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Den här boken fyndade jag i en kaffestuga för 10 kr. Vem är jag att motstå något sådant?
Det är inte säkert att Roy Jacobsen skulle bli så smickrad över att kallas deckarkung, men han är ett väldigt bra alternativ till alla de norska deckardrottningarna.
Trandagen firas den 25 mars och är en lokal tradition i Kalmartrakten, men den finns även på Öland, i Blekinge och enligt uppgift även i Västsverige. Vissa källor anger att den funnits sedan 1500-talet. Kvällen före T. hänger barnen upp en strumpa vid sängen och på morgonen hoppas de finna godis i den, trangodis. Det heter att tranan landat under natten på resan norrut och lämnat godiset. Tranan kommer till våra trakter när det börjar bli ljusare kväller och förr fanns talesättet att tranan bär ljus i säng, man gick till sängs när det var ljust. T. räknades även som den första sommardagen, då skulle skorna av och barnen skulle springa barfota utomhus. Dagen sammanfaller med Maria Bebådelsedag och Våffeldagen.
Bilden är lånad av Kristianstadsbladet
Torsdag 24 mars 19.30
Malmö SymfoniOrkester
Joshua Weilerstein, dirigent
Marianna Shirinyan, piano
Tidigt landskap
Smitning av Dominique Dyens
Franklin Fay Birkinshaw Davies Bateman Weldon Fox, aka Fay Weldon. Nu har hon skrivit sina memoarer,
Noveller, lyrik och artiklar.
There's certainly no shrieking reproach in A Scattering, Christopher Reid's latest collection, dedicated to the memory of his wife, the actor Lucinda Gane (whom readers of the right age will remember as the science teacher Miss Mooney in Grange Hill). But neither has he been rendered wordlessly impotent. Rather, he gives us a lucid, cogent panorama of grief and loss, from the first diagnosis of illness to a provisional - it never could be final - acceptance of his enforced membership of "the club of the left-over living". These are calm, careful, coolly self-contained poems, but they invite the reader in without reserve. If there's a sense of something being worked out here, Reid's engagement with the process of bereavement, as both husband and poet, only helps to prove the aptness of Donne's dictum, that "Grief brought to numbers cannot be so fierce, / For he tames it that fetters it in verse".
Reid's poetry has always delighted in confounding expectations. As one of the originators (with his one-time tutor Craig Raine, the publisher of this volume) of what James Fenton termed the "Martian" school, he makes the familiar strange through witty juxtapositions and wild, sometimes surreal imagery. This is how the title poem of his 1982 collection, Pea Soup, begins: "A hecatomb; / haruspication of pods ... / It is thus that we understand / our kitchen gods // workaday hierophants, / opening each green victim / with a neat jab of the thumb, / cascading entrails [...] / into a deep pan". It's a clever kind of poetry, skilfully constructed, often erudite, and just a little emotionally chilly. Though Reid's habitual wit does not desert him in A Scattering, that isn't a charge that could be laid against him here.
The book opens with "The Flowers of Crete" and a last holiday together, as he grapples with the fear of what lies ahead. Often, there's the sense that she is one step ahead of him, just out of reach, or threatening to be - an Ariadne who cannot, this time, provide the thread that will save her Theseus from his fate. So he turns to the inward consolations of writing, asking her to forgive "your husband the poet, / as he mazes the pages / of his notebook, in pursuit / of some safe way out"; while she, looking ever outwards, chases "to its least accessible hiding-place" every specimen in her guide to the island's wild flowers.
"The Unfinished" describes, simply and detachedly, the deathbed vigil. "I never heard / the precise cadence / into silence / that argued the end. / Yet I knew it had happened." Afterwards, with the same detachment of "ultimate calm", he quotes Wittgenstein, considers Auden, and tries to configure her death as a journey, though he knows it isn't, or is so only "in that space / of the mind where the wilful / metaphors thrive". Then he recurs to the final few days, telling it as straight as he can, refusing, for instance, to invest the disease that kills her with anything like human moral agency:
Hobgoblin, nor foul fiend;
nor even the jobsworth slob
with a slow, sly scheme to rob
my darling of her mind
that I imagined;
just a tumour.
There follows a series of vignettes, "A Widower's Dozen", that dramatise the accommodations and adjustments that the mind makes when faced with such loss: he talks to her about their garden, imagines that he hears her coming to bed or sees her in the street, endures the repeated jolting realisations that she's gone. It is perhaps odd that, faced with the ultimate dislocation, Reid is, in this book, at his least "Martian". Yet the old wit and erudition are still there. The collection's title, for instance, makes one think of a scattering of ashes, but not so: the title poem describes the way elephants perform a kind of obsequy for their dead by "hook[ing] up bones with their trunks and chuck[ing] them this way and that way"; the animals' ponderous bulk "makes them the very / embodiment of grief, while the play of their trunks / lends sprezzatura". That slightly waggish "sprezzatura" is a typical Reid flourish.
In "Afterlife" he walks past the hospital to which his wife left her body for research and thinks: "That's where my dead wife lives. I hope they're treating her kindly." This end, he finds, is greatly preferable to the shallow certainties of religion, because she is still "doing practical work ... educating young doctors / or helping researchers outwit the disease that outwitted her". Here, as throughout the book, the keynote is one of gratitude.
There's no self-pity, no beating upwards to God's throne here, just a kind of secular prayer of thanks, albeit one that performs the miracle of bringing the dead back to life. Reid conjures her brilliantly for the reader - her way of dressing, her somewhat scattered mental energy, her many enthusiasms. As an act of devotion, A Scattering perhaps proves the almost-truth of Larkin's almost-instinct at the end of "An Arundel Tomb", that what will survive of us is love. How fitting, then, that this beautiful book should begin and end in benediction; it is surely no accident that the opening and closing words are "blessing" and "blessed".
Mitt i livet segnar 38-åriga Amy Rosenblatt Solomon- läkare, mamma, hustru, dotter och syster - ihop på löpbandet och och hennes liv går inte att rädda. Maken Harris blir ensam med tre minderåriga barn, 7, 5 och 1 1/2 år gamla.
Ingen i världen ( orig:s titel: In the Country of Men) av Hisham Matar, född 1970, handlar om den nioårige Suleiman som bor strax utanför Tripoli i Libyen.
Av en ren händelse råkade jag gå förbi radion just när Anita Ekström läste Dagens dikt,
I lusthuset (1954) av Jane Bowles (1917 - 1973). På Dramaten. I rollerna bl. a. Marie Richardson och Basia Frydman. Absurd, någon gång komisk men mestadels tragisk. Mödrar och döttrar som talar förbi varandra; stumma kroppar och olycklig inåtvändhet. Oförmåga att bryta mönster, att bryta upp, att frigöra sig. Det hela utspelar sig i Kalifornien på 1940 eller -50-talet.
Philippe Grimbert har skrivit en liten självbiografisk roman, Hemligheten, om en ung pojke som är enda barnet och som känner på sig att han är fel, så fel. Han skulle ha varit en helt annan. Hans far hade önskat sig en annan son och kanske i viss mån även modern. Två vältränade vackra människor får en liten bräcklig son, sjuklig, blek och tanig och helt ointresserad av fysiska aktiviteter. Inte för att det sägs direkt, men sådant känner man ju på sig.
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