Hi friends,
Before we begin - have you taken a look at my Threshold offering? A 6 month container for 12 women exploring together our peri and menopause together in an emboldening and empowering and positive and supportive space. A gorgeous group of women is gathering, I’ll be capping it at 12 to keep it warm and intimate. Doors closing at this price this evening, June 26.
Before we begin - have you taken a look at my Threshold offering? A 6 month container for 12 women exploring together our peri and menopause together in an emboldening and empowering and positive and supportive space. A gorgeous group of women is gathering, I’ll be capping it at 12 to keep it warm and intimate. Doors closing at this price this evening, June 26.
Here’s all the info :
also - next week’s post will land with you Sunday, not Friday as usual - I’ll be away for the week, and despite my best efforts I did NOT get two posts scheduled before I went !
ok, let’s dive into post for today
I thought it was time for another Joy Jumble. Lord knows we need it.
When this lands in your inbox I’ll be high in the sky on the way to Greece for a week of holidays. Packing for holidays had me go through my dangerously high pile of books recently read and TBR. So I thought for this joy jumble I’d share a few of my most recent reads, along with what I’m bringing with me for the hols.
one :: The Two Kinds of Decay by Sarah Manguso
This was tricky enough to get my hands on, I waited awhile for it to be shipped from the US via my local bookshop as no Irish or UK supplier stocked it. It arrived, and I took a glance at the first page in the car, and found myself still sitting there 20 minutes later reading ‘just one more page’. Manguso is also a poet and the book (a memoir about a wildly unpredictable autoimmune disease she contracts in her early 20’s) is written in spare short chapters, paragraphs often only one or two sentences long. I devoured it.
I am quite interested in the fact that so many of the memoirs I’ve loved are written by poets who have crossed over into personal narratives - Doireann Ní Griofa,
, Polly Atkin, , and more are all prime examples… I’m interested to hear what you might think the relationship between the two is?two :: A Flat Place by Noreen Masud
I was drawn to the title of this book. I wanted to know more about what these flat places were, why Masud was writing about them. I’m currently searching for a title for my own book and am curious about what draws me to a book’s title. I think what I enjoyed most about this book is that Masud did not hide her own quirky personality throughout, it was so interesting to read about how she saw the world. That and how the book is not a sickness to health memoir, but rather a book in which the author is searching for understanding rather than a cure.
three :: Matchstick Man by Julia Kelly
I read this book in two sittings over a weekend, sitting in a giant hall on the northside of Dublin while my son competed in a speed cubing competition, the clackclackclack of cubes and bright young brains whirring all around me. The book tells the story of a relationship between the author and a well known Irish painter, Charlie Whisker, who developed early onset Alzheimer’s disease when their daughter was very young. Kelly writes with unsparing love and honesty about their relationship, the highs of a glamorous carefree beginning and the relentless disintegration and bewilderment that followed, for both Whisker himself and those around him. A book that moved at a page-turning pace, with heartbreak at its core.
four :: Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong
This is one coming in the suitcase for the holidays. Published last year by the ever brilliant Tramp Press, it is Armstrong’s debut. The blurb says ‘Old Romantics is an acutely observed and hideously entertaining collection of linked short stories from an astonishing new talent. Unreliable, deceptive and flawed, Maggie Armstrong’s narrators navigate a world of devious attractions and latent hostility from first through through to motherhood.’ I haven’t read any fiction for awhile, so I’m looking forward to escaping into this with my toes in the ocean.
five :: Why We Swim by Bonnie Tsui
I plan on swimming until I’m wrinkly next week, so this seems like the perfect book to accompany me in Greek waters. I think I picked up the recommendation in a list
six :: The Ghost Lake by
I am so drawn to the relationship between landscape and our own emotional experiences, as well as to the holding of ancestral experience that a place can contain. Pratt (another poet) explores all of this, as well as working through the unfathomable grief of losing a child. Possibly not the most beachy of reads, I am nevertheless really looking forward to reading Pratt’s lyrical pilgrimage through an ancient landscape, beginning, as she tells us, at her daughter’s grave.
I always say my favorite books are memoirs by poets! There’s something about poets’ use of language and way of seeing the world that I love. To your list I’d add Sean Hewitt’s All Down Darkness Wide, Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey, and The Light of the World by Elizabeth Alexander.
My book is in good company! Thank you x