Reviews: The Island in the Sound; Grand Tour; National Theatre; and Long Distance
John McAuliffe: His new collection is aware of its knack for constructing clinching symbols from an ordinary life being eulogised.
I Haven’t Been Entirely Honest with You by Miranda Hart: A self-help memoir that is helpful but too long It’s a book of passion and yearning – “I have a young man’s mind, deranged with desire”, she writes in a poem after Augustine, and she’s particularly good on carnality and want, able to recreate on the page some of the “pent-up electric joy” of sex, and pleasure, in part as a reverse side of the omnipresence of grief and loss.
The impressive Fog Lane has a fabular quality which links several of the book’s seemingly competing instincts – at once hymning the everyday while creating patterns, and a resonant, metaphorical, set piece which cuts through the bafflement and disinheritances of the poems’ speakers. The world, to some degree, feels like the ball in Fog Lane, “Not yet given up as lost/or out of reach”, while the I of the poems so often, as per The Scientific Method, is “a participant observer, not unobsessive”.
It’s a book populated by ghosts, by the need and at times discomfort of elegy. There’s a freeing-up that goes with the disappearance of old certainties, as well as the loss: “Now that you are dead I can write this”, Clanrath begins, in which an old secret can be unburdened, and there are poems in memoriam of Seamus Heaney, as well as closer, blood, relations.
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