“Tattoos are all about mortality and getting old,” she says. “They are all about who you are.” The writer, naturalist, poet and illustrator, who turns 50 this year, insists it has nothing to do with a midlife crisis: “I’ve had loads of those already.” Instead, it goes back to her earliest days and the death of her twin brother soon after he was born. “It has taken me many years to realise that was a very important loss for me.”
“It’s hard to think of a better example than the Hungarian Pastry Shop of what makes one love a city, a neighborhood, a place,” says the poet and writer Rachel Hadas. “That ‘what’ is hard to define but easy to recognize and to remember. It’s a combination: the location and the people, the coffee and the weather, the croissants and the conversations.”
Instead of anything didactic, Johnson and her blurring, expansive language merge the figurative and the literal, leaving us with a series of searing impressions of the girls and their connection, all of them vivid, distinct, and fleeting.
The poem’s accounts of nature and memory are illuminated by repeated images of light and colour. From this material Prior crafts lovely, elegant verse.
The past never stays where you left it
flying off to perch on some other branch
migrating to a different nest