This week in literature…

... saw the death of experimental modernist poet, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) in Zurich, 27th September, 1961. 

As a mythopoeic imagist, she was profoundly influenced by the avant-garde works of Ezra Pound. The poem below, ‘Hermes of the Ways’, perfectly encapsulates the style and intent of Imagism, an aesthetic that Pound describes, in an early letter to H.D., as 'objective—no slither; direct—no excessive use of adjectives, no metaphors that won’t permit examination. It’s straight talk, straight as the Greek!...'

Hermes of the Ways

by H.D.  

                                                        I

                                        The hard sand breaks,
                                        And the grains of it
                                        Are clear as wine.

                                        Far off over the leagues of it,
                                        The wind,
                                        Playing on the wide shore,
                                        Piles little ridges,
                                        And the great waves
                                        Break over it.

                                        But more than the many-foamed ways
                                        Of the sea,
                                        I know him
                                        Of the triple path-ways,

                                        Hermes,
                                        Who awaits.

                                        Dubious,
                                        Facing three ways,
                                        Welcoming wayfarers,
                                        He whom the sea-orchard
                                        Shelters from the west,
                                        From the east
                                        Weathers sea-wind;
                                        Fronts the great dunes.
                                        Wind rushes
                                        Over the dunes,
                                        And the coarse, salt-crusted grass
                                        Answers.

                                        Heu,
                                        It whips round my ankles!

                                                       II

                                        Small is
                                        This white stream,
                                        Flowing below ground
                                        From the poplar-shaded hill;
                                        But the water is sweet.

                                        Apples on the small trees
                                        Are hard,
                                        Too small,
                                        Too late ripened
                                        By a desperate sun
                                        That struggles through sea-mist.
                                        The boughs of the trees
                                        Are twisted
                                        By many bafflings;
                                        Twisted are
                                        The small-leafed boughs.

                                        But the shadow of them
                                        Is not the shadow of the mast-head
                                        Nor of the torn sails.

                                        Hermes, Hermes,
                                        The great sea foamed,
                                        Gnashed its teeth about me;
                                        But you have waited,
                                        Where sea-grass tangles with
                                        Shore-grass.

Book of the Week

The Fountains of Silence by Rupa Sepetys

Reviewed by Lachlan Murray

Incredibly well researched, Sepetys delivers on yet another work of captivating historical fiction. The Fountains of Silence shines light on a dark, and often overlooked 20th century history dictatorship. Spain under Franco provides the perfect stage for a forbidden romance. Daniel, a wealthy, Texan, aspiring photojournalist, meets Ana, an impoverished hotel worker. Their developing love faces several obstacles throughout the book, including disapproving family members and social differences. 

Although Daniel and Ana lead the narrative, various powerful secondary characters play their part. Perhaps my favourite character in recent memory is the mighty Fuga, who steals the show with his defiant values and noble attempts to become a legendary bullfighter. His supporting role, like many others, add depth to the environment and consequence to the leads' actions, while providing intriguing subplots themselves. Sepetys truly transports readers into foreign lands with her masterful, yet approachable, language. Her layered narratives and historical insights make for a fascinating read - my personal favourite of the 2021 Carnegie Shortlist.

Prizes Prizes Prizes

September kicks off the season of literary prizes, with the announcement of the winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction - the extraordinary Piranesi, by Susannah Clarke (reviewed by Mrs Cummings below) - and the Booker Prize shortlist. The Booker prize-winner will be announced on November 3rd, which means that this year's SPS Predict the Booker evening will take place just after half term. 

For those of you unfamiliar with Predict the Booker, this is what happens: a panel of student readers each choose one of the books on the shortlist, and make the case for it to win (and occasionally NOT to win), before the audience decides which book will get their vote - a bit like a literary balloon debate. If you'd like to get involved as one of this year's speakers, please contact Mrs Cummings, or pop along to the library to choose which book you'd like to recommend.  

The SPS track record for successfully predicting the winner has been, er, mixed - you can find out more about our 2020 predictions here, and our 2019's here - but it's always a highly entertaining (and illuminating) evening. We hope that lots of you will come along, or watch from home, as we'll be streaming the event again this year: so do get involved - it's a lot of fun!  

'Piranesi lives in the House. Perhaps he always has.'

Piranesi lives in the House, which is his world. It has endless corridors and an infinite number of rooms. Everywhere there are statues, each different from the next, and inside the House an ocean is imprisoned, with tides and waves flooding the staircases. Piranesi lives completely alone apart from a twice-weekly visitor who brings incongruous gifts. But then messages start to appear, scratched into the fabric of the House, and the space which Piranesi thought was safe and understood becomes strange and dangerous.

This is an absolutely magical book. You enter the world of Susanna Clarke’s astonishing imagination and while you’re in there, nothing else matters. This is a book to read in one sitting, immersed, and when you finish you will still have the sound of the waves in your ears and you will be startled by the real world. It is my book of the year, and indeed probably my favourite book of many years.

Susanna Clarke’s earlier work Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell was hugely successful but there has been a lengthy gap between it and this, her second book. During that time she has been ill with chronic fatigue and thought she would never write again. Her first book is a doorstop coming in at over 1,000 pages. This is a very slim volume in comparison at only 272 pages and it would be easy to feel cheated at how short it is. But every word counts and the writing is lyrical and elegant. Please do read it, it is wonderful.

You can see Bernadine Evaristo announcing the Women's Prize for Fiction winner here: - it's about 28 minutes in!  
 

Book of the Week

The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken
Recommended by Andy Wang 

Written by an anonymous author with the pen name 'the Secret Barrister', this book dives into the complicated criminal justice system in England and Wales, giving a personal account of the writer's own experience and revealing the system to be vastly underfunded and riddled with problems. Within pages, the reader discovers the shocking truth of what criminal justice is actually like, and how all of us are inextricably linked to it.

Poetry Friday ...

As well as reviews, articles and recommendations, the Book Blog also features occasional creative writing posts. Today's is a poem written by Mr Harris, which was partly inspired by Philip Larkin's poem 'Going, Going' (you can hear a recording of Larkin reading this poem here) and particularly by Walt Whitman's 'I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing' - which you can read here.  

'As we wait on a packed train home'

As we wait on a packed train back home,
Trying to suffocate the noise of boys blaring
That rough racket from their phones, I stare
Out at the hedgerows that tumble past my window.

Late on a May Bank Holiday, white freckles
Of blossom, like a recent memory, soon
Blurred and behind us, to wilt in the June sun.
My eyes ache to focus on something so fickle,

So I turn to the fields beyond, shifting sands of green

And yellow, then clumps of semi-detached houses,
Rushing through a station where scattered crowds
Clutch at the last light from the sinking summer’s eve.

We burst through them onto pastures new, no high
Boundaries to break my eyeline and in the distance
Stood a farmhouse, cool and slow, indifferent
To the oak that had rooted in the living room and climbed

Up through the ceiling, splintering floorboards as it forced
Its way into the bedroom, where broad branches battered
At the sky and finally, upon breaking through, unanswered
In its stone tomb, flowering in defiant, lusty green. Time unlost.

I turn to you still frowning at my side, straw-haired and sun-kissed,
And smile. You reach over and hold my hand, as you always do,
And we sit in our own silence. In that way we whistle through
The fields and years together. The noise around us unmissed.

Many thanks to Mr Harris for sharing his poem: if you'd like to read more poetry on the blog, you can find Mr Anthony's poem 'The Spin' here.  We're always happy to publish creative work - just send it to any member of the English department. And if you're interested in getting more involved in creative writing at SPS, there are plenty of opportunities: Mr Harris runs the SPS creative writing society, which kicks off with its first meeting on Tuesday 21st September, at 12:40 in E7, and you can contact Mr Gardner (mtg@stpaulsschool.org.uk) if you'd like to contribute to our creative and critical writing magazines, or become part of the editorial team.  So get involved, and share your writing with a wider audience - have fun!  

Welcome back!

 It's our first post of the term - and we'd like to welcome all our regular readers, plus everyone else encountering the blog for the first time.

The blog exists to promote and celebrate all aspects of books and reading at SPS.  Anyone can contribute - if you've read something brilliant, fiction or non-fiction, and you want to share it with the world, just send us your review (spsbookblog@stpaulsschool.org.uk) and we'll happily publish it. We also publish creative writing, articles about writers and writing, plus the occasional quiz. Our Tuesday post is our regular 'book of the week' slot, so here, without further ado, is the school librarian, Mrs Cummings, with our first recommendation of the term.

The Call by Peadar O'Guilin

Reviewed by Mrs Cummings

Set in a contemporary Ireland which has been cut off from the rest of the world, this is a cursed country where at some point every teenager will vanish for three minutes and four seconds. They go to school and train aggressively in the hope of surviving the ordeal, but most are killed or return horribly damaged. 

The heroine, Nessa, is a likeable character: intelligent and strong-willed but her physical disability means she is at a disadvantage from the start. She has to try to survive both the monsters she meets when she is Called, and the threats she faces from the other people.

This is such an unsettling book. Dark, often gory, it stayed with me long after reading it. It has the pace of a thriller but it is a strange mash-up of fairy tale, fantasy and horror story. At times the violence meant I had to put it down but, in the end, I just needed to know what happened.  

The author has said this is the first of a duology - if you enjoyed Hunger Games or A Game of Thrones you will probably enjoy this. If you want a good night’s sleep, maybe skip it.