Human Voices by Penelope Fitzgerald
This collection of poems begins with the Sonoran Desert, a return to personal and social histories. Poems crisscross the desert to bear witness to the live repercussions of past and contemporary events, from Bisbee, Arizona, in 1917 to the border country one hundred years later. The vision widens to chart a contemplative orientation between the desert as a place of refuge and beauty, and the desert, in Thomas Merton's words, as the country of madness. The elegiac spirit that runs through the collection is the same one that searches for tenors of human connection and solidarity. Children play a central role in this project. Traveling far beyond the southwest, from Olaszfalu, Hungary, to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, histories and communities are experienced as interspersing realities. Poems seek to be responsive to and responsible for memory in its many iterations, including the birth of language itself, so that the meaning of home ground can be revealed. In this way, the desert is both a geographic place as well as an interior, more expansive, and difficult to define terrain, a literal and figurative desert.‘Reading a Penelope Fitzgerald novel is like being taken for a ride in a peculiar kind of carEverything is of top quality – the engine, the coachwork and the interior all fill you with confidence. Then, after a mile or so, someone throws the steering-wheel out of the window.’ Sebastian Faulks
‘Wise and ironic, funny and humane, Fitzgerald is a wonderful, wonderful writer.’ David Nicholls
‘Of all the novelists of the last quarter-century, she has the most unarguable claim on greatness. [It has been] a career we, as readers, can only count ourselves lucky to have lived through.’ Philip Hensher, Spectator
‘One of the pleasures of reading Penelope Fitzgerald is the unpredictability of her intelligence, which never loses its quality, but springs constant surprises, and if you make the mistake of reading her fast because she is so readable, you will miss some of the best jokes. This is a very funny novel.’ The Times
‘Comic, and sometimes extraordinarily sad.’ A.S. Byatt, TLS
Penelope Fitzgerald was one of the most elegant and distinctive voices in British fiction. Three of her novels, The Bookshop, The Beginning of Spring and The Gate of Angels have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She won the Prize in 1979 for Offshore. Her last novel, The Blue Flower, was the most admired novel of 1995, chosen no fewer than nineteen times in the press as the ‘Book of the Year’. It won America’s National Book Critics’ Circle Award. She died in April 2000, at the age of eighty-three.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780006542544 |
| ISBN 10 | 0006542549 |
| Title | Human Voices |
| Author | Penelope Fitzgerald |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | HarperCollins Publishers |
| Year published | 1988-12-01 |
| Number of pages | 208 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |