Judith Kerr Books

 

Mog and Barnaby – this is a charming caper, an enjoyable lesson that some friends are best seen in short doses, even if you do love them…

Twinkles, Arthur, and Puss – one cat with 3 identities and 3 homes – which their 3 “owners” only discover when she goes missing :-)

Mog and the V.E.T – sharing a story that any one that has taken a cat to the V.E.T will be familiar with – but interesting how often dreams are part of Kerr’s stories – Mog has a very active dream life.

Katink’s Tail – one of the rich things about Kerr’s stories is the inclusions of older people as active characters, and in this one we are left wondering if the night time adventure was a dream, or was it real?

My Henry – here again it is an older person that is the centre of the story, and there is a validation of her live of imagination, that she goes on adventures in her mind with her departed husband – reminding us not to just see someone sitting in a chair – there can be some much more going on within.

Frequencies of God – walking through Advent with RS Thomas by Carys Walsh

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There is always a danger with collection of reflections on poems that in “explaining” them (like jokes) you trample on their power – thankfully Carys Walsh avoids that providing reflections that weave some of the context in which Thomas was writing particular poems with an expansive meditation that draw out the richness of your encounter with Thomas’ words.

R.S. Thomas is not a poet of joy – and the darkness that pervades many (most?) of his poems sits well with the mood of Advent, it is a people that have walked in darkness that will see the great light. It was also the right mood for Advent 2020, with the impacts of COVID stripping away much of our usual festivity.

While reflecting on the poem Llananno Walsh writes that a place of pilgrimage is “both destination and punctuation on a longer journey. A stopping point, a junction, and a meeting place: huddled between ancient and modern… Here is a still point where time and eternity meet in a place forever giving birth to God’s presence.”

Shield by Lyndon Davies, Illustration by Penny Hallas

  Out of print, but buy it from abebooks.co.uk 

The pairing of images and poems is successful – both dark and complex – layering of meanings somewhat disorienting.

The Train was on Time by Heinrich Böll

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The journey of Private Andreas, heading back toward the Eastern Front with his conviction that he is in the final days, and then hours, of his life takes you into a world become small – there is a closing in. Facing death and yet trapped in the mundane. There is an inherent comment of the futility of war.

There is an intensity to his relationships – the intimacy of the friendship with priest Paul he has left behind, the two soldiers he befriends on the train, and Olina he meets in the brothel – contrasting and yet bound together by his introspection.

It is a short but dense book – in terms of word count you could probably have got through it in an evening, but I found the emotional intensity such that I needed to space it out over a number of days, probably, accidental, reading it in “real time”.

To have a story of an ordinary German soldier is unusual for us.

The Forward Book of Poetry 2016

 Out of print, but buy it from abebooks.co.uk 

The forewords of these books are often insightful – in this one AL Kennedy reflects on how we value art, and poetry, in particular – which reading towards the end of 2020 amidst the challenges of COVID had a new resonance. “The arts in the UK seem always to be apologising for themselves, having to remind funders, publishers, politicians. Media outlets and all the complicated machinery of commercial reproduction that they still have value...”

The poems I tagged from this collection were:

Kim Moore – In That Year

Damain Walford Davies – Corpus

Inua Ellams – Shame is the Cape I wear – which is especially powerful and unsettling

Marilyn Hacker – Pantoum in Wartime

Arundhathi Subramaniam – My Friends

At Home in Advent by Gordon Giles

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Unfortunately I didn’t connect with this book.

In the introduction he reflects a little on how COVID would be creating a different Advent yet the reflections, other than the odd mention, didn’t really seem to respond to the experience of being “at Home” which is meant to be its organising theme.

Each day we have a reasonable chunk of scripture but in most cases the reflection that follow makes no discernable link to that passage – I was often left puzzled about why the two had been paired together.

There is also a real puritanical kill-joy spirit to many of the reflections, many of our festive traditions are no particular link to the Christian message of Christmas, and certainly their expression within the hyper-commercialisation of the season is generally unhealthy. But there can be much joy to be had, in the charm of decorations, in good food, and in friendship shared – and in a time such as this such simple pleasures should be enjoyed when we can not anathematised.

And finally, during a reflection on the Magi he notes that some believe them to have been Zoroastrain – a religion that he describes as “now almost completely defunct” - Wikipedia suggests there maybe around 120,000 Zoroastrains today, a very small number on the Global scale, but to deem them “defunct” seems, at best, an ill-chosen turn of phrase.

The Art of Advent by Jane Williams

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This is clearly a follow up to the success of The Art of Lent, and therefore one naturally begins with a compare and contrast. Where Sister Wendy’s reflections were a single page Jane Williams gives three, and all the images this time are of explicitly Christian subjects. But these differences are not a detriment – there might be more words but the reflections are sharp and focused and the range of artistic styles is still broad. The success is that you are caused to stop and ponder on the image, layers of meaning are opened up, in the rush of Advent a point of stillness is available.