“How can I be kind? How can I find bird-relief in the nest-building of day-to-day? Necessity supplies no velvet wing with which to escape. I am indeed and mortally pierced with the seeds of love.”
Remembering Elizabeth Smart on her birthday.
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“How can I be kind? How can I find bird-relief in the nest-building of day-to-day? Necessity supplies no velvet wing with which to escape. I am indeed and mortally pierced with the seeds of love.”
Remembering Elizabeth Smart on her birthday.
“A pen is a furious weapon. But it needs a rage of will. Everything physical dies but you can send a mad look to the end of time.“
I will admire the Canadian writer Elizabeth Smart eternally.
pickHeady stuff! I first read this at age 20 (borrowed from my then girlfriend) and nostalgia got the better of me when I saw this copy in Waterstones. Hmmm... I like it less now than I did before. The writing is either luscious or overblown, depending on your view, and there is something at once beautiful and monstrous in Smart's giving of herself wholesale to this great love of hers, the misery of it no less than the ecstacy, and expressing it so.
Miss K and I went to Bristol yesterday to see an exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints. Very interesting!
We made a detour to Waterstones on the way back to the train station. I've decided that, provided I am actually writing, poetry books don't count towards my book-buying quota. So I came away with Raymond Antrobus, Kaveh Akbar, and Sean Borodale's latest.
Attrib. and By Grand Central Station... have been on my wishlist for a while.
Librarians on the loose in Seattle #elliottbaybooks #bibliomania
so-soMixed feelings here.
There‘s something brave about vulnerability. And there‘s something powerful in Smart‘s love for this man. She is ready to face all criticism & ostracism for him. She sees it as inevitable. Don‘t we all want a love so true in our lives?
Yet knowing how this ends (it‘s based on events in the author‘s life) hurts the potency of this paean to love.
So if you want to read this, read nothing else about it until afterwards.
pickDifficult. Read to my partner. Achingly honest.
Wow only one page in.. I hereby abandon all the books I should be reading.
