Jeremy Treglown
A Clockhouse of One’s Own
Reading a book or a poem in the place it’s about: it’s an obvious thing to do, if only one step less irrational than carving your initials on a writer’s birthplace. But what has reason got to do with it? Imagined approximations, talismanic associations: they do have power. In a chuck-out box in the porch of an Oxford second-hand bookshop, I once found a paperback of Stendhal’s De l’amour, inscribed ‘I Murdoch, Somerville, 1938’. I gave it to someone but feel fonder of it in memory than of almost any book still on my shelves.
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'She must pretend to be a walking companion, observe without being noticed and paint the subject from memory, in secret. It's a superb metaphor for the female artist, hidden from history.'
@nclarke14 ponders the resonance of 'Portrait of a Lady on Fire'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/portraits-of-ladies
'And there in the evening the bride and the gamekeeper
Wait with their faces averted, wait
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And a train to arrive, but not yet and not yet.'
'It Says Here', from Sean O'Brien's upcoming collection.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/it-says-here
https://literaryreview.co.uk/here-there-everywhere-2
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