viragohaus's reviews
237 reviews

Usefully uncertain http://www.killyourdarlingsjournal.com/2015/08/usefully-uncertain-a-review-of-maggie-nelsons-the-argonauts-in-nine-fragments/

'Wright’s use of the personal pronoun throughout is grounded and clarifying – weighted to illumination and analysis rather than expression.'
My take on Fiona Wright's Small Acts Disappearance. http://www.killyourdarlingsjournal.com/2015/09/cry-of-its-occasion/

The return that never arrives. My review of Fever of Animals http://www.killyourdarlingsjournal.com/2015/10/the-return-that-never-arrives-miles-allinsons-fever-of-animals/

It's difficult to reconstruct what happened, the truth in one's memory fights the memory of the truth'
from Under Foreign Rain
Argentinian poet Juan Gelman's work is inextricably intertwined with the politics of the homeland he spent so much of his life in exile from.
When the military seized power in 1976, Gelman's son and pregnant daughter-in-law were 'disappeared', that too elegant synonym for murdered while hands bound.
The son's remains were only discovered in a concrete drum in 1990; his daughter-in-law's have yet to be. We do know that she was kept alive long enough to give birth and that the child was given to a pro-junta family to raise.
The bare-bones horror of this would break most of us and Gelman stopped writing for years, returning in calm anger and rageful sorrow in 1980s.
The plainsong of Gelman's poetry casts a clear light on its subjects, be they grief, state violence, lost friendships or the tango.
Even though the translation here by Hardie St. Martin reads as a little too safe, Gelman's unstinting belief in the salvation of work is steadfast and, finally, uplifting.

In painting, a vanishing point is where two or more lines of perspective join. This convergence across apparent distance often has the effect of suggesting infinity in the tiniest fleck.

Felicity Plunkett's debut collection Vanishing Point is similarly concerned with the impact of discernible points of difference colliding. Plunkett's imaginative, attentive gaze renders universal subjects particular with detail. From the splitting of the atom to release a large destructive radius of ashen dust to the splintering of birth ('My body broke open like a laugh'), the poems here are often keenly aware how the smallest thing speaks of the largest.

Particularly striking are the poems in the latter half of the collection that concern the fractures and repairs of birth (Delivery, Contractions, The Negative Cutter), the little little beginnings of life bounding against the blanking, compartmentalising universals of medicine.
At other points, there's a detached eroticism married to a real love of language that reveals more and more with each read.

What an unusually, beautifully resolved debut collection this is.

Just over 100 pages of affectless first person prose with minimal dialogue means that much has to be made of the novel's constraint. Its a pity that it reads now a great deal less radically than it would have upon original publication in 1986. A book to appreciate rather than enjoy.

China Miéville's imagining of a Paris still under Nazi occupation in 1950 and beset by wild manifestations of Surrealist art striding the streets is deeply flawed despite its inventive premise and descriptions that are often dazzling. An alternating storyline set in 1941 is flat and explains the obvious, and even the more successful chapters set in 1950 never feel urgent, despite what the novel insists are the highest possible stakes. Still, this short book (200 generous spaced pages) is a joy whenever Miéville drops in a 'manif', a surrealist impossibility conjured into life and action, which fortunately for this reader was often.

The central conceit - the American Civil War was never fought and slavery never abolished - is clearly considered and the consequences thought-through. This consideration is the chief strength of a novel that is otherwise over-long, possesses characterisation that is carelessly slight and too determined to set up a sequel.