Books purchased in Hodges Figgis in Dublin, where I felt I might faint, perhaps due to a hangover, perhaps due to the overwhelming array of books here (for instance, a whole floor devoted to Fiction):

—Dream Work, Mary Oliver
—Coventry, Rachel Cusk
—Blood Feast, Malika Moustadraf
—Family and Borghesia, Natalia Ginzburg
—There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour’s Baby, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
—Justine, Lawrence Durrell
—Cosmicomics, Italo Calvino

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Sometimes, when I haven’t written in a long time, it feels as if I have been asea for years. As if I have been in a remote country, even to myself; when I start writing, I start to realise how far away it was, and how foreign my own self is, to me, to others.

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"I wanted/ the past to go away, I wanted/ to leave it, like another country; I wanted/ my life to close, and open/ like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song/ where it falls/ down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;/ I wanted to know,/ whoever I was, I was/ alive/ for a little while.”—From “Dogfish”, Mary Oliver, Dream Work




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