A huge disappointment

 

Poems of Earth and Spirit: 70 Poems and 40 Practices to Deepen Your Connection With Nature by Kai Siedenburg
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

What a huge disappointment!

The title makes this book sound wonderful for those who love poetry, nature, and meditative practices. The well-written introduction, detailing the way the author arrived at creating and sharing these poems, is equally enticing.

Unfortunately, the poems are pathetic! They are homilies in chopped-up-prose, and banal at that. Giving this book one star (for the introduction) comes close to over-rating it.

I hastened to remove this book from my Kindle and nearly deleted it without reviewing. But maybe potential readers should be warned.

View all my reviews

Fiction that reads like memoir

A Secretive Life by Sara Hardy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This enthralling novel reads like biography because it's full of historical facts and characters who were real people, famous people. And also because Cecilia, the fictional central character / narrator, rings so true. Though much of it is set in England, and in Berlin between the World Wars, I like that Cecilia also lives for a time in Melbourne, and encounters such legendary figures as Magareta Webber of bookshop fame, and renowned landscape gardener Edna Walling.

It's also a delight to an avid reader like me (a mere generation younger than Cecilia herself) that in England and Europe she encounters Radclyffe Hall and Vita Sackville-West. I never met any of these famous figures myself, but one feels one knows them because of reading so much about them, and in some cases their own writings. (Goodness, my first poetry book was launched in The Bookshop of Margareta Webber! Though she herself was not only retired but deceased by then.)

And yet those famous folk, so well and believably portrayed, are not the reason for falling in love with this book. That reason is the character of Cecilia herself, both as the rather jaundiced – but engagingly so – elderly voice telling the story, and the younger self going through all the adventures of her long life. Sara Hardy's a great story-teller who sets a rollicking pace in this novel. She makes Cecilia and her eventful story unquestionably real.

Now I want to read a lot more Sara Hardy.  

View all my reviews

Writing the Story of Your Life, by Carmel Bird

Carmel Bird is an Australian writer of novels, short stories and essays. She has written books on the art of writing, and has edited anthologies of essays and stories. In 2016, she was awarded the Patrick White Literary Award.     

– Wikipedia.

This book, written in 2010, I only recently discovered. Glad I did! I’d been flirting with the idea of a memoir for years, always deciding against. But Carmel writes beautifully, and we have a long history….

We knew each other as children, and again in our forties. 

I was born in 1939, she in 1940. We grew up in Launceston, Tasmania, in the same neighbourhood. We didn’t play together often – her place was around the corner and up a hill from mine, a longish walk for a youngster. But our families were acquainted. We remember attending each other’s birthday parties when we were in primary school.  

We both had elocution lessons, and recited (other people’s) poems in The Competitions – an annual State-wide eisteddfod for music and elocution students. We were at the same school awhile too, in different classes. Then, still in our teens, circumstances took us on separate journeys, geographical and otherwise. 

We met again in eighties Melbourne, as featured writers at Montsalvat Poetry Festival, and got to know each other all over again. We almost became the close friends we weren’t as kids. But, circumstances…. We became geographically distanced once more. Now we have only slight awareness of what the other is up to – both still engaged in literary life, but in different arenas; with rare contact, friendly-but-brief.

Nevertheless, the shared childhood place and experiences, and our similar feelings about them, creates deep understanding. We are both – as she calls herself in the book – expatriates, yearning for the home we remember. (We've both occasionally revisited.) 

Though each chooses not to live there now, the yearning is real. Whenever anything's on TV about Tasmania, I’m glued to the screen. This book, full of Carmel’s childhood recollections, from her journals, awakens and satisfies that yearning. 

She offers fascinating insights about memoir, related to both fact and fiction. She makes memoir writing sound like the most seductive of pleasures! The enticing exercises, though, I didn’t (yet) do. I told myself I was reading for the lovely writing and lovely reminiscences. Yet even before I finished, I began a new memoir I know I’ll complete – not about childhood, but a later experience I’ve been blocked from writing. This book freed me.

Note: This is a longer, more detailed and personal version of my Goodreads and Amazon review.

I'm sharing this with Poets and Storytellers United at Friday Writings #30:  Beloved Books, in which I invite people to write something inspired by one of their favourite books. This part review, part memoir celebrates a new favourite of my own – and the memoir it helped free me to write is the story about prison poetry workshops which I have recently been sharing, bit by bit, with P&SU.