31 Mar 2014 23:30:47
The thorny relationship between art and life is probed powerfully by David Park in three absorbing novellas depicting the lives of the wives of three poets, and moving ambitiously from 18th-century London to 1930s Moscow, to contemporary Ireland. These are poets who suffer for their art, who are at odds with society. We meet William Blake's wife, Catherine, at a time when society scorns him; Nadezhda, the fascinating wife of Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, who was killed during Stalin's regime; and finally the grieving widow of a fictional contemporary Irish poet.
What these lyrical novellas lack in plot and pacing they make up for in poetry: lush, vivid, at times startling imagery blooms from the pages. Catherine is working on her husband's prints, and she describes how colours blur and run into each other, and likewise how difficult it is to distinguish "what memory is really mine and which shaped by his imagination", as Park thrillingly exposes the porosity of the personality.
Catching a current literary trend for portraying the perspectives of writers' wives, this is an intensely evocative, thought-provoking, if uneven book, about the effect of life on art, and the mysterious effect of art on life.
