February Reading Diary
By Kim Moore
I have finally started running again after being given the go-ahead by my physio (hurrah!) so am feeling slightly less frantic and calmer! I have also treated myself to an electric folding bike to help with my commute to Manchester. Sadly my visions of me gliding up the 277 metre climb from the valley bottom up to my house on the edge of the moor was not just optimistic, but frankly delusional. My bike is ‘pedal assisted’ which means if I don’t pedal, it stops. So my mission by the end of this teaching term is to get a little bit fitter so I can get up to the top of the hill without getting off and pushing the bike.
In another moment of madness, my daughter and I decided we should get a hamster. I started researching ethical hamster care, and in my usual all or nothing way, now have a 120 cm long hamster enclosure filled with bedding, hides and everything a spoiled hamster could possibly need.
My Reading Diary is shamefully short this month - but my reason/excuse is that I’ve spent a large part of my time reading lots of pamphlets as part of the judging process for The Poetry Business International Pamphlet Competition. This is still ongoing (before anyone asks!)…
I have managed to get a few books finished during this time though - one poetry collection, one short story collection and one novel. I hope you enjoy reading about them!
The Rose
Ariana Reines
The Rose is the fifth collection from the wonderful American poet Ariana Reines. In the UK, Penguin are publishing it and I was lucky enough to get an advance copy. This is what I like to call a desert island book - a book that you could take with you if you knew you were going to be stranded on a desert island for twenty years because there are enough layers and ideas to keep you going for a long time. It’s a book that interrogates and reinvents our ideas and preconceptions around female desire, power and submission and argues for the possibility that sometimes there is no easy or single answer.
The figure of Medea (who in the most famous version of the myth murdered her own children after being abandoned by her husband Jason for a new wife) haunts this book in a sequence of poems with the title Medea - none of which tell her story, or at least not in a linear way. The Medea in The Rose is utterly contemporary and mythic. In the first poem called ‘Medea’ of the many that run through the collection, she says “I’ll find another woman / Somewhere inside me /I’ll humble myself / I’ll try”. There is a beautiful recording of one of the later ‘Medea’ poems on poems.org where Ariana explains ‘I kept asking myself what it would mean to be the worst woman in the world.’ I loved this poem for the way it lists all the good things that must be forgotten in order to both endure violence and to carry it out.
One of my favourite poems is ‘Hellmouth’ with its repeated insistence that we must build a secret room inside ourselves. The first iteration of this has such a surefooted line break ‘If you fail to build in yourself a secret /Room’. We must build secrets in ourselves and secret rooms. Later in the poem she writes ‘The little / Room in the middle / Of me. Where I see / What I can’t say’.
Many years ago, I had ‘A Room of One’s Own’ tattooed on my arm - inspired by Virginia Woolf’s essay of course - I longed for a physical room of my own that would be my writing room, but I also wanted to have a room inside myself, a place that nobody else could touch, that could not be controlled or known or owned.
Many of the poems consist of looping threads of language that you have to trust in to follow - they are philosophical, mystical, spiritual, sexual, disturbing, grief-filled for a mother, lust-filled, love-filled, contradictory - and often funny., The poem ‘Bitch’ ends ‘Bitch this is nature /Shake your book at someone else.’ Often the sentences and syntax leap so that we can go from humour to grief - and the threads of grief that wind through this book are always surprising when they show themselves: ‘I let my country go to war / I let my mother lose her mind’.
The Rose is published in April, and if you do plan to get stranded on a desert island, or have a spare lifetime to read and re-read this collection, then I would definitely recommend.
Buy if: you like your poetry full of philosophy whilst being grounded in the everyday, exploratory in its approach to language and ideas and explicit in its exploration of shame, desire, and contradictory impulses,
You can buy The Rose by Ariana Reines here via Bookshop.org or at all good independent bookshops.
raw content
Naomi Booth
My lovely publisher at Corsair sent me this book through the post, correctly guessing I would enjoy it and I did! It’s a really beautiful novel about early motherhood - the tenderness and brutality of the early days of mothering, set against stunning writing about landscape and run through with the seams of violence that run through many women’s experiences of girlhood.
In the novel, the main character Grace has a baby and then is plagued or haunted by intrusive thoughts - she imagines her baby being hurt - both accidentally and deliberately and these thoughts become so potent she stops sleeping and finds it difficult to leave the house. When I first gave birth, I had similar imaginings. I would be walking down the stairs carrying my daughter and then imagine dropping her. Or my husband would be pushing the pram and I would imagine him letting go and the pram going into the road in front of a lorry. It was disturbing and frightening and for the first couple of months I could hardly bear anyone else to hold her, and if she cried and I couldn’t get to her straight away it was like a physical pain.
Naomi Booth does a great job of articulating this part of motherhood - the wild, all-consuming, intense, visceral, uncontrollable love that I felt for my daughter that was frightening in its single mindedness. She writes really well about the isolation of new parenthood, and the difficulties of relationships when a baby is added into the mix.
Buy if: you are interested in beautiful and evocative writing about place and the way early motherhood is filled with both tenderness and brutality.
You can buy a copy of raw content here via my bookshop.org store
Antarctica
Claire Keegan
Unlike the other two books, I did actually buy this one. I was in The Bookcase (our wonderful local bookshop in Hebden Bridge) buying Christmas gifts and couldn’t resist buying a book for myself as a present to me for being me. At the moment I’m trying to immerse myself in short stories because I’m trying to write them - and as I tell my students over and over, you can’t write anything unless you are reading. I am very much at the start of my short story reading but this one really jumped out at me because of the cover. I think it is so striking I felt compelled to pick it up.
Antarctica is Claire Keegan’s first book of short stories and was published in 1999. I didn’t realise this when I bought it, or even whilst I was reading it - the stories definitely don’t feel over twenty years old. The whole book feels like a masterclass in capturing not just what people are really like, but what really happens in the space between two people - the messy, awkward strangeness of interaction, the violence and tenderness and confusion of it all.
The titular story “Antarctica” is one that will stay with me for a long time. Imagine starting a book of short stories with the sentence “Every time the happily married woman went away she wondered how it would feel to sleep with another man.” This was one of my favourites - with a real sting in the tail at the end. I also enjoyed “Love in the Tall Grass”, featuring an extra-marital affair that goes wrong, “Sisters” about a child-free sister who is taken advantage of by her sister and her children until she fights back, “Passport Soup” about a couple driven apart and held together by the sudden disappearance of their child and “You Can’t Be Too Careful” - a witness testimony and a half.
This collection has left me wanting to read them all again, but also wanting to read everything Claire Keegan has ever written!
Buy it if: you like your short stories dark, your settings varied and your characters rendered in full colour in all their failure and joy and sadness.
You can buy Antarctica by Claire Keegan here from my Bookshop.org account or from all good independent bookshops
Claire Keegan is indeed brilliant- read everything!
I always love your selections, Kim. Thank you.