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These essays, stories and fragments are about writing. They explore the dilemmas of living as a writer, the subtleties and inspirations of reading as a writer, and the contradictions created when a writer tries to teach others how it is done.
Secrets and spies, love and tragedy in Stasi East Germany. Brandenburg 1993: The Berlin Wall is down, the country is reunified and thirty-year-old school teacher Michael Ritter feels his life is falling apart. His wife has thrown him out, his new West German headmaster has fired him for being a socialist, former Party member and he is still clinging on to the wreckage of the state that shaped him. Feeling angry and lost, Michael heads home to care for his terminally ill mother. Before she dies, she urges him to seek out an evangelical priest, Pastor Bruck, who is the only one who knows the truth about his father. When Michael eventually tracks him down, he is taken on a journey of dark discoveries, one which will shatter his foundations, but ultimately bring him hope to rebuild them.
"This book reflects on the implications of recent neuroscience findings, evolutionary theory, experimental psychology and integrational linguistics for ideas and metaphors by which we might understand afresh the practice of creativity." --introd.
Santiago, 1973: Rosa is a happy girl, living a privileged life among the ruling elite. But when violence erupts with the Pinochet coup, her socialist parents are the first to be taken. Forced to flee across the Andes, she finds herself rescued by a Stasi spy, and escapes behind the Iron Curtain to Germany.
In the kaleidoscope that is Lionel Abrahams, we find poet and wit, lover and critic, a voice speaking to us - especially to poets - with an inspirational clarity.
Kevin Brophy spent his formative years in the Married Quarters of the army barracks on the edge of Galway, on Ireland's west coast, and Walking the Line is his moving account of boyhood in a soldier's world. Strangely, in a landscape dominated by men in uniform, the household at Number 2 in the Married Quarters revolves around Mammy, the gentle mother who heals all boyhood aches from wounded knees to wounded pride, and in many respects this book is a sustained lyrical narrative of the intense relationship between boy and mother. Neither cutely naive nor wise beyond his years, the young Kevin's observations on family and barracks, on town and school are by turns humorous and poignant, but spi...
Kevin Brophy begins this selection of his poetry, tracing back to the early 1980s, with a book-length section of new poems, the fruit of the past five years of writing. His five previous poetry volumes are all represented with substantial selections - reviewed widely, those books are now out of print. The new work comes from a poet who has long made rich, intimate, lyrical and disturbing poetry about Melbourne's inner-northern urban streets and backyards, about memory and family, and more lately about the seemingly natural surrealism of the mind. The domain is home to psychology, and perhaps philosophy. But the tracking of thought in Brophy's poems is continually grounded in the senses, and he is alert to the uniqueness of ordinary human occasions. He is a master of tonality and nuance.
Secrets and spies, love and tragedy in Stasi East Germany. Brandenburg 1993: The Berlin Wall is down, the country is reunified and thirty-year-old school teacher Michael Ritter feels his life is falling apart. His wife has thrown him out, his new West German headmaster has fired him for being a socialist, former Party member and he is still clinging on to the wreckage of the state that shaped him. Disenfranchised and disenchanted, Michael heads home to care for his terminally ill mother. Before she dies, she urges him to seek out an evangelical priest, Pastor Bruck, who is the only one who knows the truth about his father. When Michael eventually tracks him down, he is taken on a journey of dark discoveries, one which will shatter his foundations, but ultimately bring him hope to rebuild them.