About Me

About Me

Gardener, Writer

A former English teacher and bookseller, I now work as a self-employed gardener (National Certificate in Horticulture) and write poetry, plays and essays. My writing credits can be viewed here. I have had two poetry books and two poetry pamphlets published by various publishers. I was a co-translator of Alain-Fournier:Poems (Carcanet). I commissioned and edited Four American Poets (The High Window Press) and was a co-editor at The High Window (2016-2018). My essays can be read at the Fortnightly Review. I enjoy cycling, fell-running, sea swimming, dog-walking, jazz, travel, reading, horticulture and garden design.

21.11.17

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter


A few weeks ago I re-read a novel - The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - that I had plucked from the bookshelves of a friend's flat I was staying in during a few days in Munich. I began reading it in Bavaria and finished reading it in England having inadvertently taken the book back with me in my backpack. It was a long, tight read. I read it slowly because it's a book rich in minute details and overlapping small-town story-lines that made me think of William Faulkner and especially Faulkner's book Sanctuary.

It's a book hard to summarise easily. When I was reading it, I wrote notes and had plans for an essay (I did make some notes on white cards) but now, several weeks later, I can't think of any overall standout theme. The author, Carson McCullers, is like a documentary-maker getting to the heart and soul of a small, southern town in the US. Her camera goes in close, uncomfortably close, to a populace of misfits and the damned.

The examination of the characters' lives is unremitting. The taut prose gleams boldly and is heroically unforgiving of its subjects, precise and cutting like a surgeon's knife; the narrative is film-like, the scenes like minimalist paintings, the honesty of the emotions pared back to a raw richness, until the burst of defiant expression. The characters are so hard on themselves. The heart is a ruthless hunter, maybe.

And yet, out of the bleakness, there is a progressive reach, truth is somehow nearby, and the lowest of the low are ennobled by their immense struggle. I can think of no other novel that, chapter by chapter, could be a contender for a cut and paste treatment. You can read these chapters any which way and still feel the pull of the book's power.

I have to post this yellowing spine-broken book back to Munich. It is an easy book to let go of, a hard novel to surface from.

On one of my white cards I wrote:

Benedict Mady Copeland (Dr Copeland)
is a precursor to:

Malcolm X
Martin Luther King
Rev. Jesse Jackson

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