, it’s off to France for a Katherine Mansfield conference in Menton, and then after a few days of frantic packing, off to Cambodia and all things strange and wonderful!

I was recently nominated for the Kreativ Blogger Award by two people on my network of blogs - best-selling novelist Wendy Robertson at Life Twice Tasted and about-to-be-published novelist Al at Publish or Perish, and have to say I was very flattered that they liked my blog enough to want to give it a KBA. But it got me thinking about what this award was and where it originated (given the Kreativ spelling - probably America!). Then I was nominated again for a Splash Award, for alluring, amusing, bewitching, impressive, and inspiring blogs.

The rules are that you have to thank the person who nominated you (thank you both), link to their blog, then nominate seven (nine in the case of Splash) other bloggers you like and create a link to them - and they in turn have to thank you, link to your blog and then nominate seven/nine other bloggers ……… A bit like a circular letter - which I always bin if I ever receive them. So, being a bit of an information junkie, I got on the internet and started looking around.

It seems that these are Memes. Memes have a pretty impressive CV - they are originally ‘a postulated unit or element of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, and are transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena. The etymology of the term relates to the Greek word mimema (mimesis, mimetics) for “something imitated”.‘ Richard Dawkins used the term scientifically in The Selfish Gene to refer to ‘evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena‘ - these could include all the elements of popular culture tunes, catch-phrases, beliefs, and fashion as well as developments in technology.

Blogs use Memes a lot because they create millions of links. If Al nominated seven people and they all nominated seven people - that’s 50 blogs all linked together. Maths has never been my strong point (I’m congenitally innumerate) but if those other 49 people all nominate 7 people ………. You can see that within a very short space of time a large portion of the blogosphere will be magically connected. I find it utterly mind-blowing to think of having connections with so many people I’ve never met and probably never will meet, out there in that fourth dimension we all inhabit so casually - cyberspace. In fact, I’m not sure I can cope with it!

Seven Interesting Things

Another, less attractive, feature of the KBA is that you have to mention 7 interesting things about yourself. Now that is HARD! But I have travelled to some interesting places, so maybe people might be interested in some of the bizarre things that have happened to me ……

1. As I mentioned earlier I’m innumerate. Not sure whether that’s interesting, but it’s one of the things I have to live with about myself and would love to change. I look at a number and it shrinks back into the paper it’s written on and begins to assume alien dimensions. Numbers hate me.
2. Despite being born in the second half of the 20th century I was brought up in a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, without electricity or running water. A bit Dickensian.
3. I lived in the middle east for eight years (and loved it), sometimes in half-built hotel rooms, sometimes in cardboard houses (Swedish) in the middle of sand dunes, and sometimes in ramshackle villas with wonky air-conditioning (the Dickensian childhood was useful practice). While I was in Qatar I got involved with English broadcasting, writing and presenting programmes for the Qatar Broadcasting service - now perhaps better known as Al Jazeerah.
4. I visited Iran - one of the most beautiful countries I’ve ever been to and also one of the most friendly.
5. I once bribed my way onto an aeroplane, at a moment’s notice, during a coup in an African country. My little daughter (she was 2) still remembers that she had no knickers on when we arrived at our destination at a safer location in the far north.
6. During a previous coup I hid under a bed with my children and a machete and listened to soldiers running round the outside of the house rattling their guns on the window bars. Which explains my behaviour in No 5. Unfortunately we had to stay there until we could get exit visas - which took nearly a year (and more bribery!).
7. In the same African country I enrolled at university (the only white student) and read law, just to stop myself from going completely mad.

Seven/Nine Interesting Blogs

There are some wonderful blogs out there and I’m deliberately not nominating some of the ones that I follow and love - being true to the Meme, I’m going to name some new ones I’ve just found that I think deserve a second glance. But, sorry to disappoint my nominees, I won’t be passing on the responsibilities, because of my strong feelings about circular letters and the feelings of obligation they impose. If anyone wants to join in for fun - they can!

1. First ‘The Crabbit Old Bat’s complete guide to getting published’ - an essential site for new authors whose content will also resonate for the not-so-new. I particularly liked Nicola Morgan’s covering letter to a publisher!
www.helpineedapublisher.blogspot.com/

2. Emma Darwin’s blog ‘This Itch of Writing’ at
www.emmadarwin.typepad.com

3. ‘Icebus’ a blog by a poet - Jonathan Wonham - who has moved to Norway - some beautiful writing, scenery and poetry at
www.icebus.blogspot.com

4. Judy Darley gets a vote because she’s trying very hard to get a website ‘Essential Writers’ off the ground - a network of blogs and helpful sites for writers just starting out. She’s discovering that there are lots of pitfalls with such an enterprise and needs all the support she can get. Her own blog is at www.judy.essentialwriters.com

5. Then there’s Tim Jones at ‘Books in the Trees’, down under in New Zealand. He’s a poet and author and his site is dedicated to new magazines and publishing outlets (international) as well as reviews and news on the publishing scene down under. There’s also poetry and some good links.
www.timjonesbooks.blogspot.com/

6. Then there’s the adventures of author Candy Gourlay, called ‘Notes from the Slushpile’ at
www.notesfromtheslushpile.co.uk/

7. And then there’s Jodie Baker’s book-feast at
www.bookgazing.blogspot.com

Hopefully everyone will find something that they like here!

Happy networking.

I chose Sharon Olds for my first poet in the Poetry Challenge just because the volume of her ‘Selected Poems‘ was on my bedside table. I was first introduced to Sharon Olds’ poetry by a friend. Then I heard her read last year at the Wordsworth Trust and I liked the way she opened the reading with two poems by someone else she wanted to share. Few poets do this because it means there’s less time for their own work. She was quiet - tall, grey haired, self-effacing, dressed rather drably. But when she began to read, it was the words that took centre stage. Her poems, unlike herself, are bold and assertive. Also unlike her public persona, they are all about herself - the ‘I’ word is at the centre of every poem. This is her territory.

There’s a lot more humour than I expected, like the wry ending of ‘My Father Snoring’,

‘………He lay like a felled
beast all night and sounded his thick
buried stoppered call, like a cry for
help. And no one ever came:
there were none of his kind around there anywhere.’

But what first got Sharon Olds noticed, was her capacity for ‘Writing the Body’ and writing about forbidden things. Not necessarily forbidden in terms of censorship, but things that poets didn’t write about and women didn’t talk publicly (or often privately) about. Menstruation, rape, miscarriage, contraception and sex. It takes courage to write about the things we all think about or speculate about, but prefer not to admit. There’s a poem where she imagines her parents’ wedding night, another where she catches a glimpse of her father’s penis. Then there is the surprise and pathos of ‘The Connoiseuse of Slugs’. I found a wonderful reading of it (by a man) on You Tube.

These are passionate intimate poems - with such nakedness the reader becomes a voyeur - party to Olds’ most private moments, which are often sexual. One of the best erotic descriptions of love making in either prose or poetry is in ‘You Kindly’. In ‘Adolescence’ she writes about the first fumbling horrors of contraception, with the wit of hindsight. The graphic images in ‘Miscarriage’ are balanced by the delicate observation:

‘A month later/our son was conceived, and I never went back/to mourn the one who came as far as the /sill with its information: that we could/botch something, you and I.’

But ‘The Language of the Brag’ was the poem I kept going back to, with its long, Whitmanesque lines, following the conventions of the ‘heroic brag’, but using it to put a woman’s achievement in giving birth to another human being, up there, equal to all the other heroic achievements of men.

‘I have wanted courage, I have thought about fire
and the crossing of waterfalls, I have dragged around

my belly big with cowardice and safety,
stool charcoal from the iron pills,
huge breasts leaking colostrum,
legs swelling, hands swelling,
face swelling and reddening, hair
falling out, inner sex
stabbed again and again with pain like a knife.
I have lain down.

I have lain down and sweated and shaken
and passed blood and shit and water and
slowly alone in the centre of a circle I have
passed the new person out
and they have lifted the new person free of the act
and wiped the new person free of that
language of blood like praise all over the body.‘

If I have a criticism of this selection, it is because there are too many poems on the death of her father. By the sheer weight of numbers they tip the balance in one direction. Her troubled relationship with her father - both before and after her parents’ divorce - has obviously been of great importance in her life, but I could have done with fewer poems. In ‘Beyond Harm’ the last lines point up the difficulty of their relationship. As Olds’ father lay dying, just before he sank into coma, he told her that he loved her, a statement she had never felt able to rely on and couldn’t even then.

‘……Right up to the last
moment, I could make some mistake, offend him, and with
one of his old mouths of disgust he could re-
skew my life. I did not think of it,
I was helping to take care of him,
wiping his face and watching him.
But then, a while after he died,
I suddenly thought, with amazement, he will always
love me now, and I laughed - he was dead, dead!’

Olds’ poetry reminds me of Anne Sexton - but these poems are forensic rather than neurotic. She examines the interior landscape of her own body with the rigour of a scientist, adding the sense of wonder you’d expect from an explorer who has just landed on the shores of an undiscovered country. She dissects flesh and bone like an anatomist, analyses emotions like wiring diagrams, showing you just how, exactly, it all works.

And the poems are structured with the same precision - the rhythms carrying you unobtrusively, relentlessly through the poem, with the stresses falling in all the important places, making you look at words you might otherwise have glanced over, revealing meanings you’d never have guessed at.

But I did wonder how her partners or her children felt about being written about so graphically - you can’t write truthfully about your own life without also exposing others. Do you have the right to make their lives public too?

I sometimes found the subject matter unsettling, but the writing is wonderful - two or three of the poems (the Language of the Brag for instance) were worth the whole book.

‘I have done what you wanted to do, Walt Whitman,
Allen Ginsberg, I have done this thing,
I and the other women this exceptional
act with the exceptional heroic body,
this giving birth, this glistening verb,
and I am putting my proud American boast
right here with the others.’

Like most writers, I’ve got two people inside my head. One is The Writer, who is always scribbling - mostly garbage - and the other is The Editor, whose task in life is to keep their talkative twin under control. The Writer is incorrigible, even in conversation, twisting everything into a narrative, being cavalier with Facts and ruthless with Truth when it gets in the way of The Story. The sensible Editor purports to deplore such reckless conduct, but can’t resist doing a bit of tweaking - deleting this, crossing out that, altering a word here and a word there - in order to make a Better Story. The two quarrel incessantly. Truth is absolutely disregarded.

But they are absolutely inseparable - what would one do without the other?

Image - Etruscan Museum in Volterra