Hoddle St fusion

Barbara Cartland’s Book of Love and Lovers

Sorting through piles of books that were taking up shelf space and could possibly be disposed of I came upon this gem. Among numerous chapter headings we find ‘The Goddess of Love’, ‘Dreams of Love’, ‘Love Forbidden’, ‘Wooed by Love’, ‘Casanova’, and very many more.

Joseph O’Neill: This Is The Life

Paul Murray: The Bee Sting

Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting is his fourth novel, and like An Evening of Long Goodbyes, has been long-listed for the Booker Prize. He is an Irish writer, and like many other Irish writers, writes about the family and the state of Ireland, or, as here, lets the despair and break-down of family life, speak for life in Ireland and in the wider world.

Oooh, nasty

Your asthma has won

     the audience’s sympathy;

Don’t lose it by reading

      your poems

From The Epigrams of Martial, tr. Laurie Duggan (Scripsi 1989)

Image: http://www.oldbookillustrations.com/illustrations/declaiming-poetry/

Jane Hirshfield : Pebbles

At a time when Australia is about to vote on a referendum for indigenous people (about 950,000 people in a population of 26 million) to have a Voice to Parliament, and when the No campaign has no logical case except political cussedness, these words from Jane Hirshfield, the first composed by her, the second her translation of Issa , seem appropriate.

Global Warming

When his ship first came to Australia,
Cook wrote, the natives
continued fishing, without looking up.
Unable, it seems, to fear what was too large to be comprehended.

 

On a branch / floating downriver / a cricket, singing

Kobayashi Issa (Translated by Jane Hirshfield

Image James Wainscoat Unsplash

Brigitte Reimann: Siblings

Anna Funder : Wifedom

Anna Funder describes her latest brilliant and compulsively readable book as ‘Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life’. We are not talking about Sonia Orwell who was married to Orwell for a brief period before he died, mainly to handle his literary estate. No, this book is about Eileen O’Shaughnessy, the first wife, who sacrificed her own literary brilliance, health, and freedom for George Orwell. She never received any acknowledgement from him, and died from a surgery for uterine cancer performed by the cheapest doctor she could find, in order to spare George Orwell the cost.