Nutshell (2016)
“When she squeezed by us in the hall, when she was still, in our thoughts, my father’s girl, I listened out for the alluring creak of leather. But no, today she’s dressed in softer style, more colourfully, I think. She would have cut a figure at the poetry event tonight. When she was wailing in distress her voice was pure. But her account of the visit to the mortuary, clutching at her fiancé’s wrist, was a reminder, as each growling sentence trailed away, of the guttural urbane, her tasty fry-up. Now, as my mother extends an arm across the kitchen table to enfold the visitor’s hand in hers, I hear in the vowels the duck’s quack restored. Elodie’s relaxing into my mother’s confidence as she, the poet, praises my father’s poems. It’s the sonnets she loves most.
“He wrote them in a conversational style, but dense with meaning, and so musical.”
Her use of tense is correct but offensive. She speaks as if the death of John Cairncross has been fully confirmed, absorbed, publicly acknowledged,... historically beyond grief like the Sack of Rome.MoreLess
“He wrote them in a conversational style, but dense with meaning, and so musical.”
Her use of tense is correct but offensive. She speaks as if the death of John Cairncross has been fully confirmed, absorbed, publicly acknowledged,... historically beyond grief like the Sack of Rome.MoreLess
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