Michael Hofmann
What the authors of these three wildly different books share is a gift for creating through language a kind of intimacy of presence, as though they were in the room with you. Emily Wilson’s much-awaited translation of The Iliad (W.W. Norton & Company) is a gorgeous, hefty hardback with substantial authorial commentary that manages to be both scholarly and engaging. The poem is translated into effortless-looking blank verse that reads like music. The Running Grave (Sphere) by Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling), the seventh novel in the Cormoran Strike crime series and one of the best so far, features Rowling’s gift for the creation of memorable characters and a cracking plot about a toxic religious cult. Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional (Allen & Unwin, reviewed in this issue of ABR) lingers in the reader’s mind, with the haunting grammar of its title, the restrained artistry of its structure, and the elusive way that it explores modes of memory, grief, and regret.
... (read more)The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick edited by Alex Andriesse
The joy of rhizomes. / Four makes of bamboo / volunteering everywhere, / a kind of supergrass. / ‘Hello, it’s me.’
... (read more)Defend
Indefensible
Defendant
Deafen
Defang
Deferment
Deform
Deforest
Defect
We have the White Louse. His name is Donal Dump. He is the Resident, and he heads the Dump maladministration, squillionaires and a sprain-surgeon, a Cabinet of all the talons. They call him a racial spigot. He sees it as he calls it, which makes him spigot. He squitters Twitter on the shitter, and we titter after. He only squeaks for us.
... (read more)June 22
And many happy returns of the day to Cyndi Lauper, 65,
once said to ‘dress funny’ and her voice likened to ‘rat’ (or ‘rat’s’),