by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Nov 27, 2008 | poetry |
Jane Hirshfield writes: Having eaten the pears. Having eaten the black figs, the white figs. Eaten the apples. Table be strewn. Table be strewn with stems, table with peelings of grapefruit and pleasure. Table be strewn with pleasure, what was here to be done...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Nov 26, 2008 | life, shapes |
In Remembering the Bone House, Nancy Mairs writes, “Here I develop that ability to concatenate events which characterizes human consciousness and makes ‘daily life’ possible.” I had to look it up. To concatenate is to link together, as in a...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Nov 24, 2008 | memoir, memory, reviews |
Remembering the Bone House is one of my all-time favorite books. Nancy Mairs wrote this memoir in 1989. It was out of print for a while, but then Beacon Press did a new printing in 1995, for which the author wrote a new preface. In it, she called...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Nov 21, 2008 | craft of writing, memory, reviews, truth |
The Gathering, by Irish writer Anne Enright, won the 2007 Man Booker Prize. I read it in April. In this novel, the narrator describes her family of origin in terms of the labels we acquire, as families and as individuals in a family. “The Hegartys didn’t...
by Cynthia Newberry Martin | Nov 19, 2008 | journeys, reviews, shapes |
If I weren’t reading all of Rachel Cusk’s books to look at how her writing develops over time, I would not have finished her sixth book, In the Fold, published in 2005. As one reviewer wrote, “too little happened to too many people.” Or...
