Jonathan’s Reviews > Cloud and Ashes: Three Winter's Tales > Status Update

Something about Mary Butts and the presence of the mythic has sent me back here for another reread. God the sentences are just beautiful.

Here now she heard the brawling of the water in the winter becks, crawse, clapper-tongued; the creak of boughs. The year was old and raw and riotous, a malkin squatting in a ditch to piss. Rag naked in the wind and rain.

From the internet - "Gilman is a scholar of sixteenth and seventeenth century literature, trained in close reading at Cambridge University. She has an extraordinary ear for literary style: her earliest publications were parodies. In 2006 at a meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, a fragment of her Cloud & Ashes was definitively identified as the product of a minor Jacobean dramatist. "

From an interview with Greer: "There's a tough strand in the language, running back through Hopkins to the Gawain poet (a northerner, like Garner). A green and thorny tongue, a covert of birds. Quintessentially English, being pied. "Counter, original, spare, strange." Not pure, but insular. Of many branched and braiding roots: one stubborn flowering. And I admit, the devil's own thicket to hack through. "

Continues to both impress and perplex me.

Just stunning use of language.

Holy shit. This is spectacularly dense and well crafted. Some of the most complex and thematically rich writing I have read in a long time

He is met at a crossroads on a windy night, the moon in tatters and the mist unclothing stars, the way from Ask to Owlerdale: a man in black, whiteheaded, with a three-string fiddle in his pack. Or in a corner of an ale house, querulous among the cups, untallied; somehow never there for the reckoning, though you, or Hodge, or any traveller has drunk the night with him.