Felicity Plunkett

Biographies juxtapose competing views of particular events, moments and aspects of Plath’s life. Red Comet, over a thousand pages, takes in all the other Plath biographies before it. Scholarship is meant to work like this, as is legal precedent. Biography is like a party game where each person adds to a story, repeating and elaborating on what has come before.

‘This novel haunts crossing spaces, the liminal zones of libraries’ public privacies (laundering, humming, existential despair), hallways and elevators. And many of us are reading Weather in locked-down homes without much sense of what might happen next. Kazim Ali, writing about the magic of the poetic line, notes: “Something exists in the here and now with no dependence on before or after.” This is the space Offill observes, collecting shards and slivers of questioning.’

Form can figure as a room you enter or you don’t, usually a very small room, if not the smallest, imagined as staid and stultifying, or worse, suffocating.

In Li’s, Friedmann’s and Febos’ work, the polyvocal I draws together facets of self and subjectivity, braiding them, while unbraiding simpler notions of a singular, truthful I. As reticence and disclosure speak together, or loss and hope, or the I and we of postmemory and of empathy, form becomes capacious. Like Febos’ ‘Abandon Me’, each of these works proceeds piece by piece like a poem, stanza by stanza, assays that get where they do by breaking both linear narrative and certainty, and by reassembling the smashed pieces to see what light they might shed and what delight they might preface.

‘The vulnerable state of speaking ‘freely, copiously, and passionately’, as Nelson writes, demands the unsettling of anything fixed. The freedom to craft, from this unsettlement – from the tilt of failure and into whatever must fall, between what can and cannot hold, resisting a cookie-cutter naming that cuts away what might hover at the edges of existing words and forms – might be where the wounding and suturing enacted formally in each of these works leads to wildness. Nelson says that she writes: ‘Because I do not yet understand the relationship between writing and happiness, or writing and holding’. Perhaps none of us does. Perhaps form – including literary form and the forms of happiness – is always provisional and shifting. Perhaps it is the state of being ‘feral with vulnerability’ that might produce new ways, new understandings of something we think of as truth.’

In Report from the Interior, Auster describes the impact of his Jewishness on his remembering and subjectivity. He stands apart from the typical American boy he has hitherto imagined himself to be. His younger self does not attempt to resist this separateness. He refuses to blend in with the assumed and compulsory Christianity of his education.

In the Memorial Room is both literally and figuratively posthumous. It centres around themes of creativity, being a writer, and a writer’s posthumous memorialisation. Frame wrote the novel in 1973, but did not allow its publication during her lifetime.

Belinda Castles Hannah and Emil is prefaced by the story of Flora, a newly-pregnant Sydneysider. Flora receives a parcel containing a bequest…

Since I started work on this review, I’ve resisted turning it into an essay about the kindness movement. Felicity Plunkett’s poetry deserves our full attention. But the book is called A Kinder Sea, and as I’ve been reading and re-reading these poems, I’ve found I can’t stop thinking about kindness, or rather, what I have begun to call, in my head, the problem of kindness.