Duffy once said: “A poem can say in so few words something so precious and startling that it almost enters us.” Mean Time entered me—the collection as a whole, but especially the title poem. Walking home late at night from rehearsals, I told the darkening sky that “The clocks slid back an hour/and stole light from my life.” After an argument with the trumpet player, I cried on the bus and whispered to myself: “I felt my heart gnaw at all our mistakes.” And when he left to work as a musician on a cruise ship for six months, I was nothing if not dramatic, writing over and over in my notebook: “These are the shortened days/and the endless nights.”
In 2002, halfway through my music degree, the local Borders bookshop began to stock Selima Hill. Up to this point, their poetry shelves included mostly canonical texts, alongside works by a few contemporary authors—Duffy, Billy Collins, and Charles Bukowski. I wasn’t part of any poetry groups, and didn’t know anyone else who even read poetry, so it was a coincidence that the cover of Portrait of My Lover as a Horse caught my eye—bright orange, with a picture of a horse standing in what looked like a rather grand living room. Most importantly, it had the word lover. I’d led a sheltered enough life for that to feel radical, thrilling—this word on the cover of a book, and a book by a woman, at that.
We’ve come a long way from the image of a tuxedoed James Bond sipping his shaken-not-stirred martini in Casino Royale. Real-life players are instead reaching for Red Bull to power through 10 straight hours of play amid the constant clinking of poker chips. On the windowless casino floor, they don sunglasses to shield any glimpse of their eyes that could give away their position to other players and wear noise-canceling headphones to silence everything but the calculations running in their heads.
They are trying to play, albeit imperfectly, a strategy computer algorithms have revealed as game theory optimal, what players call GTO: the mathematically proven way to become unexploitable to other players while maximizing winnings. How closely players can hew to GTO can often determine their success, especially since the competition has never been fiercer: Anyone can now study GTO with an app on their phone.
Each night, as the line that separates day from night sweeps across the face of the ocean, a vast wave of life rises from the ocean’s depths behind it. Made up of an astonishing diversity of animals—myriad species of minute zooplankton, jellyfish and krill, savage squid and a confusion of fish species ranging from lanternfish to viperfish and eels, as well as stranger creatures such as translucent larvaceans and snotlike salps—this world-spanning tide travels surfaceward to feed in the safety of the dark, before retreating to the depths again at dawn.
Known as the diel vertical migration, this nightly cycle is the single largest movement of life on Earth, with some estimates suggesting the biomass of the animals that make the journey may total 10 billion tons or more. So dense is this cloud of bodies, in fact, that in World War II, scientists working on early sonar were perplexed by readings showing a phantom sea floor that rose and fell at dusk and dawn. Now dubbed the deep scattering layer, this phenomenon unsettled many commanders, and later gave rise to research into the possibility submarines might be able to disguise themselves within the obscuring fog.
“There is,” Nathan writes, “very little to say of joy.… It may be that’s what’s so special about it, that it’s nondescript, even banal.” Yet, even if we may not recognize or define joy until long after it has passed, The Future Was Color reveals that our pursuit of it is never inconsequential. In fact, you might say, it is the most important journey we can undertake.
The Orange Room is a reminder that abusive relationships don’t have to involve smashed glasses or black eyes. The deliberate diminishing of a partner, the dimming of their inner light, is something so many of us have either experienced or witnessed in a friend – and Price reveals it, here, with tender care and quietly devastating accuracy.
This isn’t a ghost story, per se, but the characters dig up and deal with the ghosts of their past. It’s also much more than a typical summer beach novel. It’s sad, and hopeful, and an overall terrific read.
This second collection is timely in a different way. It is loosely themed around those thinkers whose primary focus was imagining different kinds of improvements to the politics and the societies in which they lived; they each attend, in different ways, to the question, Runciman says, of “wanting to know why we find ourselves in the situation we do and how we could achieve something better”. It would be a useful volume to place at the bedsides of Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves.