Sarah Wood (9)

This is a set of four short stories, the beholder, the poet, the commission and the wound, that are aiming to blend and meld fiction, myth, biography and poetry, with very strong influences from Virginia Woolf.

The first, the beholder is about a woman who visits a doctor about something growing from her collarbone, and how it becomes part of her. The poet is a fictionalised biography of the poet Olive Fraser, and the commission is a similar exercise on Helena Shire. It finishes with the wound, and the changing of a man from one entitiy to another.

In the end I thought that this was ok, it is beautifully written, and Smith has a mastery and control of language that make some of the passages soar. But I couldn't really get a long with it. The Illustrations and photography by Sarah Wood are good though, and even though this is only a small part of the book, I thought that the attention to detail by the publishers was excellent, from the font to the binding and layout of the book.
… (meer)

This collaboration by Ali Smith and her partner Sarah Wood is a largely a celebration of the Scottish critic Helena Mennie Shire (1912-1991), whom they were friendly with when she was a fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge, and of the poet Olive Fraser, whose work Shire rescued from oblivion when she published an edition of her collected poems as The wrong music in 1989. The book, published by the Suffolk-based small press, Full Circle Editions, contains four stories, separated by illustrations, and it's obviously a carefully designed object, intended to be enjoyed visually as much as read.

I've read the first two stories before elsewhere (possibly in Public Library and other stories?), but that didn't matter - "The beholder" is the one where an odd growth on the narrator's chest turns out to be a Lycidas rose bush, and "The poet" is an account of Olive Fraser's rather unfortunate life, with the usual Smith caveat that you know that this is a work of fiction about a real person, i.e. "true" but not necessarily "correct". In "The commission" we are introduced to Mrs Shire in a similar sort of way, with Smith establishing parallels between the paths she, Fraser and Shire all followed from the north of Scotland to Scottish universities and Cambridge, and bouncing those similarities off the rather different trajectories of Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath (amongst others...). And finally, "The wound" is a very short piece inspired by the Scottish renaissance poetry that was Shire's special interest for much of her life.

Light, glowing, as hard to pin down as the aurora photographs used in some of Wood's pictures, as thought-provoking as Smith always is - a lovely little book.… (meer)

This slim volume of four stories - two fiction, two biographical/autobiographical - is not the usual fare of Smith's writing. The two short stories are rather mythical. The two other stories rather biographical.

However, the book holds some interest for me as the stories about Olive Fraser and Smith's meeting with Fraser's friend and biographer Helena Mennie Shire, and of course Smith's own story, reference a lot of places that are quite close to me.

Aberdeen University is literally a ten minute walk away. Cornhill Hospital, where Olive Fraser was a patient for a period of time, is a place I pass by several times a week. Inverness and Nairn are both in easy reach.

And, yet, there is more that moves me about the stories than just passing familiarity with the locations. I was intrigued, too, by Fraser's poetry and how it reflected her state of mind - or rather her different states of mind. The treatment for a mis-diagnosed mental condition she received strongly reminded me of a favourite author of mine who suffered the fatal consequences of a similar mis-diagnosis only some thirty-odd years earlier.

The friendship between the two writers, Fraser and Shire, would play a part in motivating Smith to pursue her own writing.

It is maybe in this context, too, that the last of the four stories - The Wound - was conceived. Like all of Smith's works, Shire is a book about the power of words and language and art. The power to transform. And just as Helena Shire had dedicated her working life to investigate and uncover medieval and renaissance Scots text which would transform the understanding and context of the known interpretation of text from that era, so Smith's story tells of a transformation of man by a self-inflicted admission of vulnerability.

Anyway, I had not heard of either Olive Fraser or Helena Shire, but now all I really want to do is to browse the archives at Aberdeen University library and find out more about them.… (meer)