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paigeweb's reviews
77 reviews
A Woman Appeared to Me by Renée Vivien
2.5
Frequently incomprehensible, but with some moments of beauty.
Really interesting if read as an example of the continued historical reception of Sappho and her legacy.
If I have to read the words “amour” and “dolor” one more time I’ll go insane.
I love you because you are going to die. It is the brief joy in ephemeral beauty that I drink on your lips.
Really interesting if read as an example of the continued historical reception of Sappho and her legacy.
If I have to read the words “amour” and “dolor” one more time I’ll go insane.
I love you because you are going to die. It is the brief joy in ephemeral beauty that I drink on your lips.
Classical Women Poets by Josephine Balmer
emotional
inspiring
reflective
sad
5.0
“I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass.”
This Sylvia Plath quote came to mind continually while reading this book. A hundred years ago or two thousand… we are more alike than we think. It’s incredibly moving to think about these women who lived so long ago, and to read fragments of their lives in their own words. It really is a testament to the universality of human experience: Nostalgia for distant childhoods, the bitter torture of unrequited love and the sweeter tortures of love fulfilled, the sting of abandonment, the joys of female friendship, the love of mothers for daughters, the consuming grief for people who we have loved and lost. The pleading human need to be remembered in a future you’ll never get to see. God it makes me so emotional.
Josephine Balmer did beautiful justice to these forgotten voices with introductions to each poetess that included biographical information and enlightening notes on their (often misogynistic) modern reception. Absolutely recommend.
Baucis, these tears are your embers and my memorial, traces glowing in my heart, now all that we once shared has turned to ash…. Baucis, this crimson grief is tearing me in two.
Your love, Biote, was like honey, like truth, and now I’m placing a slab above your grave. Set it in stone: Euthylla took you for her lover and these tears are your memorial falling one by one for the years we have lost.
Farewell, take comfort, my darling girl.
This Sylvia Plath quote came to mind continually while reading this book. A hundred years ago or two thousand… we are more alike than we think. It’s incredibly moving to think about these women who lived so long ago, and to read fragments of their lives in their own words. It really is a testament to the universality of human experience: Nostalgia for distant childhoods, the bitter torture of unrequited love and the sweeter tortures of love fulfilled, the sting of abandonment, the joys of female friendship, the love of mothers for daughters, the consuming grief for people who we have loved and lost. The pleading human need to be remembered in a future you’ll never get to see. God it makes me so emotional.
Josephine Balmer did beautiful justice to these forgotten voices with introductions to each poetess that included biographical information and enlightening notes on their (often misogynistic) modern reception. Absolutely recommend.
Baucis, these tears are your embers and my memorial, traces glowing in my heart, now all that we once shared has turned to ash…. Baucis, this crimson grief is tearing me in two.
Your love, Biote, was like honey, like truth, and now I’m placing a slab above your grave. Set it in stone: Euthylla took you for her lover and these tears are your memorial falling one by one for the years we have lost.
Farewell, take comfort, my darling girl.
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
5.0
This book had my jaw on the floor repeatedly just from the beauty of the writing. I loved so much about it, from the pirouetting of the social rituals and its reflection in the way the narrative ricocheted seamlessly from the perspective of one character to another, to Clarissa’s rejection of religion for a unique theology of human interconnectivity, to the themes of temporality and memory, to the dark underside of war, trauma, and death that lingers beneath the mundane performances of daily life that we cling to. My favorite Virginia by far. An offering for the sake of offering. This will stay with me forever.
“Clarissa had a theory in those days— they had heaps of theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people. But she said, sitting on the bus going up Shaftesbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere; not ‘here, here, here’; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere. She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who complete them; even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter— even trees, or barns. It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror of death, allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for all her skepticism), that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places after death… perhaps—perhaps.”
“Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the center which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.”
“Then (she had felt it only this morning) there was the terror; the overwhelming incapacity, one’s parents giving it into one’s hands, this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there was in the depths of her heart an awful fear.”
“Clarissa had a theory in those days— they had heaps of theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people. But she said, sitting on the bus going up Shaftesbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere; not ‘here, here, here’; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere. She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who complete them; even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter— even trees, or barns. It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror of death, allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for all her skepticism), that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places after death… perhaps—perhaps.”
“Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the center which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death.”
“Then (she had felt it only this morning) there was the terror; the overwhelming incapacity, one’s parents giving it into one’s hands, this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there was in the depths of her heart an awful fear.”
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
4.0
A cathartic exorcism of childhood and adolescent memories in the form of a letter to an illiterate mother. Themes of emigration, diaspora living, the effects of war and generational trauma, queerness in rural America, etc.
Who will be lost in the story we tell ourselves? Who will be lost in ourselves? A story, after all, is a kind of swallowing.
You once told me that memory is a choice. But if you were god, you’d know it’s a flood.
Who will be lost in the story we tell ourselves? Who will be lost in ourselves? A story, after all, is a kind of swallowing.
You once told me that memory is a choice. But if you were god, you’d know it’s a flood.