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Caroline Smailes published her first novel In Search of Adam in 2007 to wide critical acclaim. Exploring themes of sexual abuse and self-harm, the book prompted many people to contact her to tell her of their own experiences.

Smailes decided to find a way to give something back to those whose lives have been touched by abuse and has written a novella, to be published as an ebook, asking only for donations to the charity One in Four in return. The charity offers support for people who have experienced sexual abuse and sexual violence. As a small organisation it desperately needs funds to continue its work. The novella is called Disraeli Avenue after the street in which In Search of Adam is set, and is a collection of short insights into the lives of the people living there.

Caroline’s publisher, The Friday Project is in full support. MD and Publishing Director Clare Christian said “This is a fantastic idea which will raise money for a very important cause and which will give fans of Caroline’s writing much pleasure at the same time.”

The Disraeli Avenue eBook will be available mid-February 2008 and can be downloaded from The Friday Project or from Caroline Smailes’s own website. Here is the link to the charity One In Four again.

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Caroline Smailes was born in Newcastle in 1973. She moved to the North West to study English Literature at Liverpool University before going on to specialise in Linguistics. A chance remark on a daytime chat show caused Caroline to reconsider her life. She enrolled on an MA in Creative Writing in September 2005 and began to write her first novel, In Search of Adam, which was published by The Friday Project in 2007. Her second novel, Black Boxes, will be published in July 2008.

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Jane Davis has been in touch to report that the Get into Reading project will be featured on BBC Radio Four’s Woman’s Hour on Tuesday 29 January. You can find details of the programme here, including a ‘listen again’ link, which is good for a week. The programme was recorded in Wirral and Liverpool and features our ‘reader in residence’ with Mersey Care Trust.

Find out more about The Reader and its events and reading projects here.

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I spent most of Sunday riding on steam trains at the East Lancs Railway. There is something very appealing about the size and elemental power of mainline steam locomotives. They harness fire and water in ways that would have impressed Milton or Blake. Railway posters from the 1930s take pride in the scale, speed, and modernity of the venture. The famous ’summer comes soonest’ poster for Southern Railway, showing a small boy looking up at the driver of a huge engine, was parodied "with apologies" by LNER, using an even smaller child and an engine with even larger wheels. These things were a status symbol then and in steam, 70-odd year-old museum pieces that they are, they are still glorious.

But while they can be beautiful and awe inspiring trains are also suggestive of loss and tragedy: the lovers parted on the platform, the cattle trucks heading for Dachau or Auschwitz, the soldiers off to war. Perhaps more than anywhere off a battlefield, the railway platform is where soft humanity and hard modernity meet. This poem by Wilfred Owen captures that idea of machines in service to humanity’s causes and the  fatal pact we sign with them: "Then, unmoved, signals nodded, and a lamp / Winked to the guard":

The Send-off

Down the close, darkening lanes they sang their way
To the siding-shed,
And lined the train with faces grimly gay.

Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray
As men’s are, dead.

Dull porters watched them, and a casual tramp
Stood staring hard,
Sorry to miss them from the upland camp.
Then, unmoved, signals nodded, and a lamp
Winked to the guard.

So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went.
They were not ours:
We never heard to which front these were sent.

Nor there if they yet mock what women meant
Who gave them flowers.

Shall they return to beatings of great bells
In wild trainloads?
A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,
May creep back, silent, to still village wells
Up half-known roads.

by Wilfred Owen

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The New Yorker has a brief story about Art Garfunkel (What, you need a Wikipedia link to work out who I mean?) who has been recording and making notes on his voracious reading habit since the late 1960s, beginning with Rousseau’s Confessions (oh, go on then) and concluding, for now, in 2007 with book number 1023, Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons, which incidentally was made into a rather good film. The Garfunkel Library is right here. From the article:

Candidates for political office, and the reporters who cover them, like to believe that a reading list reveals a great deal. In recent years, the cherished-book list has become as compulsory a component of the Presidential campaign as a church affiliation or a health-care plan. Hillary Clinton named “Little Women” and “The Poisonwood Bible.” Mike Huckabee: the Bible and “Mere Christianity.” Barack Obama: “Song of Solomon” and “Moby-Dick.” John McCain: “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” When mishandled, the book thing can lead to grief, as when Mitt Romney cited “Battlefield Earth,” by L. Ron Hubbard, or when John Edwards, four years ago, went with I. F. Stone’s “The Trial of Socrates,” which earned him the skunk eye from Robert Novak. (“Did [Edwards] know of evidence that Stone received secret payments from the Kremlin?”)

Then there is Art Garfunkel, who is not running for President but who has nonetheless provided the world with a list …

Here’s the link to the New Yorker piece again.

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It’s been a difficult week for me so far, trying to finish off a book and start teaching again, with all that entails. On top of that Internet exile beckons while our house wiring is sorted out, but here are a few of my thoughts on the last few days.

It can hardly have escaped anyone’s notice that A.L. Kennedy’s book Day has won the Costa (formerly Whitbread) Prize. Praise for the novel has been effusive, but dissenting voices made themselves heard in the run-up to the judging.

Meanwhile Slate has been worrying about Vladimir Nabokov and his request that his final work be burned. Will his son do it? Nobody knows.

Ali Karim, in January Magazine has a feature on Cormac McCarthy and the arrival in the UK of a writer whose work has been lifted from (relative) obscurity by the Coen brothers’ film, No Country For Old Men. Karim does a great job of pulling the key articles together.

And for the book paraphernalia fetishists among you I would like to bring to your attention an entire blog dedicated to bookshelves. Is this a dream come true?

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We are celebrating National Rabbit Week here at The Reader and in honour of the occasion our featured poem this morning is Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Milestone by the Rabbit Burrow’, which is actually written from the point of view of a rabbit. Without wishing to disparage the whole tribe of lagomorpha, rabbits have simple worries. Still, as long as gin is allowed, who wouldn’t want to live ‘where no gins are’?

The Milestone by the Rabbit-Burrow

(On Yell’Ham Hill)

In my loamy nook
As I dig my hole
I observe men look
At a stone, and sigh
As they pass it by
To some far goal.

Something it says
To their glancing eyes
That must distress
The frail and lame,
And the strong of frame
Gladden or surprise.

Do signs on its face
Declare how far
Feet have to trace
Before they gain
Some blest champaign
Where no gins are?

–By Thomas Hardy

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Angela Macmillan ponders the under-representation of rabbits in grown-up literature.

Eight thirty this morning found me at the vet’s with a frantic dog who was desperately trying to be somewhere else. During a brief lull in between his barking and tugging I saw a notice on the wall announcing that next week is, believe it or not, National Rabbit Week. Later, after the dog and I had had our shots–he of anti inflammatory stuff and me espresso–I started to think about rabbits in literature.

Rabbits have done what rabbits do best all over children’s literature. There are dozens of them: Peter Rabbit, Benjamin Bunny, Rabbit ( plus friends and relations), Miffy, Velveteen Rabbit, Brer Rabbit and so on. They appear fairly frequently in crossover literature too: Bigwig, Hazel and of course the White Rabbit. But apart from an excellent, if grim, short story called ‘The Little Pet’ by Dan Jacobson, I just can’t think of an adult book featuring rabbits. Dogs, cats, horses by the score but adult literature, as far as I know, is a rabbit free zone. Surely there is at least one rabbit reference somewhere in Shakespeare?

There is John Updike’s Rabbit of course, but that is cheating.  So what about poetical rabbits?  I am drawing a bunny blank here as well. I can only come up with Alan Brownjohn’s ‘Going to See the Rabbit’ which is really a poem for children but has an adult theme. And I think there is something by D.H. Lawrence, but it is not in any of my anthologies.

The dog is much better and fast asleep beside me dreaming, no doubt, of racing up Watership Down so I leave you to ponder with this quotation from John Steinbeck no less:
‘Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them and pretty soon you have a dozen’.

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By Angela Macmillan

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The final sections of the Earth Shattering, ‘Forces of Nature’ and ‘Natural Disasters’, combine poems that show the effects of global warming, climate change and question the accuracy of the expression ‘natural disaster’. The anthology ends, after covering man-made environmental disasters and so-called ‘acts of God’, with “planetary catastrophe and Eco-Armageddon.” However, this is not meant as a pessimistic conclusion but a reminder to us all, that as the world’s politicians and multi-national corporations arrange our reckless rush towards Eco-Armageddon, poetry is not a hopeless gesture but that in its detail, the force of each poem effects each reader’s determination for change and adds a voice to the collective call.

The last poem to feature from this anthology is Helen Dunmore’s Ice coming. A poet, novelist, short-story and children’s writer, Helen Dunmore won the Orange Prize for fiction in 1996. She has written abundantly and successfully: in The Raw Garden she questions our notions of what’s really ‘natural’, the impact of human intervention on the landscape and genetic engineering; exploring our relationships with animals and our own animal nature in Bestiary;  in her latest collection, Glad of These Times, her poems “capture the fleetingness of life, its sweetness and intensity, the short time we have on earth and the pleasures of the earth, with death as the frame which sharpens everything and gives it shape.”

Ice coming
(after Doris Lessing)

First, the retreat of the bees
lifting, heavy with the final
pollen of gorse and garden,
lugging the weight of it, like coal sacks
heaped on lorry-backs
in the ice-cream clamour of August.

The retreat of bees, lifting
all at once from city gardens -
suddenly the roses are scentless
as cold probes like a tongue,
crawling through the warm crevices
of Kew and Stepney. The ice comes
slowly, slowly, not to frighten anyone.

Not to frighten anyone. But the Snowdon
valleys are muffled with avalanche,
the Thames freezes, the Promenade des Anglais
clinks with a thousand icicles, where palms
died in a night, and the sea
of Greece stares back like stone
at the ice-Gorgon, white as a sheet.

Ice squeaks and whines. Snow slams
like a door miles off, exploding a forest
to shards and matchsticks. The glacier
is strangest, grey as an elephant,
too big to be heard. Big-foot, Gorgon -
a little mythology
rustles before it is stilled.

So it goes. Ivy, mahonia, viburnum
lift their fossilised flowers
under six feet of ice, for the bees
that are gone. As for being human
it worked once, but for now
and the forseeable future
the conditions are wrong.

Helen Dunmore, 2007

(This poem is reproduced with permission from Earth Shattering (2007, Bloodaxe Books), edited by Neil Astley.)

Back when this blog was new we featured Pepys’s diary, a blog using Pepys’s diary entries as its daily posts. Since then several similar blogs have sprung up, including the excellent WW1: Experiences of an English Soldier, consisting of letters from a soldier in the first World War. Then earlier this week (via Dovegreyreader) I came across Journal to  Stella, a blog based on the letters of Jonathan Swift to a woman called Esther Johnson. The thought I have when reading sites like these is something like "So this is what the Internet is for."Here’s what the site has to say about the letters:

When Jonathan Swift began writing the series of letter-diaries now known as the Journal to Stella on 2 September 1710, he was a forty-three-year-old Irish country parson, and little more than that. Of the great Irish literary late-starters, even Samuel Becket (forty-nine when Waiting for Godot was staged in London) was successful slightly sooner. In fact Swift had to wait until the publication of Gulliver’s Travels (1727) in his sixtieth year before he won real literary fame. The woman for whom Swift wrote the Journal to Stella, Esther Johnson, died shortly after Gulliver appeared, and probably never knew the scale of its triumph.

Here’s the link again.

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Today’s Earth Shattering poem comes from the section ‘The Great Web’, which takes its title from Denise Levertov’s Web (included in this anthology). Levertov’s ’great web’ that ‘moves through and connects all people and things, both human and inhuman’ is the metaphor that unites all the poems in this section,  evoking humanity’s interpendence and oneness with nature. The rhythym of daily life and the cyclical processes of nature are celebrated by some poets for their strength whereas others recognise lost or disappearing connections.

Frances Horovitz (1938-83) was an English poet, whose perception of the natural world that surrounds her and evocation of human relationships, has led to a remarkable “clarity, precision and attentiveness” in her poetry. This poem considers the amalgamation of spirits of the human and natural world, almost Buddhist or Taoist in its message. Living in the Cotswolds, Cumbria and the Welsh Marches, many of her poems were inspired by remote landscapes, which are revealed through “perfect rhythym and great delicacy”.

Rain – Birdoswald

I stand under a leafless tree
more still, in this mouse-pattering
thrum of rain,
thean cattle shifting in the field.
It is more dark than light.
A Chinese painter’s brush of deepening grey
moves in a subtle tide.

The beasts are darker islands now.
Wet-stained and silvered by the rain
they suffer night,
marooned as still as stone or tree.
We sense each other’s quiet.

Almost, death could come
inevitable, unstrange
as is this dusk and rain,
and I should be no more
myself, than raindrops
glimmering in last light
on black ash buds

or night beasts in a winter field.

Frances Horovitz, 1980

(This poem is reproduced with permission from Earth Shattering (2007, Bloodaxe Books), edited by Neil Astley.)