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Delicious struggle
Writing about her mother, who is a presence in many of the essays in Attention, Anne Enright recalls the two reciting poetry together. Despite her mother steadily declining into dementia, Enright adjudges the lines of poetry, as well as the books her mother continues to read, as bulwarks against the withering of her mind. ‘It seems’, Enright writes, ‘as though her mind is not putting the words together so much as the other way around.’
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Attention: Writing on life, art and the world
by Anne Enright
Jonathan Cape, $36.99 pb, 288 pp
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