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If he’s lying by omission then it’s only as all storytellers lie: they tell what makes the story work and they don’t tell what they must not; nor what they cannot.

In 1627, Gillis Vervloet, known as Gil, is a man of 79, seeking to end his life as a monk at an abbey in Saarland. But because, in his far-back youth, he was involved in some dubious activities, his admission to the abbey depends on two things: doing the abbey a favour via some detective work involving a statue looted and possibly destroyed during the religious wars of those times, and an account of his life that he is writing to help the abbot decide whether he is suitable.

There is a split narrative from then on, between 1627 and Gil’s youth. In addition we see some of the account he is writing, from which it becomes clear that the abbot is getting a heavily edited version of the story that we, as readers, are hearing from Gil. Indeed there are sixty years for which we do not see this account, and it is implied that whatever else Gil told of these years, he cannot have included the profession he practised then, or the abbey doors would surely be shut to him.

Most of the narrative takes place in the Low Countries – Antwerp and Brussels, mainly – between the years 1562 when the 15-year-old Gil arrives in Antwerp and somewhere around 1567, when he has to flee abroad. They are eventful years, dominated by religious strife and Gil’s friendship with the artist Pieter Bruegel, who takes him on as an artist’s model and to keep his accounts. Gil also models for other painters and sculptors and there is an intriguing possibility that he may have modelled for the very statue he is seeking.

Gil’s life at this point in his youth is complicated by the involvement of his brother Roeland and his religious mentor the priest Paulus in reform movements which could get them and all their associates into trouble with the Inquisition. His other problem is that though his greatest wish is to be a priest himself, his attraction to women, and to the idea of marriage and a family, is almost equally strong. He is continually having to choose between friendship and duty (as he sees it), and between the religious life and his natural inclinations.

A major factor in the religious strife of the time is the question of images, which ties into Gil’s search for the statue. Paulus the reformist priest objects to the whole idea of earthly representation of holy images; ‘But in kneeling to lead-white and madder, and to the image of a lazy servant girl and a lewd apprentice paid by the hour to represent the saints, a man plants God’s gift of adoration into the sinful earth of his gross and worldly desires.’ This could not be further removed from Bruegel’s ethos in painting, as expressed in a conversation with Gil: ‘Why do you draw drunkards? Or criminals?’ ‘Because they’re men, and men get drunk and so do women, and they’re proud, and wrathful, and they fornicate. So I need them for my pictures.’ ‘So you paint sin?’ ‘Men sin, and women too. Wrong-doing – malice and hurt – or folly, or simply what we break by our own carelessness…they’re in our nature.’ All his life, Gil is torn between seeking fulfilment in the religious or the secular, between idealism and nature, and it may seem that at the end of his life he has opted for the former, but a key passage earlier suggests that it is Bruegel’s view of the world that has influenced him more:

‘It was on the long, damp trudge back home to Antwerp that happiness came on him suddenly, like sunshine. It was in the moment he stooped to talk to a dog who reminded him of Pelle, and when he broke his limping stride to help an old man and his even older wife over a stile. It overflowed when he came on a woman at a crossroads weeping over a newborn baby as she sought the White Sisters’ orphanage at Middelheim. He could say with truth that the Sisters would be good to the baby and were very holy and loving, and when he left her and the child with the portress she was quite calm, her face softened if not smiling, and reconciled to her sacrifice. And in all that ordinary road was nothing glorious: no beauty among the dripping hedgerows and the cow-pats, no glory of angels in those sodden skies, no high majesty and passion in the sacrifice, no joy in being reconciled to sorrow…only the happiness granted to an ordinary witness to these ordinary things.’

In a time of murderous religious intolerance, Gil eventually seems to come close to believing, with Elizabeth I, that ‘there is only one Christ Jesus, one faith. All else is a dispute over trifles”. He also comes to see that concepts like “truth” and “memory” are not as clear-cut as some imagine and that ‘people are lots of things’, as Bruegel paints them, unlike the saints his fellow-servant Doortje recalls from the orphanage of her childhood:

‘the saints they taught us in the Maagdenhuis – I shouldn’t say it, I suppose – but they were so simple. Like the puppets at the Poesje Theatre: carved to be good, or bad, and the same – just wood – all through. You never wonder what they’re thinking, the way you do with Mijnheer’s people.’

Gil, looking at one such painting, reflects, ‘it was the Bruegel Gil had always known – a true Bruegel if not the only true Bruegel – who had painted it. Gil could not accept Bruegel’s faith, any more than he could accept Roeland’s. But each was a good man, and a wise man – most of the time – and surely the rest of it all could be left to God’.

The end of the book, where sixty years are skipped over in a few paragraphs, did feel somewhat rushed to me. In a way, this is inevitable given the novel’s structure. It is the events between 1562 and 1567 that Gil is trying to justify to the abbot, plus for his own safety he needs to conceal from him much of what happened afterwards. But given that Bruegel had been so important to him, it seems odd that his early death in 1569 doesn’t rate a mention – it would have happened while Gil was abroad, but we are told they kept in touch by letter.

One reason this struck me, though, is that Bruegel is such a towering character in the novel – fully realised, fully rounded, as contradictory and exasperating as humans generally are. He comes alive as Doortje’s wooden saints did not. So, and this is important in a historical novel, do the place and time.

“But things feel strange – they feel different. Like this is a waiting time. Like when you see dark clouds riding in, and swelling, and you know that before long there’ll be a storm.”

The publisher labels this novel as being for ages 12 and upwards; in other words it’s one of those that get labelled YA because the protagonists are aged about 15. I’ve never been entirely sure why this fact should automatically render a book YA rather than adult, particularly since, these days, the designation doesn’t mean a certain amount of sex and violence can’t be included. I don’t feel I need to be a pensioner to interest myself in Lear, and though I may no longer be 15, I do recall what it was like. Certainly I did not feel, when reading this as an adult, that the author was simplifying his message or vocabulary for a young audience in a way he wouldn’t have for adults, which is just as well, because young readers notice and resent that. It is a fairly short novel, which perhaps is the one concession.

It is set in the neighbourhood of York in the year 1066. Kata, a 15-year-old girl living in the village of Riccall, is finding life dull, and longs for more interesting times. “Is this all there is? Kata thought. Ploughing and planting, and weeding, haymaking, harvesting… Round and round and round.”

Things are of course about to get infinitely more interesting, because Harald Hardrada has landed with an army and is about to claim the kingdom. He has with him an illegitimate son called Tor (not an historical character) the same age as Kata. While Tor is scouting for the Norwegian army, he and Kata happen to meet, and fall in love on sight. This is obviously inconvenient, given the circumstances, and Tor, who has no previous experience of war, was already conflicted by having watched his father’s troops burn Scarborough:

“Before long, Tor could hear timber crackling and spitting, the roar and updraught of flames blazing, sucking and whistling. He could see men and women and children running away from their huts and shacks; he thought of the old people inside them, unable to escape.

“I’ve come to help these people”, the king shouted to his son. “I’ve no quarrel with them. No wish to hurt them. But if they resist me… Well, the word will soon spread. This is a warning.”

Hardrada, in fact, is your archetypal warmonger, convinced of his own rightness and justifying his actions as such men always do; these days he would be talking about collateral damage. Tor, scouting incognito among the locals, gets to know them as individuals. He also comes to realise how racially mixed their community actually is, and how the war will fracture it. Nevertheless, his loyalty to, and admiration for, his fearsome father are equally strong in him.

Kata’s conflict, in the end, is less between her love for Tor and her feelings for her people than between a longing for novelty and adventure and a wish to escape the turmoil unfolding in her world. This crystallizes around a convent she visits in York:

“Everything within seemed so peaceful and straightforward, while the world without was so uncertain and dangerous, and yet … yet so alive.

I want to be within, she thought, but I need to be without. Both.”

While I know women in Saxon times had more agency than later under the Normans, I did wonder if a girl, and one of Kata’s age, would do, or contemplate, quite so much journeying on her own. Enabling girls to do interesting things is always a problem for historical fiction writers, and unless they use the old trope of disguising their heroines as boys, their only option is probably to make them rather more self-reliant and determined than the norm – Kata, unlike Tor, is an orphan, another classic way of giving fictional children more agency.

The love-at-first-sight story is no more unlikely than Romeo and Juliet, and their feelings are quite credibly and sympathetically drawn. But for me the main focus of the story was the effect of war on ordinary people. The vengeful racial violence that erupts in York against Scandinavians who have lived peacefully side by side with English neighbours for decades, the burning and looting of essential winter stores, the ruin of a tranquil landscape. When the headman of her village predicts where the battle will take place, Kata asks what is really the novel’s crucial question:

“The earls, they’ll draw up somewhere around here”, he added. That’s my guess.”

Kata stared at the scrub to her left, and the boggy water meadows across the river, and the sweet water, now running so softly, ribbed with blood light from the lowering sun.

“Do they have to?” she asked.

“Inspired by Humphries’s reworkings and in keeping with my established approach, I chose to write poems ‘after’ Dafydd rather than translations – not changing the setting or period but aiming to bridge the imaginative gap between his world and that of the modern English-speaking reader.”

Those readers who were enchanted by Matthew Francis’s collection The Mabinogi (and it would be a dull reader who was not) have another pleasure looming, in these versions of the mediaeval Welsh poet Dafydd ab Gwilym. In the absorbing Introduction, Francis explains why, before he came across the reworkings of the American poet Rolfe Humphries, more literal, faithful translations had left him with a sense of something wanting:

“They present the poet as a historical oddity, someone we have to make allowances for, imagining what his poems would be like if we were the sort of people for whom he originally wrote, speaking his language and sharing his culture. They are not so much poems as placeholders indicating what the poems were for other readers in other times.”

This resonated with me, because it was just what happened to me when reading translations of Aristophanes. Most British translators of him were good enough at indicating what he was to Athenian readers in the fifth century BC, but what they never did was make him sound remotely funny. Not until I discovered the equally scholarly but less reverent US translators - Dudley Fitts, Richmond Lattimore, Douglass Parker and William Arrowsmith - did it dawn on me why Athenian audiences might have been splitting their sides laughing.

In The Mabinogi, Francis treated the old legends not as sacred texts to be revered (a sure way to kill them) but as stories that were told aloud, added to, twisted according to need and developed a life of their own in the telling – which was why they came so alive in his versions. In The Green Month, he takes the key to the original poems to be Dafydd’s own personality – humorous, self-mocking, fascinated by nature and keenly observant of it, fascinated also by sex and unusually honest about it, fascinated above all by words and the craft of writing. By making this man come alive, Francis can get inside the skin of the poems, as he does in “Fox”, which is both a brilliant sketch of a fox and Dafydd’s rueful admission of his own sexual obsessions:

     Then watch out, hens! The gentleman in the gamey coat
     has a nose for feathered flesh. Men may chase him
     for fifty furlongs, but he’ll be back
     sniffing around your bedroom.
     I know how he feels.

This verse also demonstrates how Francis chose to tackle the poems technically. Dafydd was a very formal poet, and while wisely not attempting to reproduce cynghanedd in a language not designed for it, Francis felt some formal constraint was necessary and chose this 5-line “tapering syllabic stanza in which each line is shorter than the one before”. It imposes economy, the more so as the poem progresses, and the result is a considerable shortening of some of Dafydd’s longer and more discursive forays into description and metaphor. It produces a poem which is “a snapshot of one of Dafydd’s themes, concentrating on the most striking images and ideas”.

A sort of distilled Dafydd, then. And often very effective. In the lines from “Hay”, complaining about the rain:

      I must be seven-eighths water now
     as the rest of the world is
     this sodden evening

there is the immediacy that Francis missed from earlier translations, the sense that this fed-up, rained-on man was like ourselves. In “Geese”, the lines “I told her I ached from my journey/ and other things” are not just indicative of Dafydd’s sexual obsession but a convincing approximation of a voice; one feels that is how he would have said it.

These poems struck me as being very true to Dafydd’s obsessive inventiveness with imagery – the “tattered sheet of snow”, the fogbound man “smothered in fleece, a tick in the weather’s wool” – also to his keen observation of the natural world and to his self-mocking humour. They are also, as one would expect from a combination of Dafydd ab Gwilym and Matthew Francis, hugely entertaining poems in their own right. Just as the American translators fixed on the one thing that really matters about Aristophanes, ie how and why he is funny, so Francis’s “snapshots” have focused on what mattered about Dafydd.

“Object permanence”, as the notes explain, is “the understanding that objects can continue to exist even when we cannot perceive them”. This collection delineates various people, including the author, via objects, places and moments that have been important in their lives. This is as good a way as any to bring characters to life, provided the writer chooses the right details, and Berkeley proves very acute at it. In “Behold This Woman”, a long list of details gives a vivid picture of a somewhat intimidating woman, “hair upswept in a fury”, who might be the speaker’s mother, but perhaps even more impressive in this regard is the poem, short enough to quote in full, “Bendinck’s Bittermints”:

     He was not a man for confectionery
     but my father loved the way the spartan shell
     cracked against the tongue to yield
     an inner sweet asperity. A small
     box would last all January.
      A second mint, he said,
     would taste the same, so why
     would you eat another straight away?

The same sharpness of observation surfaces in her forensically accurate rendering of remembered adult expressions: “And the wind comes up/ All the Way from the Urals” (Gibraltar Point) and attitudes: “Save the string because you never know/ when you’ll next need string”.

Memories of childhood, various temporary jobs, incidents, people, all combine to build up a kind of autobiography. Artistic influences figure too, The end of “Darning”, “Between my fingertip and thumb/ the needle fits. The thimble finger steadies it” acknowledges its debt to Heaney, and though “Places I have slept”, according to the notes, “’ owes its inspiration to ‘Sleeping’ by Raymond Carver.”, I did wonder too if Tracey Emin’s famous bed was not somewhere at the back of the poet’s mind.

There is a certain humour in these echoes, especially that of William Carlos Williams,

you won’t
forgive me

I have eaten
the last tomato

and indeed an acerbic humour has always been characteristic of this poet’s work, as in “Coin of the realm”:

     She’s looking right, into the future
     where her bareheaded son will be crowned,
     looking left, into the past. She wears a crown
     (or is it tiara?) because without it
     she’d just be a woman, but the king
     is a King, bareheaded on coins
     and, like all depictions of monarchs,
     shown for simplicity’s sake
      neatly cut off at the neck.

By its nature, this is a collection full of personal references, but that need not, and does not, render it inaccessible, because they are mostly the kind of references to which a reader can easily relate, or substitute his or her own memories for those of the poet – we have nearly all, in childhood, been on a trip to the seaside like the one in “Gibraltar Point”, that did not live up to expectations. The one poem where I did feel I didn’t really know what was going on was “Monday at Kettle’s Yard”. I was hoping to find a reference to this in the notes, but in vain.

Mostly, she works in free verse, but when she feels a poem belongs in a form, she handles it deftly. “Breaking news” is a villanelle, appropriately for a poem in which “ it’s all happening again”, and “Missing”, again aptly for its subject, is a lipogram omitting one letter of the alphabet in each stanza. This must be a fearsomely complicated thing not just to do, but to get a decent poem out of, and testifies to considerable technical skill.

The longest poem in the collection is “The bowser”, about a disused water-tank around which childhood memories cluster and whose decay mirrors changes in the wider world. In one italicised section it speaks, like an object in an Anglo-Saxon riddle poem, recalling its past. Then the poem segues into a long lament for all that the object and its falling out of use stands for:

     O stubborn tank of stale water
     o lumpen iron emptiness
     o grim beacon of loyalty and decay
     of foundries in west midlands
     young men trained in technical drawing
      taps and gaskets
     baffles and wheelhead valves

Again this format echoes place-laments through from Anglo-Saxon times to the nineteenth century, though they tend to concern ruined halls, mansions and abbeys. But this poem is none the less powerful and evocative for memorialising a water-tank. This is a collection notable for its keen observation; the poet had various jobs when younger, but judging by her eye for the telling details in all of them, she was always at heart a writer.

The book may be obtained from this address.

This is very much a themed collection; its genesis was empty nest syndrome resulting from the departure of a daughter to university, but as is generally the way, one emotional preoccupation leads on to others, memories of the mother’s own youth and past relationships. The words “mother” and “daughter”, though, remain central throughout.

The sense of the daughter’s absence is sharply evoked in poems like “the winter the murders stopped”:

     i miss hearing the creak of my daughter’s bedframe
     in the middle of the night, miss being summoned
     for glasses of water she could easily
     get herself, and now my house is filled
     with spiders, since there is
     no one here afraid of them

Memories of this daughter as a child

     as soon as you could walk you had the inclination
     to bolt and there was i, forever yanking you back
     on your reins (“the bolter”)

mingle with memories of the narrator’s own childhood sleepwalking: “i was an escape artist in a pair of fluffy pink slippers.” (“escape artist”). Indeed escape, of a kind, is also central to the poems, in that many of the remembered or imagined relationships in the collection end in failed contact. The idyll of “drowning on a stranger’s couch”, in which two people seem to be fulfilling each other’s emotional needs, ends with

     you will never
     write the letter you vow you will write when you eventually
     return home to wales a few weeks later, the
     thank you to the stranger who misses
     being a mother, from the girl who misses being a daughter.

And in “glasgow”, what looked like the start of a promising friendship also ends with the parties each going their own way:

     on one of your days off you took the bus
    into glasgow and brought me back a stuffed polar bear that i still have.
    and then one morning,
    some weeks after the bear,
    i heard from one of the housekeepers
    you’d caught that same bus
    in the dead of night, rode out to some other hotel in some other country,
    onto some other adventure. you left me alone

If this sounds despondent, that is not how the collection comes across, because there is quite a lot of wry humour in the voice, also a recognition that one cannot own people, nor keep them for ever – the daughter “is not lost, she is free” (“i didn’t call gillian Anderson”), and “the person next to me is not mine either, not really,/ because people never are, are they?” (escape artist”).

Some things about the poet’s technique will by now be evident; she doesn’t feel everything needs to be left-hand justified and is happy to use all the white space on the page, which is always rather a pleasure to me as a reader. And she works only in lower case, which some readers will not like so much, but it does seem to suit the conversational, informal tone of these poems. She also, at least in this collection, works mostly in the first person (occasionally in the second, when addressing the daughter). There are hazards in the “I” voice, notably the danger of sounding self-absorbed and sentimental. I think she mostly avoids this through the use of humour, though the last two lines of “the bolter” do strike me as not only predictable but a bit saccharine in tone. Mostly, though, she manages her endings well, making them memorable without looking contrived or sought-for. Indeed the last three lines of the last poem, which I won’t spoil by quoting, undercut the emotion of the collection in a way that raises a wry smile.

This is one of those collections inspired by Covid, but in an odd way. The author, though of Jewish descent, had not learned Hebrew as a child, nor especially missed it, but “the imposed solitude and feelings of collective dread in those strange times prompted an urge to reclaim something of my heritage and explore my identity. My parents were both dead by this time and the vacuum of lockdown made me long for community and a renewed continuity with the past.”

Hence a renewed engagement with learning the language. But Rose, besides being a poet, is a translator, and soon became interested in the language for its own sake rather than just as a source of personal memories. “When I did more research into the letters, I became fascinated by their different layers of meaning and the further I delved into the symbolism of each letter, the more interested I became.” And so we have a sequence of poems in response to each of the 22 Hebrew letters. It also, as befits a project concerned with heritage, includes images of religious objects which had significance for her forebears.

It is obvious from the first, title, poem how conscious she is of the history and physical reality of language; the way its shapes evolved from pictures and from being carved into stone (“Aleph Bet” is of course the ancestor of “alphabet”):

      rapped right to left, hammer
     and chisel tap-dancing
     thought into endurance,
     tablet dust a halo rising.

She is conscious too of shape, the shape that sounds make of a mouth and their own shape on the page

this letter is a hard kiss
of sound, a pursing of lips […]

     This is the sign,
     in shape and meaning,
     for a house, its door open,
     beckoning always
      (Bet)

Our letters are a lot further removed from pictograms than those of the Hebrew alphabet. Though C and G are our closest equivalents of the Greek gamma and Hebrew gimmel, neither much resembles a camel with an outstretched neck, as gimmel does. The recognisablility of the pictograms enables us to see what was important to the people who invented these ways of visually representing sounds: a tent, a riding animal, water. They also lend themselves to imagery: mem can mean water, but also a womb, since water is the source of life. All these layers of meaning (somewhat reminiscent of the readings of Philip Pullman’s alethiometer) naturally fascinate a linguist like Rose, and of course for all those fortunate enough not to be monoglots, there is also the fascination of their accidental resemblance to the words of another language:

      One
     of the elemental mothers—
     aleph, mem, shin: air, water, fire—primordial
     mem keeps mum,
     clamp of lips at teat,
     a murmur of mam, mummy, am, immi,
     names like mementos
     recalling the mmm
     of comfort and home.
      (Mem)

There is of course a personal relevance to this, which surfaces elsewhere:

      this letter
     is forced between lip
     and teeth, delivering
     the vim in words
     like lev, heart, avi,
     my dad, hav, give, ahava,
     love
      (Vet)

Ultimately though, if I had to define the overarching theme of this collection, it would be neither Judaism nor a sense of personal identity and heritage, but the nature of language. How and why it develops, how it works physically, how it shapes our thoughts. The notes at the end, explaining more about the individual letters, will be fascinating to anyone with an interest in linguistics. And there are times in the poems when the wordplay begins to echo George Herbert, convinced that two words do not sound alike by pure accident:

      Repentance
     may yet ring changes
     to convert a pauper,
     rash, and rasha, a rascal,
     to rosh, head, the skull
     a crown, righteous as one
     throwing stones
      (Resh)

Apart from a couple of slightly unexpected near-contemporary images in “Shin” – “fingers split like Spock/for a tripartite salute” – and “Dalet” – “the blinking 404/error of existence” – there is only one definite reference to a contemporary event: covid, in “Kaf/Khaf”. But the last poem, “Unknown”, concerns a letter traditionally said to be missing from the alphabet and whose eventual revelation will set all wrongs right:

      this is the missing shape
     that will mend the place
     of hurt where grief plumes
     like a city of debris rent
     with sirens

It is implied that we don’t yet even know how to make the sound of this letter; it might be palatal or labial, but if we ever find out,

      it will rise in thanksgiving
     from our depths and press
     its utterance to the cheek
     of the child who sleeps
     through the night’s silence.

Which last outcome we can all agree would be highly desirable, though it currently seems most unlikely. This is a sequence which would appeal to anyone interested in heritage and identity, but above all in language.

Tony Curtis has now been active in poetry for some 50 years, and as might perhaps be expected, this collection is very retrospective, sometimes elegiac, in tone. There are many childhood reminiscences, tributes to departed friends like Dannie Abse, Helen Dunmore and Glyn Jones, and poems centring on the history of Carmarthenshire, where Curtis grew up. To quote (in translation) the Welsh poet J T Jones, a man in old age is drawn to the scenes of his youth, “to walk in the places where he used to run”. But Curtis has also been a much-travelled man, and this is reflected in poems set in the US and Europe.

In poems like “Visiting the Big Man”, the elegiac tone is very pronounced:

     We looked across the fields
     for what had gone
     and what we’d never see again.

     That would have been the last time
     I saw him, or maybe the time
     before the last time.

Those three “time” line endings strike like hammers, or the tick of a clock, emphasising both the passing of time and the fallibility of memory.

But though the poet is necessarily conscious of mortality (even, in “Further instructions”, leaving guidance for the disposal of his ashes), elegiac does not have to mean unremitting gloom, and these memories are mostly positive. There is keenly observed nature,

Sparrows bicker in the bankside bramble (“The Guardian”),

and the “Bosherston Pike”,

     angling through the lily roots,
     Razor teeth and steel-clasp jaws
     Cruising the pools like a U-Boat in the shadows.

There are intriguing “characters” from the past, like Jimmy Wilde and Anne James. There is also the present, in the form of grandchildren and, still, new experiences:

stare up through the huge pines and meet
a sky that comes down to greet us

     with its diamonds closer,
     bright and sharp and beyond number,
     met as if for the first time. (“Yosemite”).

Having said that, there is undoubtedly a dark streak running through the collection, perhaps best exemplified in the often ambiguous and mood-changing endings of some poems. From that of “Railroad – “blood and dreams. Everything we need/ it seems” to the sinister double meaning in the last line of “In the Duomo, Siracusa”:

      out of the body in death, that motherly caress,
     the waiting over, knowing your depth
     and it’s taking you in.

“Scrolling Down”, a list poem which is his one concession to the internet age, didn’t really work for me; it highlights the random nature of news stories and the way they manage to equate the vital and the trivial, but we all knew that. There are, inevitably in a retrospective like this, a great many personal references, especially to friends and acquaintances. I know from experience that this can sometimes irk readers (or maybe it’s just reviewers), but it really shouldn’t, as long as the writer has managed to find the universal in the particular. We have all lost friends and relatives; all found inspiration in odd corners of history, and we should be able to mentally substitute the names in our own experience for those in the poem. I was reminded a couple of times of a review of one of my own collections, which opined that it wouldn’t please any reader who was “not interested in history”. I think that is true of this collection too, but then I can’t actually imagine what such a person would be doing reading any kind of a book.

All the policies of tsars are now being implemented by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Teaching in Ukrainian is once more prohibited in the occupied territories of Ukraine and Ukrainian books are being withdrawn from libraries there.

I’ve already reviewed one book about the war in Ukraine, last year. That was the journalist Jen Stout’s Night Train to Odesa, by an outsider whose interest in the area led her to spend time in a war zone. This, by contrast, is an insider view: essentially the diaries and other connected writings of the novelist Andrey Kurkov, who was Russian-born but has lived in Ukraine from the age of two and naturally considers himself Ukrainian.

Like Stout, he is informative on what it is like to live in a constant state of war; he notes, as she did, the way people get blasé about air-raid warnings, and the expanding vocabulary of children (to judge by his surprised tone, the f-word was, before the war, far less common among Ukrainian children than it has long been among English ones). He dwells more than she did on the effects of power cuts, having experienced more of them: “The Russian aggression has given electricity a very bad name. People in older buildings with gas stoves and ovens consider themselves very fortunate. They can cook and make hot drinks. What is more, bricks placed strategically on the gas hob can heat a room quite effectively”. And there are chilling details like this: “In the Kyiv metro, there are adverts for apartments in newly built blocks. The posters show floor plans and I noticed that all the new apartments have rooms set around a spacious, windowless area – a clever design for wartime.”

What I hadn’t bargained for was how, as both a writer and a Welsh person, I would identify with him in the culture war. Kurkov can speak and understand Ukrainian, but his native language, the one he grew up hearing his parents speak, is Russian and as any writer knows, it is very hard to compose in any but one’s native tongue. Kurkov still writes in Russian but does not publish in it; he gets his work translated into Ukrainian and other languages and it is the translations that get published, not the originals, a decision eased by the fact that his work has been unwelcome to the Russian authorities since he took part in the Orange Revolution.

You’d think this would qualify him as a Ukrainian writer in most people’s eyes, but as Welsh writers in English will know, things are not that simple: “I continued to write literary texts in Russian but I called myself and considered myself a Ukrainian writer. Some of my Ukrainian-speaking colleagues treated my self-identification with hostility. They stubbornly called me a Russian writer and insisted that if I wanted to call myself a Ukrainian author I should switch to writing in Ukrainian.” Groans of recognition… The one difference, as far as I can judge, is that Ukrainian and Russian are a hell of a lot closer than Welsh and English, so it might be easier to switch between the two, but it still wouldn’t be that easy.

This linguistic antagonism is not universal; “Odesa is a commercial city – full of sellers and buyers – where people are used to responding in the buyer’s language if they know it. At the central market, in addition to Ukrainian and Russian, you will hear Moldavian, Bulgarian and Gagauz. Hatred of Russia, which is evident at every step around the city, has not transposed into hatred of the Russian language”. And bigoted statements do generate angry responses:

“The climax of this round of the fight over language was a statement from the infamous anti-Russian-language crusader and former Member of Parliament, Iryna Farion, who declared that Russian-speaking Ukrainian soldiers should not call themselves Ukrainians. Feedback from both Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking soldiers was not long in coming. Ukrainian soldier Ekaterina Polishchuk – known throughout the country by her call sign Ptashka (Birdie) – who fought in Mariupol and survived Russian captivity, said: “Your position is not pro-Ukrainian and I consider you a project of the Kremlin. You are an enemy, promoting poisonous narratives. Your position and statements are complete shit. I say this as someone who spoke Ukrainian in captivity and who has been defending Ukraine for three years side by side with heroes who speak Ukrainian, Russian, Georgian, Belarusian, Polish, dozens of dialects, English, and dozens of other languages …” Kurkov adds that the commander Major Zhorin responded with a similar message, “but in words nobody was likely to print”.

Nevertheless, the intolerance of language zealots is understandable; if you spend generations undermining someone’s language and culture, they are liable to attack yours in return. Hence the recycling project in Kyiv: “turning Russian-language books into pulp to raise money for humanitarian projects. This campaign is not spearheaded by the state but by Ukrainian-language writers and cultural figures who believe that the preponderance of Russian-language books in libraries, both public and domestic, is an aspect of Russian aggression.” Understandable but saddening, like the campaign against the memory of Mikhail Bulgakov: “a memorial plaque dedicated to the writer was publicly removed from the wall near the entrance to Kyiv University, where he studied. Now a host of Ukrainian intellectuals and writers have decided to ‘take up arms’ against his museum”. The issue with Bulgakov is not just that he wrote in Russian but that he opposed Ukrainian nationalism. But he’s long dead, he was a fine writer, and Kurkov plainly shares the view in the Facebook comments of Ukrainian soldiers about such goings-on: “While we are fighting here, are you out of your minds?”

I must not imply that the cultural question dominates unduly. There is far more about politics, the course of the war and everyday life for civilians in wartime. And it is fascinating and informative, from remarks like “Ukrainian children can already tell the difference between the sound of a blast made by air defence systems and the noise of the explosion of a missile hitting its target” to humour, like the story of Grandad Danylo, the one man in Kurkov’s village near Kyiv who, in the 1980s, subscribed to a newspaper: “Every morning, a postman cycled up to the gate of Danylo’s house and left a newspaper between the slats in his fence. Danylo immediately pulled it out and read it from cover to cover before beginning his “anti-Soviet” activities. He walked along the street stopping to talk with everyone he met, calling over the fence to neighbours if he saw a potential interlocutor in a courtyard. First, of course, he greeted them and then he told them, in detail, what the Soviet press was lying about that day.”

But the book is essentially the diaries of a writer in wartime and not only does the cultural aspect naturally matter a lot to him, it also resonates more with any reader who shares that preoccupation.

This is an anthology of poems, prose pieces and artwork celebrating “the sacred feminine, Brigid, and the heritage of Kildare”. It becomes obvious quite soon that “Brigid” is but one avatar in a long line of female figures of worship going back through mythology to the great Asian goddess variously known as Cybele, Isis, Lady, Mother and much else. The “brideog” dolls which are dressed in white and resemble slightly potato-faced children were once made of straw, which betrays their origin as corn-doll fertility symbols. Indeed Katie Donovan’s poem “Charm” references not Brigid but that other famous feminine symbol Venus of Willendorf, “totem of pleasure and plenty”, powerfully contrasting her “yeasty curves” with the stick-thinness of starvation or anorexia. Jesse Hill’s macaronic “Selkie, Find Your Skin” uses the Scottish Gaelic myth of the seal trapped in the skin of a woman, while Lenore Hart’s “Lady of the Beasts” has for its title yet another name by which the Great Goddess was known, and for its theme another of her attributes, as a guardian of animals. A more modern myth of Hans Andersen’s surfaces at the end of Claire Blennerhassett’s “Feabhra” (February, the month of Brigid’s feast day), in which an idyllic portrayal of a little girl is undercut by the sinister ending:

your playful feet
dancing in red
t-bar shoes.

Though mythology is at the back of everything, there are several pieces set in the present day, in which the image of Brigid acts to empower a woman – in Caroline Busher’s prose piece “Brigid and the Heart-Shaped Womb”, not only does water from Brigid’s well help a post-menopausal woman to become pregnant, a sense of Brigid’s determination and agency seems to enable her to discard an unsatisfactory former flame; her feelings go from “there was something about him that she found impossible to resist” to “He was no more than just a face in the crowd”. And in Catherine Anne Cullen’s sharp “Brigid of the Bargain Bins” a modern-day Brigid proves a match for the harsh circumstances of her life:

She checks the prices of sliced pans,
weighs up own labels against known brands.
She knows they cut corners with prices,
sees through their tricks, has a few of her own.

The third element in the title, “the heritage of Kildare” perhaps features less obviously than the others, but in the prose piece “Strong Bridgets” by Alison Wells, the landscape comes across very clearly:

Decanted suddenly, as a young child, into landscape. Bequeathed an inheritance of bogs, wide skies, rock castles, pools of frog spawn, moss and furze and rushes, holly trees and hideaways. A V-shaped valley between hills, like arms opening out, like a cloak thrown across vastness, marram grass rippling, folding, silk, spreading and settling all round.

This is an anthology of poems, prose pieces and artwork. Though the artwork is scattered throughout, the anthology seems otherwise to have been arranged with mainly poems in the first half, prose in the second. I’m not entirely sure this is the best way of doing it; sometimes after a longish piece of prose one welcomes the different kind of concentration, shorter but more intense, that a poem needs.

Brigid’s blue cloak, reminiscent of how the Virgin Mary is so often portrayed, marks her as, like Mary, an attempt by the adherents of a monotheist religion to make up for the lack of a female deity (ironic, really, that she is no longer officially a saint, having been dropped from the calendar by Pope Paul VI on the ground that there’s no evidence she actually existed). One does wonder if the Vatican’s real problem with her was that she shared too many attributes, including her name and feast day (Imbolc, February 1st), with a pagan Irish goddess. In this anthology Monica Corish’s “Keepers of the Flame”, an excerpt from a novel, imagines a meeting between the two. There are aspects of her, like her association with metalwork, that are strangely un-nunlike, and one of her miracles, in which she helps an unwillingly pregnant woman by making the embryo “disappear without pain” (see Maureen Boyle’s “St Brigid in the Orchard”) must have raised some clerical eyebrows. I don’t suppose her de-listing will have stopped folk celebrating her feast day and legends, in which she “exists” in a different way from that envisaged by Paul VI.

The thing about the Greek Anthology; it is universal in a way so much poetry aspires to be. It deals with universal human concerns, which is why it lends itself not just to straight translation but to re-making in other contexts. There is some of both here. Constantine’s translation of an epigram of Leonidas of Tarentum is fairly straight:

This here is Clito’s bit of a dwelling, this
The bit of land he sows, that there’s
His vineyard, that his wood, both scant. Nevertheless
Among these meagre ownings Clito’s clocked up eighty years.

This felt oddly familiar, and was, but not via Leonidas. I was recalling the Orkney poet Robert Rendall:

Look! This is Liza’s but and ben,
Wi’ screen o’ bourtrees tae the door,
Her stack o’ peats, her flag-roofed byre,
Her planticru abune the shore;
Yet ‘mang her hens and household gear
She’s brucked aboot for eighty year.

Constantine is himself a fine poet and his versions of the Anthology poets are as sensitive and effective as one might expect. The poets he has chosen are a personal selection. The predominance of Leonidas must be a personal preference, and understandable, because the man was such a superb epigrammatist that one wonders if there has ever been a better. Constantine also makes a point of foregrounding the female poets who are often overlooked, especially Anyte of Tegea, whose work also fits in with a thread of kindness to animals that runs through the selection – this concern for nature and our fellow creatures will resurface in the Coda, a section of his own poems inspired by the Anthology. Anyte was clearly an animal lover, and several of the Anthology poets express indignation at ill-treatment of horses or sympathy for injured dolphins, seen as friendly to man. Perhaps the most moving is Addaeus of Macedon, praising a grateful farmer:

When his labouring ox was worn out by old age and the furrows
Alcon, reverencing him for his service, led him not to the slaughter
But to a meadow of deep grass. There how this fellow creature
When Alcon strolls out to visit him at the hour of shadows
In grateful delight lifts up his head and bellows!

“This fellow creature” – we do not often think of the ancient world as a kindly place for other species, but some of the Greek anthology poets clearly had a sense of fellowship with them.

This kinship with animals is a major theme of the epigrams he has chosen. So are human relationships, often expressed in the sense of loss on the death of friends or kin, and the often troubled relationship between humans and their environment, especially the sea, on which so many Greeks found both a living and their death.

In the “Coda” we have a further development, wholly original poems constructed on the acknowledged model of the Anthology poems. Many are full of contained anger and sadness both at what we do to each other:

Laws of war

We too had laws of war: don’t poison wells
Don’t fell the olive trees (they take so long to grow)
Don’t bomb the schools, don’t bomb the hospitals …
Stranger seeking our monument, look around you.

and at what we do to the environment and to other creatures:

Albatross chick

Opened, this babe’s full stomach looks like a trove
Of bright things stowed away for an after-life.
What we cast on the waters is not the food of love.
Nothing will come of us for you but grief.

Perhaps the two most striking examples concern the death of children. In the main body of the work, he translates Zonas, being as universally relevant as any poet has ever been:

Dour ferryman, coming for the child Euphorion
When you hush your prow through the reeds and touch the shore
Be kind. His father, standing in the muddy shallows
Will hand him up the plank. Reach down, Charon
Bring him carefully on board. Those are his first sandals,
His pride and joy. But his footing in them is still unsure.

And then we have Constantine’s own take on a child in the aftermath of war:

Child After.

Over and done with. All gone.
She is too small to be left on the road alone.
Another day, another night, will nobody come?
Death will, a kindness, and take her home.

I found it interesting to compare Constantine’s versions with those of Dudley Fitts in his “Poems from the Greek Anthology” (1978). Fitts’s choice was often different, he translated many more humorous poems, but when he and Constantine translate the same poem, you couldn’t say one version was better than another, more that they have looked at the poem from slightly different angles. But that’s the Anthology for you: new to everyone who reads it and the proof that ancient models still say something to living poets. Genius can’t date.

“Chad suddenly said, ‘Goddammit, I gotta get me some grandchildren. What’s the point of finding the Endurance if you don’t have grandchildren to tell the story to?’ So I told Chad about a little moment in Macklin’s unpublished diary in which he was thinking about what he would do in old age if he survived. He saw himself sitting beside an inglenook fireplace, telling his grandchildren the story of the sinking of the Endurance and how they survived on the ice.”

Mensun Bound is a marine archaeologist and this is the story of his two attempts, one unsuccessful, the second triumphant, to find the Endurance, sunk in the Weddell Sea in 1915 during Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition. This theme lends itself to a two-strand retelling, comparing Shackleton’s original journey with that of the searchers for the ship, which is how Bound handles it.

aThis is quite handy, since he can keep his own diary of events but augment the long journey south, when nothing much is happening yet, with the diaries, largely unpublished, of members from the original expedition. By this process we gradually get to know Shackleton and his companions, and it becomes clear that for all their courage and fortitude, they were as fallible as anyone else and certainly no band of brothers. They were snobbishly exclusive towards the ship‘s crew, who resented it, and they understandably fell out a lot among themselves when stranded on Elephant Island. To quote Macklin’s diary; “Do what one will, one comes at times to hate the very sight of some particular unfortunate from whom one cannot escape. The way he looks, or eats, or walks, or sniffs, becomes abhorrent”.

Bound, a Falkland Islander, grew up with tales of Shackleton and clearly admires him immensely, but not to the extent of being unaware that he too had flaws; he could be autocratic, seems to have chosen his team specifically with an eye to eliminating any dissent and was petty enough to deny the Polar medal to Chippy McNish, the one member who did defy him.

The characters of those on the search expedition come over less strongly (possibly because there was less dissent, or because they’re all still alive). But the major character in this strand of the retelling is in any case the Antarctic itself. It is, of course, a landscape like no other:

“In all directions our view is dominated by bergs that range in shape and size from soaring, pointed multilaterals and long, vertiginous flat-tops to smaller thimbles, pinnacles and broken teeth; and finally there are the plumper and more bosomy bergs whose edges have been softened by snow.”

The wildlife, so long unmolested, is equally impressive; “Looking down, I could make out a number of seals suspended, motionless, in a vertical position, with only their nostrils protruding through the brash ice beside the ship. […] Most remarkably of all, they were actually coming right up to our submerged hull and nuzzling us with their noses.”

As they near the search area, there is a lot of tension, provided not least by the unpredictability of the technology they are using to search in conditions where it is largely untried and where one little thing going wrong can wreck everything, particularly given that any repairs have to be somewhat Heath Robinson: “It was not a sophisticated repair job, but one requiring successively larger hammers. They started off with a carpenter’s hammer and when that wasn’t big enough they sent for the blacksmith’s block hammer, and when that didn’t work they lowered down a sledgehammer. That worked.” There is a grimly amusing moment when one of the team members decides that state-of-the-art isn’t always best: “He spotted an old winch in storage and asked if he could also have that one for the project. Everybody was of the opinion that the two new ones would be entirely reliable, but Nico’s view was that they were not tried and tested, whereas the old one, despite its years, was. Both of the new winches have now failed and so Nico has switched to the 25-year-old winch, and it is working.”

What comes over most strongly is the complete and exciting unfamiliarity of the place – as Bound says, “We know more about the rings of Saturn than we know about our own Southern Ocean. To me it is painfully paradoxical that although we can peer 32 billion lightyears across the observable universe, we cannot see to the bottom of the Weddell Sea.” Bound’s motivation for the search was a fascination both with wrecks and Shackleton, but for me the most enthralling thought was the one he encapsulates here: “And this is where my chart of the Weddell Sea becomes interesting. The contour lines are there and follow the normal conventions, but when you come to the sector which is permanently covered by pack – that is to say, the part of the Weddell Sea where we are now – there is nothing. The contour lines stop dead in their tracks. There aren’t even any conjectural dots. It’s just blank and void. Right now, we are, literally, off the map. Nobody has been to the bottom of the Weddell Sea.”

Here be dragons, in fact. Who wouldn’t want to go on that trip and fill in that chart?

Now everybody's heard of Bletchley Park and the work they did breaking secret codes, but what they don’t tell you was where they got the signals from to decode – and I was in that department. There was a little organisation in the Navy, which was called the Y Service, and we listened in to all the signals that the Germans were making and disposed of them according to what was going to happen. – Hilda Hale

I got the Kindle version of this book having already read Sinclair McKay’s The Secret Listeners, also about the Y Service. The focus here is specifically on the Wrens who made up a large part of Y – McKay’s book also dealt with the male and other non-Wren members of the service.

The primary sources for this, as for The Secret Listeners, include many personal memoirs, which enables individual voices to come through. One characteristic that crops up again and again is wry humour, unsurprisingly a common reaction in the face of tension. Daphne Humphrys, remembering the walk back to her lighthouse station at night: “the eerie, lonely walk along the cliff at dark with ‘your tin hat bumping on your back [which] made you think something frightful was close behind you treading. I’m ashamed to say I was often glad to have the sky lit up by an air-raid.’” Her colleague Vivienne Jabez-Smith, at Ventnor, bemoaned that ‘Two Messerschmitts used to strafe the front every morning, once getting somebody's boyfriend in the shoulder and once, much more serious, shattering the display window of the only decent cake shop”. The unfathomable goings-on of military authority were also a rich source of humour; decades later, Wrens from the South Foreland station were still wondering to what end they had been issued orders, in the event of an invasion, to collect a tin of tuna fish and walk to Bristol.

Most of these girls were very young, often still in their teens. They had been recruited for their linguistic skills, since they would have to listen to and understand German radio messages. Many had spent time at German universities or on exchange programmes with German families. So they tended to be from upper or upper middle-class families. Joy Banham, “eighteen and straight from a country grammar school, with a strict nonconformist background” was at first ill at ease with “such people as Dawn Thompson, who had just come back from studying singing in the conservatory at Lisbon, Ann Turner, who had led a sophisticated life in London, and several others with confident, bossy manners and far more experience of the world than her”. They were, however, of an age to adapt to each other and their new circumstances, which was just as well, for they were often in the front line. Some made the voyage to overseas stations – in another example of official thick-headedness, “despite the tell-tale armfuls of tropical uniform, they were told to say that their destination was Scotland”.

Secrecy, indeed, was paramount, so much so that many Navy personnel had no idea what exactly they were doing; nor did the girls’ own families. When the Aguila was torpedoed, with the loss of 22 Wrens en route for Gibraltar, the news was not publicly reported and individual epitaphs for the girls do not mention it. And the bar on mentioning this work lasted a long time after the war, which may be one reason their considerable contribution to the victory was slow to be acknowledged.

Doubtless a dismissive attitude to women also came into play. “Nancy McKinlay was distressed that, having joined the WRNS in the summer of 1941 from Glasgow University with a degree in French and German and having served at several Y stations and in NID24, she was, after her marriage in 1945, discharged as ‘a married woman of low priority’, terminology which infuriated her for the rest of her life.” And at the Chicksands station in Bedforshire, the needs of the Wrens were clearly not a priority: “when the nearby rest hut, containing an Elsan, a bucket-sized portable toilet, was commandeered by the male chargehand as his workshop and office, the women were obliged to carry the Elsan into the field and use it there”.

Its roots in individual testimony render this a lively and absorbing account. There is inevitably some duplication of events and information from McKay’s earlier book but not so much as to be a problem, for the WRNS focus is enough to individualise it. There’s something about the sheer youth of these girls – joining the Wrens because they fancied the tricorne hat, longing for the visiting admiral to accidentally lean against the recently whitewashed wall – that makes the important work they were doing all the more impressive.

Elin:
“How long have you been here?”
Me:
“Sometimes I think it’s several months. Sometimes only a few days.”

The word “Kafkaesque” is bound to come to mind when discussing a novel about a man working in a huge building (“the bank”) whose business is always a bit of a mystery to him and where life constantly repeats itself. The bank’s crooked managers are periodically found out by the auditors, fired and replaced by equally crooked successors, a staff party is promised but never materialises, bizarre accidents happen for no apparent reason. Meanwhile our unnamed narrator, whose existence at first revolved entirely round “the bank”, gradually begins to make a life outside it, courtesy of Elin, who becomes his wife, and their two children.

There is quite a lot of speculation as to what money actually is and how it works:
“You misunderstand the nature of money. If I steal money from you and buy something from a seller and this seller then buys something from another seller, it does not happen that the law, when it discovers the theft, tries to follow the route of the money and demand it back from the last seller.”
Me:
“But why?”
Him:
“Because it is no longer that money.”

But I think it would be a mistake to assume that money is the crux of the matter. “The bank” could actually be any large business or organisation and anyone who has worked for one, not necessarily a bank, will have many moments of rueful recognition:

“The manager introduced the new standardized paper formats. All the tables, pedestals and cupboards were replaced to suit the new formats.”

Then there is the caretaker asked what his recent promotion entails: “According to the manager, the promotion of a caretaker means the right to be designated as promoted caretaker”.

It seems to me that “the bank” represents the whole world of paid work, that monolith that dominates so many of our lives, and so seldom to our benefit. It begins much like a fairytale: our narrator, effectively orphaned, is expelled from the world of childhood and walks to the big city to seek his fortune, ending up at the bank because he has family connections with it. Indeed it seems most of its employees dropped into the work by chance: “They say that this is not exactly what they once dreamed of”. Our narrator makes periodic noises about leaving and trying something else, but it does not sound as if he ever will.

He does, however, marry and start a family, and judging by the novel’s ending, this is the only truly worthwhile part of his life. Though, as his children Monika and Henrik (his family are the only people in the novel to be named) play in the park, one wonders if they too, eventually expelled from childhood, will end up in “the bank”.

This is such an unorthodox novel that one feels grateful to Harry Watson and Vagabond Voices for getting it translated from Swedish and introduced to a wider audience.

As he gets into the passenger seat, Taban wonders if the story he told Eve is the grimmest she can imagine. Because it isn’t for him. For him the tree’s deformed growth being the result of an unstoppable external force is the happiest plausible explanation. There is another possible version of the tree’s story, which is far more painful to him. In it everything is the same, but there is no lightning to blame. The tree is simply born a twisted mutant.

Well, this is as intense and complex a novel as I’ve read for a while. It has three constantly interwoven strands: first, and most important, what goes on in the life and the head of a boy called Taban, second, politics in Zimbabwe and third, a fantasy strand based loosely on a lot of different mythologies and involving foxes. I‘m not sure quite what it is that attracts poets and novelists to mythical foxes with superpowers; apart from Ted Hughes, there is the Japanese kitsune, which seems to crop up quite often, and Metin Murat’s recent novel The Crescent Moon Fox (Armida, 2022) featured a similar beast.

Markham grew up in Zimbabwe and is thus able to convey a sense of the novel’s place without particularly trying to. There are no passages of conscious topographical description; just the odd mention, in passing, of avenues of jacaranda trees and the need to watch out for crocodiles near the water is enough to remind us where we are.

Taban, small, shy and something of a misfit, sees himself as a victim – he does get bullied, but it is never clear quite how much, because although he is the point-of-view character through whose eyes we see, he is also unreliable. Like most children with a grudge against their world, he fantasises becoming strong enough to take revenge on it and sometimes seems able to do so by sheer force of will. He also has an (adult) alter ego, Solomon Mushonga, from the novel’s “political” strand, who expresses all the latent ruthlessness and potential cruelty of which few would think Taban capable. I may say here that I find this political strand utterly fascinating: there is a scene of an election debate on land reform in a postcolonial situation that is brilliantly done and maintains its audience’s interest in a way you might not think such a fictional scene could do.

Then there is the fantasy strand. I would guess some readers will be leery of this and try to rationalise it. It is certainly possible, for instance, to see the terrible mound of bones Taban and Hilde climb as a reference to political wars:

"The whole top layer of the mound starts sliding. Hilde snatches Taban’s arm to stop him sliding with it. As it peels away, sloughing to the street below, more bones reveal themselves. Hundreds if not thousands. Femurs and clavicles and tibias and sternums and even whole spinal columns. All knotted together like the tails of a rat king. They are different sizes and vary in colour and condition, but they all have one thing in common – they’re from humans."

And the fox-bites which appear only to Taban and his mother are clearly at least in part products of their own minds, the consequence of troubled and guilt-ridden childhoods. Nevertheless, the mythological/fantasy elements can’t be totally reasoned away and must to a degree be accepted. I didn’t have a problem with this, though it wasn’t the element of the novel that most gripped me (and I did feel the magic dagger could maybe have been better seeded; it seems to crop up when there’s suddenly a use for it).

What I found most memorable was Markham’s ability to clinch some concept that matters in a few words. Solomon’s chilling response, when a soldier tells him there is no evidence of a conspiracy: “Lieutenant, I told you to find evidence. Not look for evidence”. And Taban’s moment of self-realisation; “The reason the other students laugh when he gets beaten up is because of what he is. Not what is being done to him.”

Taban’s friend Hilde says at one point, “I’ve always been unhappy – feeling like I was from two places at once”. In some ways this is true of their whole community; born in Zimbabwe, Taban is of European descent and not wholly at home in his birth country, though neither does he identify with the despised “Albions” who used to own it. “Discovering? Really? How can you discover somewhere already home to over a million people? Discovery? Albions have a thousand euphemisms for conquest. Perhaps that is where their language’s nuance lies?”. It is made clear, in fact, that the “Albions” have consistently misunderstood the country from the start; they have made fatally important mistranslations, and Taban’s own name is a mishearing by his parents of the Setswana name “Thabang”. It means “be happy”, ironically enough, since this is something Taban finds elusive. When he is on his way, at the novel’s end, to the UK in a plane, the continuing presence of the fox suggests that you cannot emigrate from what you are.

This us a Covid-themed pamphlet consisting of both poems and a long prose piece called “Field Notes 2020”. I think this is a piece of prose as opposed to a prose poem, partly because it is left-hand justified, and as far as I know, prose poems are justified both sides, but also because it does indeed read like notes in a journal, intended for shaping into poems later. Phrases like “Swallows fire themselves across the sky; bright crossbows; trigger-tight wings” leap out of the surrounding prose for all the world like the start of a poem, but prove not to be one.

This isn’t meant as a criticism, because after thinking about it, I have come to the conclusion that it is quite deliberate. “Field Notes 2020” comes very early in the pamphlet; it describes mainly the early months of the pandemic (when the poet was herself ill), and its stop-start, slightly unshaped, unfinished feel seems to reflect the uncertainty of the time: the way enterprises and intentions are frustrated and come, if not to nothing, at least to less than they otherwise might. There are many moments of beauty or happiness, like the “surprising kestrel hovering in rosy-blue”, but they are just that, fleeting moments. And many involve not the present, but memory or anticipation. In this context, “notes for future poems” seems an appropriate device.

If that is so, one would expect the succeeding poems to be considerably more shaped and polished, which indeed they are. The ones that work best for me are those that go beyond the actual pandemic, to find the universal in the particular, and the standout among these is “Ponies At The Airport”, with its echoes of Edwin Muir’s “The Horses”. Muir was describing the aftermath of an imaginary apocalyptic war, with humans not only deprived of modern technology but having come to mistrust it, and returning to their ancient partnership with horses. In Noakes’s poem, the ponies are real, grazing

between Heathrow’s hangers and cargo sheds,
on the edge of its runways
and by the acres of standing planes.

It isn’t likely, as the poet implicitly recognises, that this state of affairs will continue as it does in Muir’s poem, not when empty planes still fly and engines are kept in tune. But the hint of a different future is there: the horses

stamp and graze on through wet and fine.
Their grass may churn to mud, but they are there,
ready, whenever we want them.

There are some unfortunate typos that could usefully be corrected if these poems end up in a full collection – “an short” (The Sick Spring), “passed” for “past” in “I am brushed passed “ – (Field Notes), “before the engines arrives.” – (Source: A Car Fire), “summised” for “surmised” in ”On coming across John Snow’s grave in Brompton Cemetery during a pandemic”. That last is a pity, occurring as it does in another poem that successfully goes beyond the here and now to another epidemic, the cholera of the nineteenth century.

On the whole, this pamphlet does a good job of chronicling the period without sounding self-pitying or self-righteous. It was a period that many, including me, have no great wish to remember, and one result of that is my dilemma when reading “Countless Pyres, 2021”. This describes hastily-arranged mass funerals:

   Every day, thousands of bodies
  are stacked at the edge
  of the funeral grounds, each
  wrapped in white linen.

   All day masked priests work at
   fast ceremonies and rapid prayers
   till they too are fit to drop.

When I first read this, I took it to be another instance of going beyond the particular, comparing the pandemic to the Black Death, because despite the date in the title, I couldn’t recall any such mass burials happening during Covid. I still do think this, but have to recognise that this might have happened, I just can’t recall for sure if it did or not, which says a lot about how many memories from that time I have blocked. Unlike Noakes, I didn’t keep “field notes” from the time; perhaps one day I’ll wish I had…

   they can’t get the taste of terracotta
  out of their mouths
  they know they came from mud

   that only yesterday
  they were a substance
  to be walked on – “Maker”

What comes most strongly through this collection is a preoccupation with what we are, where we came from and what we shall become. It is haunted by Old Testament and Eastern myths, the quest of Gilgamesh and the meditations of Omar Khayyam. As always with re-imaginings, the changes the author makes to her original tell us a lot about where she is coming from. For instance, in the “Wake!” poems, a “re-imagining” of the Rubaiyat, she renders the lines “And in your joyous errand reach the spot/where I made One” as “find the quiet spot where I became one with the universe”. This has to be a conscious divergence; Fitzgerald, and, if memory serves, Omar, was using the phrase “where I made One” to mean “where I was present” (as in “he made one of the party”), but Lewis gives it a pantheistic, or perhaps atomistic, turn, reminiscent of Wordsworth’s rocks and stones and trees.

The same interconnectedness happens in “Fox in a Frosty Field”, where “grief connects with other griefs, unmanageable and random, they cluster, form chains like protein”. This is a meditation on memories and experiences, how they shape and alter each other and even appropriate each other’s effects, so that the grief we cannot express for one loss is transferred to some other event:

How that fox on the road to the garden centre had a ruff of its own red innards round its neck.

How I cried for it, and also for my mother-in-law who I once helped to buy a fur stole.

It may also not be fanciful to see this fascination with interconnectedness in the collection’s formal aspects; the repetitions, patterns of rhyme, chain-forms like the pantoum. Lewis uses this kind of form very skilfully, as in “Fair Ground”, where the deceptive simplicity of what is almost a nursery rhyme masks a dark and serious point.

      The men are riding the roundabout.
     Their bearded faces go up and down.
     It’s such a laugh, they giggle aloud.
     Their eyes glitter with harmless fun.

      their bearded faces go up and down.
     Happy as children let out of school.
     Their eyes glitter with harmless fun.
     They love to go on the ferris wheel.

     Happy as children let out of school.
    Only boys are allowed to be scholars.
    They love to go on the ferris wheel.
    Girls are mourning their books and rulers.

And how artful that title, not “Fairground” but “Fair Ground”, typical of this poet’s exactness.

This poem also demonstrates how, despite its mythological roots, the collection is also very conscious of contemporary events. Indeed in “How can we comfort each other when we can’t comfort them”, the last sentence is alarmingly prescient:

      How can we comfort each other if we can’t comfort them?
     What right have we to be living when they are only offered
      a choice of endings

      by whatever powers of hell come out of the dark pavilions of the terrible,
     death-delivering sky – and I am being forced to allow it? Let there be no
     building on the mass graves of innocents.

I admit to not “getting” what the poem “Another way of saying it” is trying to do, and in “Guinevere”, the image of her “polishing the round table, over and over, wanting praise” threw me a bit; I can’t help thinking queens had staff for that sort of thing. But this is peripheral to the collection’s powerful, haunting theme. The last poem, “The Bat”, harks back to an earlier poem that ends “We are the stuff of unexploded stars”, a line that again put me in mind of Lucretius and the atomists:

you died there alone and this is true of all flesh,
whether in or out of the sun, the end comes

and with the end
comes darkness, and with darkness

the beginnings of stars.

“These cities are palimpsests, with layer upon layer of history, culture and identity drawn over one another, each obscuring the last but with glimpses stealing through.”

This is a study of five Mediterranean cities, Tyre, Carthage, Syracuse, Ravenna and Antioch, not “lost” in the sense of being completely submerged or vanished, but in the sense of being decayed from their former grandeur. Tyre is now a quiet fishing port, with a lot of antiquity submerged just off the coast; what little is left of Carthage is absorbed in a suburb of modern Tunis; Syracuse has been through a period of heavy industrialisation and Antioch, like its modern incarnation Antakya, has been devastated by a series of earthquakes. Ravenna, alone of the five, is still more or less where it was and still relatively important, albeit as a centre for art rather than the western capital of the Roman empire, but its relevance to the theme will presently appear.

The question the book raises is, what causes a city to go into decline like this, and it becomes apparent that there is no one answer. Being plagued with earthquakes won’t cause it alone; if the site is sufficiently desirable, people will come back and rebuild. On the other hand, a site desirably located for purposes of trade or defence will accordingly be desired by many, and may change hands correspondingly often, with violent consequences. Again though, the conquerors will usually have wanted it enough to rebuild on the ruins they have made, as the Romans did in Carthage. A harbour silting up, or a trade route changing, can have more catastrophic effects.

The word “capitals” in the title is no accident; all these were once national or regional capitals, and losing that status was often the first step on a downward spiral – Syracuse lost out to Palermo in that way. All have been ruinously fought over; all subject to natural disasters. But in many ways it is their differences that are more interesting. Modern Tyre still clings to its ancient “Phoenician” identity, to a sometimes alarming extent:

“Phoenicianism’, as it has become known, was championed by various political parties following the creation of modern Lebanon, most notably those with Christian and Druze leaders. This took on a darker side during the devastating civil war from 1975 to 1989, when ‘New Phoenicianism’ was picked up by far-right Christian militias and used as a way of differentiating the Christians from the Muslims, taking on a distinctly racist current.”

Yet in Tunis, descended from Tyre’s daughter-city of Carthage, the author remarks, “During my time in Carthage, I do not meet a single Tunisian who describes themselves as Phoenician”.

And the artists of modern Ravenna whom she quotes seem if anything to resent the dead hand of “history, which dwarfs everything the city is in the modern day. That trumps the reality of the city. It’s a mistake. Ravenna is so much more than her history, but you grow up with these ghosts”. Marco Miccoli, a skater and street art curator from Ravenna each year creates an exhibition in honour of Dante. ‘People are only interested, we only get permission, if it’s about Dante’.

Some of the book’s most powerful moments do in fact come from the juxtaposition of past and present. In Tyre she notes, “There is a second archaeological site just south of the modern city. This is where the most extensive excavations have taken place, revealing the necropolis, churches and the magnificent hippodrome. Directly adjacent stands the Palestinian refugee camp of Al-Bass. This ghetto is part of the city’s identity, and as I walked through the necropolis, the ramshackle buildings and barbed-wire fences loomed over me. One forgotten people beside so many more. Some of them have less private space than the dead Romans in their sepulchres.”

There is a lot of interest and information in this book, also some welcome humour “He stationed his war elephants around the edges of the city and instructed builders that wherever there was an elephant, there they should construct a tower. It is a loss to urban planning that this method of demarcation is no longer employed as part of the architectural process”. And while I knew the emperor Constans had been assassinated, I wasn’t previously aware that far from being stabbed as the usual custom was, he met his fate in the baths, bludgeoned to death with a soap dish.

I do have some quibbles. In the Ravenna section, spending pages on one of Byron’s love affairs strikes me as completely irrelevant. And like so many modern historians (particularly, I have to say, the female ones), she is too fond of bringing herself in as a character. I could especially have done without “The cave church was the first building I ‘checked on’ when I arrived in Antakya in February 2023, and when I entered to see everything exactly as it had been, I burst into tears. They were the first tears of many to be shed that day – and the only happy ones.” While I can understand her being emotional after the earthquake, I don’t need to know about it; authors can be emotional on their own time instead of embarrassing Gentle Reader with that sort of thing.

However, for most of the time this is a genuinely informative work with an interesting central concept. Living as I do on an island that was a stage on a major seaway, I appreciate an author who views the sea not as a barrier but a connection: “It was the crossing place and the meeting place: the centre of the world.” I could almost forgive the Author’s Note for beginning: “This book has been a journey”…

Hope is often misunderstood. People tend to think that it is simply passive wishful thinking: I hope something will happen but I’m not going to do anything about it.

If I’m reviewing a book from a few years back, and one which must have been reviewed by the press at the time (though I confess it completely passed me by), it’s because a book advocating hope seemed rather apposite at a time when there’s a great deal of pessimism and despair about, much of it justified. In the event, I have very mixed views about it. Jane Goodall has long travelled the world giving talks about conservation, urging people not to be discouraged by the size of the problems from doing what they can. She has demonstrably done a lot of good, with initiatives like Roots & Shoots, designed to encourage individual and community action, and she is right to say that pessimism and despair can, in effect, become an excuse for doing nothing.

This book, however, is an infuriating mix of truly inspiring stories of positive action, anecdotes masquerading as evidence, wishful thinking, the sentimental and the genuinely moving, practical initiatives, interesting information and “spiritual” baloney. I don’t think it is helped by the narrative method, which involved Abrams conducting a series of interviews with Goodall. For one thing, this encourages the inclusion of much irrelevant detail – “There was coconut rice served with a creamy Swahili bean sauce; lentils and peas with a hint of ground peanuts, curry, and coriander; and sautéed spinach”: well, fascinating if you like menus, but nothing to do with the book’s theme.

Also, in order for the reader to feel the dialogue is going somewhere, Abrams feels obliged to be constantly surprised and enlightened by whatever Goodall is saying, even when one might think it was so obvious that he must surely have stumbled on the idea before. “Doesn’t it feel like a drop in the ocean, given the overwhelming autocracy or tyranny that people are facing around the world?” “But millions of drops actually make the ocean.” I smiled. Hope, checkmate.” There is too much of this: “I was beginning to see what Jane meant about the tapestry of life and the interconnection between all species.”, “Jane smiled and nodded her head, like an elder who was passing on the secrets of life and survival. I was beginning to understand.”

Often the dialogue simply feels forced and unnatural, as when they are swapping examples of political activism:

“Yes,” Jane said, “think of the early suffragette movement in England, led by Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst, when the women tied themselves to the railings outside the House of Commons as they fought for women’s right to vote. And think of the number of people, all over the world, who have tied themselves to trees, or climbed up into the branches, to try to protect a forest from the bulldozers.” “Another inspiring example is Standing Rock,” I said…” This goes on for a while.

When Goodall focuses on practical initiatives, however, the book is genuinely informative and sometimes inspiring. In China, Jia Haixia, who is blind, and Jia Wenqi, who has no legs, have together planted more than ten thousand trees to help heal the degraded and polluted land surrounding their village. Roots & Shoots, originally founded in a Tanzanian school to convince children that everyone could make a difference in the world, proved its worth when a visitor to a refugee camp noticed a strange difference in one area: “It was depressing, he said—bare earth, people with vacant expressions, children sitting listlessly outside their huts. He continued walking through the camp, and then suddenly he came to a section of the camp where the atmosphere changed. Children were running around and laughing. Hens foraged in a patch of land where grass had been allowed to grow. A few teenagers were working in a small vegetable garden.” The people in that area had been through the Roots & Shoots programme and were not inclined to sit around despondently waiting for something to happen.

sThere are many such stories, and they make a good point. But there is also a degree of wishful thinking, nowhere more evident than in this passage – the book was published in 2021, remember…

“Jane didn’t miss a beat. “That’s true. But it’s going to be the twenty-year-olds and thirty-year-olds who will vote in the right president.” Once again, Jane was prescient. Eleven months later, an increase in young voter turnout would help vote out Donald Trump, who had pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement, and elect Joe Biden—and one of the first major acts of his presidency would be to rejoin the Paris Agreement and recommit to building a healthier economy and planet.”

To which one can only say, whoops…. And I’ve checked; the young vote, especially among young men, turned trumpwards in 2020 and they named the economy and their personal finances as the biggest issue. So much for their ecological concerns. A quotation in the book from Desmond Tutu, “the human race takes two steps forward and one back”, seems more realistic. I could also really do without the sentimentality (far too many mentions of “tears”) and the mystic/spiritual shtick. “Somebody or some unknown power looking after me up there,” Jane said, glancing up. “That sort of thing has happened before.” She seems to have convinced herself that there is no such thing as coincidence – “Was it coincidence that put us next to each other on that plane that neither of us should have been on— and that we had the last two seats? If I had not initiated a conversation that opportunity would have been lost.” Abrams, moreover, seems not to notice that her statement, “But I don’t believe in fate or destiny. I believe in free choice,” is in flat contradiction to her evident belief in some mysterious guiding power. Nor does he ever ask why this unknown power is not “looking after” others in the same way. He does reflect, “As I thought about these stories, I realized we had left the realm of science”, but it doesn’t seem to bother him.

I’ve no doubt many readers would mind the spirituality, the sometimes fuzzy logic and the tears less than I do. I’ve no quarrel with the book’s message, but I think there are better ways to deliver it.

“This book is […] an attempt to take the temperature of the nation as it emerged from a century when it had dominated the world and was beginning – whether it knew it or not – a long process of decline. It draws heavily on popular literature, on the songs of the music hall and on the newspapers.”

The first thing this book really needs is its title explaining, for anyone unaware that the phrase “Little Englander” has radically changed its meaning since it was first coined. These days, it usually means an insular, jingoistic person who thinks his country better than any other. It was often applied to Brexiters. But it originally meant someone who didn’t believe in the ideal of Empire, thought Britain should stay at home and mind its own business, and was more interested in affairs in Europe, its nearest neighbour, than in anything going on in dominions halfway across the world. A political opponent wrote of the Liberal leader Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's opposition to the Boer War: "The impression one got of him from the Press in those days was … that he was an unpatriotic Little Englander". In fact, by this definition it would be Remainers who were more akin to Little Englanders.

The phrase “in the Edwardian Era” is also not completely accurate, unsurprisingly, both because the book does not come to a stop with Edward VII’s death in 1910 and because some of the trends that characterised Edwardian society had their roots earlier. “Edwardian”, like the Regency, was a relatively short period that followed a long one and had a slightly decadent air, as of a society sensing change on the way and rather desperately enjoying itself while it still could. Priestley, in The Prince of Pleasure, described the Regency as “gamey”, and the word fits this era well enough too.

Turner, in drawing its picture, has leant heavily on popular entertainment: trends in books, classical music, art and above all the music-hall. This makes a lot of sense, because these tend to reflect the way a society is really thinking rather than how it would like to see itself. In 1901, the readers of Leisure Hour, asked to name the greatest living Englishman, split the vote between Field Marshal “Bobs” Roberts, veteran of countless Victorian and Edwardian wars, and General William Booth, “the teetotal, vegetarian founder of the Salvation Army”. These may have been the people they thought they should admire, but if one goes by the books they read, the music-hall songs they sang, the papers they read and later, the films they watched, the people they really admired and longed to emulate were demagogues with the gift of the gab, like Joe Chamberlain, and entrepreneurs who, by fair or foul means, made a great deal of money, like Horatio Bottomley. Indeed, music-hall songs were generally very scornful of virtuous teetotallers like Booth.

This way of writing history is also good at highlighting trends. There was the habit of comparing anyone successful in his field to “the ultimate self-made man”, Napoleon, (“Edward Moss, of Moss Empires, was ‘the Napoleon of music halls’; Horatio Bottomley ‘the Napoleon of finance’; Joe Chamberlain ‘the Napoleon of Birmingham’; Alfred Harmsworth ‘the Napoleon of journalism’”). There was a glut of “invasion novels” imagining a foreign takeover, eventually satirised by Wodehouse, who in The Swoop imagines an invasion by nine separate powers: “England was not merely beneath the heel of the invader. It was beneath the heels of nine invaders. There was barely standing-room”. There was the popularity of mutoscopes, better known as What the Butler Saw machines: “The craze spread rapidly around the country. At one end of the business there were the pleasure grounds at Earl’s Court in London, with hundreds of machines; at the other was the gentlemen’s lavatory on Rhyl seafront, where their presence caused much overcrowding, to the annoyance of those wishing to use the conventional facilities”. Turner’s method also shows up class differences; the welcome for the Entente Cordiale among more travelled, cosmopolitan-minded folk not extending to readers of the popular press or music-hall patrons. “We have a firm belief in the immorality of the French people,’ journalist Philip Gibbs pointed out in 1911, adding that it was ‘in the English music-halls where the popular idea is most clearly expressed’. He was thinking of songs such as Billy Williams’s ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ (1909), in which a vicar visits Paris without his wife and is corrupted by its loose morals: ‘With a lady he was pally, quite entente-cordi-ally.’”

This is a serious history with all the proper apparatus of notes, though unforgivably lacking an index, at least in the Kindle version. But its source material lends itself to much incidental humour. Some is unintentional on the part of its originators, like this unfortunate choice of title: ‘One of the great needs of the world today is manliness in its young men,’ pronounced the Cornish writer and Methodist minister the Reverend Silas K. Hocking in a lecture entitled ‘There’s Now’t So Queer as Folk’. Some derives from characters who were intrinsically witty in themselves, notably Marie Lloyd. Standing on a picket line in support of a stage artists’ strike, Marie advised letting the mediocre singer Belle Elmore through, “Oh, let her go in, she’ll do more for the strike by playing than she will by stopping out”. Belle had worse problems waiting at home if she’d only known; her husband was Dr Crippen.

A word of explanation first. This is one in a series from a publisher called Enthralling History, whose website declares “We believe that learning history should be an enthralling experience”. This seems to mean, among other things, dispensing with the normal academic apparatus like notes and index (though it does have a list of sources). I’m not sure why history books with this perfectly normal paraphernalia can’t be “enthralling” – if one doesn’t want to read those bits, one can surely ignore them? I assume they think even seeing such evidence of academia may put off the casual browser, which is a pity, since it supposes the casual browser to be somewhat thick.

I’m afraid that to me, the absence of notes and index means it’s Not A Proper History Book, Nevertheless, if the aim of the series is to recruit new readers of history, it’s a laudable aim, and having picked this one up on Kindle while trying to find out more about Toussaint L’Ouverture, I thought it worth reviewing. I’d been reading and reviewing a lot of revolutionary history last year and this was one revolution I hadn’t got around to.

And as a first overview of events, it does its job. It soon becomes clear that this revolution shared the problems endemic to most revolutions, viz: people were clear what they wanted to get rid of but much less clear what they wanted to put in its place, different disaffected groups spent as long quarrelling with each other as they did opposing the establishment, who by contrast were completely focused on retaining their privileges, and the kind of men suited to leading and winning a revolution were not inevitably, or even often, the best men to run the country afterwards.

Yet this revolution did, after a fashion, succeed – independence was gained, though at a ruinous price in reparations, slavery was abolished, though the new leaders found that to keep agriculture going they needed to direct labour in a way that was fiercely resented, and a republic was created, though the difference between a king and a president for life with draconian powers was hard to discern. Presumably those who survived the appalling slaughters along the way thought it all worthwhile.

This could indeed make an enthralling story. It didn’t enthrall me, largely because it was all about events and seemed to miss out the people. But history is as much about people as events, and the heroes and villains of this story (generally the same person at different times) seldom came alive for me, because we simply weren’t given enough of their character and background. To give one example. Toussaint, at the beginning of the war, was a freedman in business (indeed, like many freedmen of colour in the island, he owned slaves himself). Quite late on, when discussing the different attitudes of Toussaint and Dessalines to the French (Toussaint basically wanted to reconcile and stay part of France, Dessalines wanted the French out on the first boat, or dead), the author observes, “It can be assumed that this stemmed from Dessalines’ background, which had been very different from Toussaint’s. Unlike Toussaint, Dessalines had still been a slave when the uprising broke out in 1791. Dessalines had been forged in the rebellion”.

This is such an important point that I marvel it was not made earlier; it explains a lot about why Dessalines was so much less forgiving. We are given a competent summary of events; we simply are not given enough information on the background of these and other leaders to grasp why events happened as they did.

Dessalines, like almost every other leader who came to power after the revolution, had himself made president for life, took dictatorial powers, directed labour and tended to respond to criticism by killing the critic. He also massacred his opponents, though to be fair the French had started that. He is unique among the hapless post-revolution leaders in actually having been assassinated and torn apart by an angry crowd; by the end he was about as popular as Saddam or Assad.

Nowadays, however, although “for the outside world, the person most associated with the revolution is Toussaint Louverture, and for good reason, in Haiti it is Jean-Jacques Dessalines”. This surprises Wellman; it doesn’t surprise me. For one thing, even dictators can get enveloped in a rosy glow of nostalgia when things don’t improve after their death. For another, it was in Dessalines’ time, after Toussaint’s death, that independence was actually declared and the name Haiti adopted. It was also in his time, and on his order, that Haiti’s white population was dispossessed and all but eliminated, which to people who had suffered slavery under them was probably an outcome more to their liking than the forgiving coexistence advocated by Toussaint. It is seldom that oppressed people newly come to power are ready to listen to the likes of Tutu and Mandela on that point.

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Review of The Bruegel Boy, by Emma Darwin, pub. Holland House Books 2025
Review of Kata & Tor, by Kevin Crossley-Holland, pub. Walker Books Ltd 2025
Review of The Green Month, by Matthew Francis, pub. Faber 2025
Review of Object Permanence by Anne Berkeley, pub. The Garlic Press 2025
Review of maybe i'll call gillian Anderson by Rhian Elizabeth, pub. Broken Sleep Books 2025
Review of Aleph Bet by Sue Rose, pub. Cinnamon Press 2025
Review of Leaving the Hills, by Tony Curtis, pub. Seren 2024
Review of Our Daily War, by Andrey Kurkov, pub. Open Borders Press 2025
Review of Fire: Brigid and the Sacred Feminine, eds Shauna Gilligan & Niamh Boyce, Arlen House 2024
Review of A Bird Called Elaeus, by David Constantine, pub. Bloodaxe 2024
Review of The Ship Beneath The Ice, by Mensun Bound, pub. Macmillan 2022
Review of Bletchley Park’s Secret Source, by Peter Hore, pub. Greenhill Books 2021
Review of Circulation, by Magnus Florin, trs. Harry Watson, pub. Vagabond Voices 2024
Review of Fox Bites, by Lloyd Markham, pub. Parthian 2024
Review of Chalking the Pavement by Kate Noakes, pub. Broken Sleep Books 2024
Review of From Base Materials by Jenny Lewis, pub. Carcanet 2024
Review of Twilight Cities, by Katherine Pangonis, pub. Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2023
Review of “The Book of Hope” by Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams, pub. Viking 2021
Review of Little Englanders: Britain in the Edwardian Era, by Alwyn Turner pub. Profile Books 2024
Review of The Haitian Revolution, by Billy Wellman, pub. Enthralling History, 2024

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Good God! There's writing on both sides of that paper!

Sheenagh Pugh's writing blog

Recent Entries

Review of The Bruegel Boy, by Emma Darwin, pub. Holland House Books 2025

Review of Kata & Tor, by Kevin Crossley-Holland, pub. Walker Books Ltd 2025

Review of The Green Month, by Matthew Francis, pub. Faber 2025

Review of Object Permanence by Anne Berkeley, pub. The Garlic Press 2025

Review of maybe i'll call gillian Anderson by Rhian Elizabeth, pub. Broken Sleep Books 2025

Review of Aleph Bet by Sue Rose, pub. Cinnamon Press 2025

Review of Leaving the Hills, by Tony Curtis, pub. Seren 2024

Review of Our Daily War, by Andrey Kurkov, pub. Open Borders Press 2025

Review of Fire: Brigid and the Sacred Feminine, eds Shauna Gilligan & Niamh Boyce, Arlen House 2024

Review of A Bird Called Elaeus, by David Constantine, pub. Bloodaxe 2024

Review of The Ship Beneath The Ice, by Mensun Bound, pub. Macmillan 2022

Review of Bletchley Park’s Secret Source, by Peter Hore, pub. Greenhill Books 2021

Review of Circulation, by Magnus Florin, trs. Harry Watson, pub. Vagabond Voices 2024

Review of Fox Bites, by Lloyd Markham, pub. Parthian 2024

Review of Chalking the Pavement by Kate Noakes, pub. Broken Sleep Books 2024

Review of From Base Materials by Jenny Lewis, pub. Carcanet 2024

Review of Twilight Cities, by Katherine Pangonis, pub. Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2023

Review of “The Book of Hope” by Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams, pub. Viking 2021

Review of Little Englanders: Britain in the Edwardian Era, by Alwyn Turner pub. Profile Books 2024

Review of The Haitian Revolution, by Billy Wellman, pub. Enthralling History, 2024