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Epdf ISBN 9781925336368
Epub ISBN 9781925336375
Each essay is based on a single theme and woven out of the same few elemental symbols of earth, and water, fire and blood, light and darkness.
What does art know that we do not? How does the image have such a hold on us all? Alongside the urge to grasp the world, to abstract and delve, is the urge to make our visions known, somehow to fix the moment in time in its fullness of meaning. In the essays, this hoard of moments takes the form of a mosaic, composed of myth, poetry and fable, of relics of the past, of explorations and illuminations and surface impressions. Set out like a commonplace book, they can be read in any sequence, or savoured for their detail.
Her two collections Milk and Home Time are included here with five uncollected stories and others which were part of A Body of Water.
Bell is still bound, by her son and by the past, to this family and its matriarch Kyria Sofia. The old warmth between the two women is quick to surface, but so too are old grievances and misunderstandings. Brimming with dreams and memories, the house reasserts its claim on Bell. As the family gathers for the Resurrection, she is fighting for her soul. Readers of Milk and Home Time will welcome the return of Bell to the fold of rural Greece with all its riches and austerities of culture and tradition.
In mourning for her husband lost at sea, Dagmar leaves the wintry landscapes of the north for the tranquillity of Swanhaven and a healing Australian summer. In the house where she spent her honeymoon twenty years before, she begins another journey, from grief to serenity and unexpected harvest. Suffused with exquisite aquatic imagery that reflects the currents in Dagmar's own moods, The Seal Woman charts the interplay of myth and language between the hemispheres.
Whether writing about being an Australian woman in love in Greece, or waiting at the airport for a small son, the author seems able to isolate moments of human experience with clarity.