Lucy Beckett

Wallace Stevens, who died in 1955, was one of the most original, prolific, serious, and rewarding of twentieth-century American poets. This is a detailed critical study of his poetry, identifying its concerns, from the point of view of a convinced admirer. Lucy Beckett presents Sevens as a contemplative poet, engaged on a long enquiry into the nature of the relationship between the creative imagination and the world it illuminates and recreates. Steven's achievement is seen as one of the great monuments in English of the endeavour to find and sustain a connection between poetry and belief.

Eight months in the life of Clare Wilson, a widow in her late seventies living alone in a comfortable South Kensington flat which has been her home for decades. As she struggles to make sense of post-Brexit Britain in a world that has left her behind and that seems full of unhappiness and anxiety, her quiet life is upset first by an unexpected death and then by Covid 19 and its consequences for her and for those she loves. In the Grieving of her Days is a contemporaneous 'state-of-the-nation' novel, and also a particularly accomplished work. Lucy Beckett's precise and gentle style will please her admirers; this most contained story reminds me of a fifteenth-century Flemish painting with precise domestic details, and glimpses of Libya and Assam in the distance. The passages describing the central character at Mass and at prayer, and her thoughts about her faith, are beautifully written and most moving.

The Year of Thamar's Book is set in the months from the spring of 2015 to the summer of 2016. An elderly recluse living in a quiet village in Burgundy discovers he is not as alone in the world as he has for many years assumed. His grandson, well-educated but ignorant, comes to the village to help the old man make a book of the pile of chaotic manuscript that tells the story of a difficult, painful yet luminous life. As he writes, and listens, the young man learns a good deal, and begins to comprehend not only how French colonial history and the horrors of war in Algeria formed and hurt his grandfather, but also how their lasting consequences are still damaging his country and his own family. At the same time he begins to understand his grandfather's faith.

An octogenarian bookseller living alone in London has found a description of his father, as a young doctor in 1920s Breslau, in a story about Weimar Germany. Perhaps his own story might be worth telling? In 1945, as a sixteen-year-old boy rescued from the ruins of Europe, he arrives at a Yorkshire farmhouse. Working on the farm for two years in the strange atmosphere of rural England immediately after World War II, he learns to deal with his memories of what happened to him and to his family and to trust, up to a point, those around him in a foreign country. London in 1947 is stranger still. But he is lucky, as he has been since 1941, when marksmen tried to shoot him into a pit full of corpses in a Lithuanian forest. The year before, different executioners in a different forest further east had shot and killed his father. Those who faced the worst atrocities of World War II, which were inflicted on people in the "bloodlands" of eastern Poland and western Russia, knew that there was little to choose between the two mighty machines, Nazi and Soviet. How was it possible for the individual to survive the crushing wheels of ideology, terror, and mass murder with his integrity intact? The Leaves Are FallingI, a sequel to A Postcard from the Volcano but a stand-alone story, explores this question. "This novel is beautifully written and deeply felt. It is an unabashed roman philosophique et historique, an elucidation of and reflection upon the predicament of the Jewish community in Poland-Lithuania during World War II."--Piers Paul Read, Author, ALIVE