Author Description

From Kirkus Reviews A kaleidoscopic collection of poems by the nonagenarian Englishwoman who has had more retirements and returns than Frank Sinatra. Raised in India under the Raj and first published by Leonard Woolf in 1929, Graves is not exactly a new face on the block, but her career has waxed and waned, sometimes eclipsed for very long periods when she continued to write yet chose not to publish. The poems collected here are recent; their scope, however, is broad, taking in recollections from Gravess childhood in India, early impressions of England (seen for the first time from the perspective of a girls boarding school), domestic scenes of life with her family, and impressions of nature both in Suffolk and on the subcontinent. Graves is at her best when reconstructing the vision of childhood, and her verse has a general sense of wonder mingled with fear that makes its most commonplace observations refreshing and touched with the light of innocence. Although not explicitly religious, theres a clear religious framework inhabiting the authors consciousness and informing her rhetorical constructions (Adam lay bound in her bond, his bladder at ease, spent, / Under his hair the five vowels and a divine lip grunt) that lends a depth to the breadth already established by her cosmopolitan view. And in spite of a solitary tone struck throughout that is inseparable from old age, the artless and straightforward narration marks the author as a woman with a mind-set considerably younger than the sum of her years. Delightful, eloquent, and unaffected: a testimony on behalf of the revivifying power of recollection in tranquillity. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.