How the Heart Will Endure

How Will the Heart Endure: Elizabeth Bowen and the Landscape of War views the Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) through the lens of war.  Winner of the Donald R. Murphy Prize, Jordan's book examines Bowen's novels, short stories, autobiographies, and essays in the context of the wars that defined her life: the Troubles, the Irish Civil War, World War One and World War Two.  The devastation of these wars defined the intensely personal vision of loss and betrayal conveyed in her fiction. How Will the Heart Endure is the first sustained study of Bowen as a creative writer in time of war.

Jordan's study combines historical, textual, and original archival research to provide a new reading both of Bowen's work and of the wartime publishing climate.  Her circle of friends included Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, John and Rosalind Lehmann, Cyril Connolly, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Stephen Spender, and Sean O'Faolain.   
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Photograph copyright Mary Kocol Photography

Cheap Grace

'We only get one shot,' Heather Jordan finds, in her poem memorializing photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson; and 'Cheap grace' is filled with her own quick takes, perceptions caught up from our fast-fleeting world; 'ice turning to water' at the shore line, 'air begin[nning] to lighten' after a week's rain, the 'skin' of shag-bark hickory 'peeling down the trunk,' a baby's arms 'raised up high once in startled reflex' at its christening--'now you/see it, now you don't,' Heather Jordan shows us, urging us to keep our eyes open for all such instances of grace. 

--Nathalie F. Anderson, Professor of English Literature and Director of the Program in Creative Writing, Swarthmore College. 

                   Lottery Ticket
Heather Corbally Bryant’s latest volume, Lottery Ticket, quietly ponders the many risks inherent in living and loving, balancing love and loss in poems that build slowly and powerfully, pulling us in with a steady, calm voice. Her deceptively simple style, reminiscent of such American poets as Edward Taylor and Emily Dickinson, draws deeply on the metaphysical tradition. This is a philosophical, meditative poetry, rich in irony, wit, and paradox, as the book’s title poem aptly demonstrates.  There we encounter an elderly woman, moving alone in “Late afternoon November gloom,” to trade in her dollars on a vain hope: 

One by one, she scratches each
Digit with the rounded edges of
A shiny nickel, eyebrows knitted
And knotted, she turns up a loser
Five times over.

Bryant ends the poem on a  ruefully ironic note: “who was to think / that she would be so lucky?” (39).

--Caroline Collins, Assistant Professor of Humanities, Andrew College






















 
@Rob Houghton