Recent reading and recommendations
I’ve recently read and been impressed with a few books that I thought might be interesting to people who like these posts, so I wanted to share.
Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell. Donne tends to be a poet I respect more than love, and I was going to get the recent biography of Keats first, but then Super-Infinite started winning all the awards. Really, all of them. It’s one of the most universally praised books I’ve come across in a while. And I’ve only just started it, but I can already see why. It’s one of the most engaging literary biographies I’ve ever read. Rundell’s immense enthusiasm is entirely present, and that makes this a delight to read.
You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith. You might recognize the line from her viral poem “Good Bones” but You Could Make This Place Beautiful is not a new collection but rather a memoir. It’s about coming through and out of a painful divorce, about being a parent, and very very much about being an artist, about choosing a life of art and what that means in both its joy and its difficulty. This one also lives up to the hype – I found it deeply emotionally resonant and a beautiful and poetic read. (If you do want a collection of hers, my favorite is one of her early ones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison.)
The Translations of Seamus Heaney. I’m a completist with Heaney – I have almost everything of his. And so I bought this book for that reason, and because I thought it would be nice to have all the translations in one volume. And then I was shocked to discover how many translations he had done that I’d had no idea of! I am deeply pleased to have picked this one up. It’s a weighty, beautiful book and includes the longer poems like Sweeney Astray, The Midnight Verdict, Beowulf and the plays The Cure at Troy and The Burial at Thebes. Absolutely worth it if you like Heaney’s work.
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