This novel tells the tale of the rumors of war that circulated in Moon's Ottery, an East Devon village, during the time of the armada. The life of the community is unsettled by the threat of invasion and arrival of a mysterious Spanish sailor. Between Rosalind, a skeptical and shrewd observer, and Henry Suckbitch, a man with intriguing connections beyond the Ottery world, the drama of a family at the moment of change and a nation at a point of...
In her first book since Friend of Heraclitus (1993, Poetry Book Society Choice) Patricia Beer confronts some harsh realities: serious illness, the deaths of friends, the encroachments of age. She remembers family with a surreal clarity (`Ballad of the Underpass' is in equal degrees terrifying and affirmative). She reads characters from Shakespeare into life. And other poets, too: Wilfred Owen writes to his `Dearest of Mothers' full of optimism...
