Poems Bewitched and Haunted, Killer Verse, Poems Dead and Undead
The volumes are compact and beautiful, and look great on the shelf — plus the collections are both thorough and accessible for someone who doesn’t read as much poetry as literature.
Antiquarian and Classic Book Reviews
2014 CE.
2014 is the publication year for the editions below.
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The volumes are compact and beautiful, and look great on the shelf — plus the collections are both thorough and accessible for someone who doesn’t read as much poetry as literature.
The eleven tales contained in this collection of some of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s stories each contain a pervasive sense of the uncanny and of a narrator that exists out of step with time and space.
You know just enough about the characters — no more, no less. You are provided with just enough background information. It keeps the story tight and moves things along in ways that longer works often struggle with. Perhaps if you look closely you can see the traces of a formula, but it is applied so skillfully that it doesn’t detract from the enjoyment or impact of the narrative.
Taylor’s stories usually take place around the home and centre on domestic issues, but I think that classifying her work as ‘domestic drama’ confers a feeling of banality that is quite unfair.
There’s nothing quite comparable to the experience of reading transcripts and re-printings of primary documents. To read a trial transcript from two hundred years ago and hear the echoes of words spoken so long ago by innocent women accused of crimes that are literally impossible to commit is something powerful and weighty.
I often read as much about American politics as I do about the politics about my own country. Though it feels like I’m on the outside looking in when I read books like this, it to some extent feels closer than is comfortable as well.