Just heard about this one, very excited. I do love an Emily, a Bronte or a Dickinson is alright with me. I wish I could recall my favourite poem of hers, each enigmatic and crystalline. She captures images with words like photographs. I have her letters, very different from the poems. A passionate mermaid in the basement.
from the Little Brown Website:
Though in her lifetime only ten of Emily Dickinson’s poems were published, her death revealed 1,800 poems, many of them in hand-sewn booklets, secreted in a locked chest. She is now regarded as one of the greatest poets of all time, but she has come down to us as a woman disappointed in love, an odd and pathetic woman who dressed in white and shut herself away. Lyndall Gordon sees instead her volcanic character - 'a soul at White Heat' - a mystic and lover whose family harboured a hothouse drama of sex, scandal and devastating betrayal.
Emily Dickinson was a woman beyond her time who found love, spiritual quickening and immortality all on her own terms: she wrote 'My Life had Stood - a Loaded Gun'. Here is an explosive genius.
5 comments:
I think Dickinson and I remember:
I'm nobody, who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us.
Don't tell.
They'd banish us you know.
How boring to be somebody
How common like a frog
To spend one's time the livelong Day like some admiring hog.
I may have muddled the words a little, taken down here from memory.
For some strange reason I found these words comforting when I was a child, as if all of us nobodies might unite together and take pleasure in our anonymity.
Thank you for this, Gondal Girl. I shall chase up the book. Lyndall Gordon is a wonderful writer. She wrote a fantastic biography of Virginia Woolf, too.
Thanks GG. That looks terrific. I'll look out for it. Hope all is well with your little one.
Not only did she capture 'images with words like photographs,' but using photography metaphor was one of her favorite ways to do so. I'm thinking of poem 974:
The Soul's distinct connection
With immortality
Is best disclosed by Danger
Or quick Calamity —
As Lightning on a Landscape
Exhibits Sheets of Place —
Not yet suspected — but for Flash —
And Click — and Suddenness.
thanks for stopping by everyone, am impressed Elizabeth and Justin that you can recite so easily.
Elizabeth -I love that idea of 'Nobodies'. I think one of my favourite antipodean lines of hers is ' the only kangaroo among the beauties' or something like that. I studied her at Uni and know she often refered to herself as a squirrel, a robin and other little things...I think she is pure volano
Justin - I didn't know that poem - but it is spot on, isn't it?
Mary - yes it looks intriguing - family feuds is something one doesn't expect a recluse to have or maybe that is why one becomes a recluse :) The Little Pixie has discovered the power of his own voice at 12 weeks and thinks his 'talking' very fine...( I do too, except at 3am when trying to settle him for sleep)
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