lettersfromgrace's reviews
90 reviews

Carol Ann Duffy manages to keep the childlike magic of Christmas alive whilst acknowledging that children are not naïve to the celebrity worship, the class stratification, the poverty, and faithlessness of the world they live in; her success in doing this makes all her social commentary more potent and charges her poem with the beauty of belief and hope that all deserve a happy Christmas, and all a good night. 

It amazes me how Duffy can tell a tale poetically that is both as whimsical and full of merriment as to appeal to a child, but in addition cast it with such profundity, citing the mute-dead, the stag, the cry of a baby, blood in a priest’s wine, the cloaked poet— references to Rossetti’s ‘In The Bleak Midwinter’. It’s beautiful work that proves what was already known, that Duffy is a poet laureate through and through. 

My favourites were ‘The Preludes’, two choruses from ‘The Rock’, ‘Journey of the Magi’. The conversion from the existentialism of ‘The Wasteland’ and ‘Prufrock’ to Eliot’s latter evangelical poems was intriguing, especially in terms of studying the development of his style. It was the perfect book to read following Golding’s ‘The Spire’. 

The nearness Eliot describes to his creator in birthing his daughter in ‘Marina’, is beautiful in its innocence and humility; the reflections upon life and death alongside being a believer in an atheist or misled world in ‘Journey of the Magi’ are incredibly profound and poignant; ‘The Preludes’ speak to so much of the futility one feels in the seemingly insignificant repetition of everyday life. There was this one section within ‘Prufrock’ of life being measured by coffee spoons that struck me, the feeling that continuing to eat or drink is pointless is one that regularly occurs to me on my period, so this resonated personally.

Eliot’s masterpiece, ‘The Wasteland’ was gorgeously modernist, and I have been so intrigued as to what modernist poetry would look like compared to the modernist poetry I so adore. It is certainly a style I like, and I would love to learn to be able to adopt it for my own purposes.

the deep symbolism of this novel gave it such profundity; its ending was perfection— maybe it is that i am rereading hamlet once more, but baldwin’s reflections on how we leave this ‘dirty body’, and the strength we are given by waiting for the hand of god felt to me almost a suicidal anticlimax— you want david to live rather than just survive, you hope he will. the discussions baldwin prompts about sexuality, what it is to be a woman, what freedom is, what nationality is, are all handled beautifully and with such touching brevity. his abilities of description and his use of repeated motifs are just gorgeous. i hope to read more of him. it is also interesting to consider as complying to the traditional tragic form, especially within a shakespearian context.

a gorgeous existential reflection that speaks of the meaninglessness of purpose given, only the meaning of the life that passes, seen by one, like a kingfisher or an apple tree, a beatitude in its joy and its terror; life is madness, folly, but we live— and like jocelin we may become martyrs. 

plath is perfection, as always.

the sequence at the very end is a beautifully written and poignant reflection on her first suicide attempt and how symbolic it became for her. 

the shadow of grief, of her father, fathomless and in black, marrying her to shadow, of the disquieting muses that surrounded her from birth, of the mother of otherness, is ever present within this poetry collection, but so too is hope, rebirth, light, and love. 

in that aspect, it is very much ariel’s older sister: wise and experienced, ready to console. 

it was interesting to compare the voice of ‘the colossus’ to the voice plath employs in ‘ariel’, as they are so distinct, but bloom from each other still; a natural metamorphosis. 

in addition, i found this volume to be much more akin to lowell’s ‘life studies’ and traditionally confessional in style than ‘ariel’, and so that helped me to see what it is that makes a poem plathian, that distinguishes her. it is that juxtaposition between winter and the spring to come, i think. 

his darkest play, most definitely— not even necessarily in the strength of its tragic action, for it is all futile, but because of that, the meaninglessness of life; even the images shakespeare creates, of ophelia in her lake, free at last from control, are of life, which shall soon become like yorick’s skull indistinguishable from all else, as death reaches and corrupts it, or makes it in its all reaching equality. 

hamlet as a character resonated with me deeply, his nature, his delay, living in his classical allusions and the written word— deeply concerned with introspection and expectation of him, in love with life, mad for it, but aware of its meaningless; cloaked in back, aware of a danger within him.

Adored.

My favourite play by Shakespeare.

I work at a bookstore currently, and am paid in books. On my first day, this was one of the novels I was paid in, and I picked it spontaneously, without any expectations of it, only that I had been to Berlin last November, and had been studying superpower relationships within the Cold War before that summer. 

I’m so glad I did. ‘Siblings’ has a deeply interesting social context, in that it is a novel inhibited by censorship, in essence fundamentally propaganda, and with its own didactic message, that one should not leave the GDR, and support the brain drain, because it is composed of all different people, striving to the communist ideal, none perhaps perfect. Like Uli and Elisabeth say, what kind of people are the party members? 

There’s Bergamann with volumes of Lessing strewn across his bedroom floor, Jocahaim with a nude inspired by Renoir’s paintings on his wall— and it’s obvious that Lessing wants us to see these people as still holding ideals, simultaneously whilst being alive and aware of their own failures. “You could have saved him.” It’s a tender awareness, a painting in a good light, and it doesn’t reflect Soviet Germany on the whole; but Reimann is aware of this. 

She is not a camera, she observes and writes to her own feelings, like Elisabeth or like Isherwood in his note to the text of ‘Goodbye to Berlin’, so whatever she puts down, it is subjective, but it is true to her, to her encounters. It is this faithful depiction that gives such depth and personality to her characters, and makes them more than just archetypes, right or wrong. 

Reimann does create a nuanced debate, on the place of art in the GDR, on bourgeoisie tendencies, on tradition— the juxtaposition between “Do you believe in tradition?” and her brother’s denial before offering her his coat was beautiful— on that all have ideals, all hope for the future, analogised through cybernetics, even if it makes us afraid in how it could be mutilated— “verse machines”. It is a thought-provoking novel, that requires reflection, notwithstanding its didactic elements. 

That is a testament to Reimann’s belief in socialism, that her readers would understand Uli’s decision, because they would realise that to her socialism is not about a kind of people, but about what ties humanity together: hope. Whether this was misguided, is history’s to decide— the achievement of a future is always fragile in the present, and Reimann doesn’t ignore this, she does represent the potential fractures, the loss, that one has to let people go. Either way, it’s personal in a time where so much was impersonal, and therefore it’s a novel to be cherished. 

In addition, her prose is gorgeous and symbolic, the chronology deeply individual, and conveying the funny lack of importance time has when you’re with someone you’ve known your entire life. It was an incredible use of the stream of consciousness form, and a tightly written novella of love, tenderness, hope, against divide, fracturing, and despair. Reimann was aware of the duality, and knew she could only pick what was better, even if it wouldn’t always live up to its name, even if it wasn’t always right.