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A feminist triumph and homage to Virginia Woolf, Miranda Darling’s Thunderhead is a potent exploration of suburban entrapment for women. The novella opens with a complex satire of Ian McEwan’s response to Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) in his novel Saturday (2005). All three books are set over the course of a single day, where the intricacies of both the quotidian and extraordinary occur. In this novella’s opening paragraphs, Darling’s protagonist, Winona Dalloway, wakes to see the sky ablaze through her window. While ‘it is dawn in the suburbs of the east’ – rather than a burning plane, evoking 9/11 terrorism, as in McEwan’s novel – she believes it ‘telegraphs a warning, red sky in the morning’. This refers to the opening of Mrs Dalloway, where Clarissa Dalloway feels, ‘standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen’.
Just the slightest movement of the curtain as she stands by the window. Just a touch. That’s how she brings the light in, Jacqui does. Just before dawn, with only the smallest movement of her finger, and in comes the light. I see it reach the Golden Cane Palm, highlighting the larger fronds, their dark becoming green. Jacqui looks at those fronds, as I do, while the light begins to fill the room. She turns her head to me as if in a studied pose, rehearsed.
The recent pause announced by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in pushing a controversial legislative package through the Knesset marks a temporary respite from a concerted plan to challenge and overturn the system of government that has been in place since the state of Israel was created in 1948.
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Shots, so the media release claims, is written in ‘mesmerising prose.’ Yeah, right! This is the life story of a rock musician they are talking about. I can recall attempting to read one such memoir, a well-meaning present from a friend who might have known better. It was by Ray Manzarek, of The Doors; it was called Light My Fire (1999) and it was completely and utterly awful. Manzarek’s organ may have on occasion swooped and swirled like a graceful albatross, but his prose is as scruffy and unsociable as a giant petrel. After twenty pages, I couldn’t care less whether it was Jim Morrison or Jack the Ripper buried in that Paris graveyard. Now, here I am faced with the journal of another borderline celebrity with too much time on his hands, a keyboardist from an ‘iconic’ rock band to boot. This book could not be anything other than a waste of everyone’s time.
Attending a poetry festival is not normally considered a life-threatening event (not even if you are prone to deep vein thrombosis from constant sitting) but when I told my family I was going to Struga, I was greeted by worried looks and expressions of deep concern. Struga is in the Republic of Macedonia. Just days before, Macedonian hotheads had set fire to a mosque in Prilip (not that far from Struga) in revenge for the death of a Prilip policeman in a road-mine explosion planted by Albanian terrorists. The hair-trigger tensions in that country were clearly dangerous, and possibly escalating.
The Unspeak Poems, Tim Thorne’s fourteenth collection, is characteristically politically engaged and international in its scope. The best of these poems make use of Thorne’s acute ear for everyday speech. ‘Gettin’ there’, for instance, sad and memorable, creates through jumpy fragments of wry observations and narrative a picture of misguided hope against loaded odds: ‘The saddest place I’ve ever seen / is the bus shelter outside Risdon prison. / You lose about one teddy bear per eviction / on average.’ The same talent is used to different effect in recording the incoherence of racism in ‘7/11’.
