Book Review | ‘Beowulf’ by Anonymous

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ancient literature, beowulf, book review, epic poem, Grendel, gutenberg project, Medieval, poetry

Beowulf by Unknown

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

“Beloved Beowulf, remember how you boasted,
 Once, that nothing in the world would ever
 Destroy your fame; fight to keep it,
 Now, be strong and brave, my noble
 King, protecting life and fame
                                       Together. My sword will fight at your side!”

Stirring stuff eh? Nothing but distilled epicness! When someone used to say ‘Beowulf’ to me I’d start thinking about epic soundtracks to films, especially ‘Lux Aeterna’. But not anymore…

No, there’s nothing to get excited about here, people. In fact, this might be my shortest review of a book yet. Basically ‘Beowulf’ is the story of a warrior called Beowulf (who comes across as a bit vainglorious, hence the quote above about him boasting!) and his epic battle with Grendel the monster, and said monsters mum. And you get to read the story TWICE. Once by the narrator, and a second time round by Beowulf himself (who was only trying to impress the ladies in court!)

My translated version was the Gutenberg e-book edition, and very unimaginative if I might say so. Ask around for a GOOD translation before you give it a go. If you know a good version, please let me know. I feel like a s*&% not diggin’ this piece of epic lit. And I don’t like that. It makes me feel dumb.

So please, convince me through another version this CAN be better and I’ll be a very grateful girl indeed!

To read my version of the text free, plesase visit ‘Beowulf’ at the Gutenberg Project.

View all my reviews

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Hallowe’en Poetry | ‘The Raven’ by E.A. Poe

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brandon lee, christopher lee, christopher walken, dracula, edgar allan poe, eric draven, frankenstein, halloween, james earl jones, jekyll and hyde, john astin, peter ackroyd, poetry, the crow, the raven, vincent price

‘”While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.”
… You heard me rapping, right?’ – Eric Draven, ‘The Crow’

Even though I do not celebrate it, the Hallowe’en spirit is something that I am very fond of. I suppose it’s my love for Romantic Gothic literature that has me looking forward to it every year. It’s any old excuse really for classics like ‘Frankenstein’, ‘Dracula’ and the ‘Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ to be pulled off the shelf and given a once over. This year however I have changed tack; instead of immersing myself in the epistolary accounts of Jonathan Harker and Victor Frankenstein I have decided to revisit Poe and his wonderfully morbid collection of short stories and poems. So since this is my first hallowe’en blog post I thought what better way to celebrate it than with the famous Gothic poem: ‘The Raven’.

This poem holds a very special place in my heart, as it evokes the true spirit of the Gothic: terror of the unknown and melancholic desire. Peter Ackroyd’s short biography ‘Poe: A Life Cut Short’ has also thrown some very interesting light on the popularity of the poem that I wish to share. In the chapter entitled ‘The Bird’ I discovered its origins and the reason why it has endured as one of the most popular ‘recited’ poems of all time. After it was published, ‘The Raven’ became one of those rarest of things; an overnight success. This intricate masterpiece of form and meter was the only real commercial fame Poe ever gained in his lifetime as he was suddenly being hailed in the street as the ‘raven’ (very apt as he always wore black) and the words ‘nevermore’ had quickly been adopted and immortalised by actors.  

However, the thing that excited me most, was that Poe himself was frequently asked to read the poem out loud. Yet this all began when a famous actor and friend of Poe recited it for the first time in Poe’s office. From that moment ‘The Raven’ has remained as a famous narrative poem that has continued to be recited by famous actors throughout history. Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, James Earl Jones and John Astin are to name but a few who have lent their voices to it, but the version I love most is the one by Christopher Walken. So here it is, complete with scary sound effects that reminds me of that Tim Burton classic ‘Sleepy Hollow’. Enjoy!

Now, the question poses itself: Which famous actor would you like to hear recite the poem? My choice would be the late Brandon Lee who starred as Eric Draven in ‘The Crow’. In the film, he only recited a couple of lines (see caption of image), but it was absolutely fantastic.

Quick Review | ‘Amulet’ – Roberto Bolaño

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amulet, book review, Latin America, literature, Mexico, Pedro Garfias, poetry, roberto bolano, south american

Amulet by Roberto Bolaño

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

“This is going to be a horror story. A story of murder, detection and horror. But it won’t appear to be, for the simple reason that I am the teller. Told by me, it won’t seem like that. Although, in fact, it’s the story of a terrible crime.”

And so begins the awkward, hallucinatory tale of Auxiliano Lacouture; the narrator of our story and self-proclaimed ‘mother of Mexican poetry‘. The story begins neither here nor there,but winds itself around people, events and fragmented memories like a kite driven by a wayward wind. Lacouture’s erratic narrative comes to rest on odd moments between art and people as Bolano tries to express the deep, subliminal messages sent and received by poets and their poetry.

“I am the mother of Mexico’s poets. I am the only one who held out in the university in 1968, when the riot police and the army came in… I stayed there with a book by Pedro Garfias.”

The story itself is loosely anchored around the drastic events of 1968, when the government ordered the storming of all state Universities, including the one Lacouture attends. Suddenly Lacouture finds herself trapped alone in the lavatory on the fourth-floor of the university, where she stays for 12 days without food or water. With nothing but a poetry book and her own memories, Lacouture begins to deconstruct events, recalling, rewinding and often going forward in time to piece together this unlikely ‘horror story’.

Part stream-of-consciousness, part feverish prophecy; the story unfolds as a metaphor for the confusion and rage that swells in the heart of Mexican poetry. Poets dead and alive populate the narrative, adding to the confused, collective cacophony of a country that rests on political turmoil. Amongst this, Lacouture emerges from the lavatory as a heroine, and is hailed by professors and students alike as a champion of literary art. She becomes a living legend, but her solitary confinement has opened a mystical door inside her. She had become a muse, a ‘Calliope’, as her eyes begun to see the power of poetry beyond the page, as she sees the army of the dead marching towards the unknown.

“And I heard them sing. I hear them singing still, faintly, even now that I am no longer in the valley, a barely audible murmur, the prettiest children of Latin America, the ill-fed and the well-fed children those who had everything and those who had nothing, such a beautiful song it is… I heard them sing and I went mad.

And although the song I heard was about war, about the heroic deeds of a whole generation of young Latin Americans led to sacrifice, I knew that above and beyond all, it was about courage and mirrors, desire and pleasure.
And that song is our amulet.”

The quote above is the last paragraph and neatly ties up the ideology that drives this book which was pretty sketchy to begin with. The roundabout telling of the story and it’s incongruence sometimes frustrated me. But something inside me told me to keep reading on. Somewhere in there is a method to the madness, it glimmers through the tangle of voices the novel is composed from. I would say a re-read is in order if I am to truly understand that method.

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Book Review | ‘Winter Trees’ – Sylvia Plath

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50 books a year, book review, Cornwall, Hollywood, poetry, sylvia plath, Vagina Monologues, winter trees, writing

Book Challenges: 50 Books A Year (no. 36)

This slim collection contains poems by the late Sylvia Plath which were written during the last nine months of her life. They are hailed to be the most revealing and enigmatic of her works which document the simultaneous mourning and celebration of the human condition.

It is hard to read a Plath poem without taking her life into consideration. While most poets write with pen and ink, you get a sense that Plath went one step further and wrote from the blood. Plath had a dark gift, a way of tapping into the exquisite pain of human suffering that makes her  impossible to separate from her work. Throughout her short career as poet and writer, it was this often too-personal tie that made publishers uncomfortable. Her savage way of conveying her emotions is evident in ‘Lesbos‘; a bitter letter to Sappho which also doubles as an unashamed portrait of Plath’s domestic despair:

“Viciousness in the kitchen!
The potatoes hiss.
It is Hollywood, windowless,
The fluorescent light wincing on and off like a terrible
migraine…

I should sit off a rock off Cornwall and comb my hair.
I should wear tiger pants, I should have an affair.
We should meet in another life, we should meet in air,
Me and you.”

Needless to say the poems in this book are written from a strong feminist lens and span issues of love, parenting, childbirth and death. Upon my first reading, I found it quite difficult to get into Plath’s particular mindset. But having said this, one must remember that she was probably by now in her deepest depressive stages and suicidal to boot, so it’s only natural for me to connect up to a certain point. The first thing I noted was the darkness that seeped from every poem she wrote. As I re-read them and entered into her narrow, desperate world I realised that these were not ‘poems’ but rather the abstract confessionals of a woman on the edge.

“The womb
Rattles its pod, the moon
Discharges itself from the tree with nowhere to go.

My landscape is a hand with no lines,
The roads bunched to a knot,
The knot myself…” – from Childless Woman

Despair confuses people, and coupled with depression often makes it difficult to see right from wrong. Yet when I analyse Plath’s poems, I realise that despair and depression were her source of sustenance, and this is what makes this collection of poems so special.  Her words are carefully chosen, with a deliberate economy that brings her visions into high-definition. As I finished the last poem ‘Three Women’ (which was intended to be a poem for three voices and later recorded for radio) I saw a sad glimpse of a talent that, if she had lived, would have been one of the greatest modern poets of our times. The piece resonates with the many myriad facets of procreation; the success, loss and abortion of it. It is an echo of womankind through different ages and the other things that ‘mother’ and ‘motherhood’ really give birth to. A masterpiece, and a precursor to the ‘Vagina Monologues‘, here is a small extract:

“I am slow as the world. I am very patient,
Turning through my time, the suns and stars
Regarding me with attention.
The moon’s concern is more personal:
She passes and repasses, luminous as a nurse.
Is she sorry for what will happen? I do not think so.
She is simply astonished at fertility”  

I recommend this to anyone with an interest in Sylvia Plath. For first timers, it may be a bit too much, but reading it a few times over will help you to understand what’s going on. Plath tends to write in cryptic code, cracking the code is a bit like adjusting your eyesight to one of those 3D posters from back in the 90’s. Fun, but it needs a bit of effort, and good poetry always demands a bit of effort from its readers.

I give this 3/5 stars.

Related articles

• P.H. Davies – A Life of Plath (phdavies.wordpress.com)
• Choosing Sylvia Plath’s poems (guardian.co.uk)
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Sylvia Plath | ‘Mary’s Song’

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mary's song, poetry, sylvia plath, winter trees

Recently, I’ve been revisiting some of Sylvia Plath’s poetry, particularly the ones in ‘Winter Trees’ which were compiled in the last nine months of her life. Plath was among the first poets I ever connected with on a personal level. One poem in particular has struck me as I was going through this slim volume: ‘Mary’s Song’.

Like most poems it didn’t make a lot of sense the first time round, but as I kept going over it, things started to fall in place. My eyes began to shift and refocus itself around Plath’s words and suddenly a door opened and I could see her awful meaning.

This poem is about the holocaust. Like the poem ‘Vultures’ by Chinua Achebe, it paints a picture of a Europe at a time where it was cannibalising itself. The last line of ‘Mary’s Song’ leaves a haunting echo inside me. May times like this never be repeated.

Mary’s Song

The Sunday lamb cracks in its fat.
The fat
Sacrifices its opacity…

A window, holy gold.
The fire makes it precious,
The same fire

Melting the tallow heretics,
Ousting the Jews.
Their thick palls float

Over the cicatrix of Poland, burnt-out
Germany.
They do not die.

Grey birds obsess my heart,
Mouth-ash, ash of eye.
They settle. On the high

Precipice
That emptied one man into space
The ovens glowed like heavens, incandescent.

It is a heart,
This holocaust I walk in,
O golden child the world will kill and eat.

It takes a special talent to say so much with so little. Her economy of words is astonishing. I wish she had lived to write more novels. Plath is a sore loss to the literary world.

What are your favourite Plath poems? What makes them so special to you?