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WORK TITLE: Rainsongs
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PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1948
WEBSITE: http://www.suehubbard.com/
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NATIONALITY: British
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RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1948; has children.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, art critic, educator, and broadcaster. Contributor radio shows, including Nightwaves, Poetry Please, Kaleidoscope, Verb, and Woman’s Hour.
AWARDS:London Writers’ Award (two). Grants from organizations, including the Arts Council and British Film Institute.
WRITINGS
Author of introductions of books, including Olja Ivanjicki: Painting the Future. Contributor to publications, including the London Guardian, London Times, New York Arts, New Statesman, London Independent, and Time Out.
SIDELIGHTS
Susan Hubbard is a British writer, art critic, broadcaster, and educator. She has written articles that have appeared in publications, including the London Guardian, London Times, New York Arts, New Statesman, London Independent, and Time Out.
In 1994, Hubbard released her first book, Everything Begins with the Skin, a collection of poems about motherhood and women’s experiences. A Publishers Weekly contributor described Everything Begins with the Skin as “a well-crafted collection that … mines the unique riches of everyday experience.”
Rothko’s Red: And Other Stories is a 2008 collection by Hubbard. Among the characters in the stories are an unfaithful academic, a widow, and a divorcee. A critic in the New Statesman suggested: “With Hubbard’s background in art criticism and poetry, it is not surprising that her writing is painterly and vivid.”
Hubbard offers a fictional retelling of the life of Paula Modersohn-Becker, an Expressionist painter, in Girl in White. A reviewer in the London Independent on Sunday remarked: “This is a disappointing mix of fact and fiction.” The same reviewer criticized Hubbard’s “rather limpid prose style.” Other assessments of the volume were more favorable. Jonathan Taylor, critic on the London Independent Online, commented: “The power of Hubbard’s novel for contemporary readers is in its distillation of dilemmas which, of course, are still pressing for women today.” Writing on the Quench website, Francis Smithson suggested: “Using knowledge she has gained from her study of Becker, as well as, admittedly, a little of her imagination Hubbard’s skill here is to literally bring Becker back to life.” Smithson added: “This is an incredibly nuanced and intense work.”
The Forgetting and Remembering of Air, another poetry collection, includes topics, such as art, artists, nature, and suicide. Ellen Bell, critic on the New Welsh Review website, asserted: “The Forgetting and Remembering of Air is a stunning piece of work—an achingly moving narrative of love for a child, parent, sibling, lover or icon. In these poems Hubbard is travelling through love and its possibilities of home, moving fast towards the acceptance of the disappointment, the ruin of it, like that great house of the cover.”
In Rainsongs, a novel, a widow named Martha travels to her late husband’s Irish town and interacts with the locals there. A Publishers Weekly writer commented: “Despite thin plotting, Hubbard’s ruminations on grief carry this novel and should appeal to fans of Kristin Hannah or Claire-Louise Bennett.” Leah Shaya, contributor to the London Magazine website, suggested: “The … self-awareness of Hubbard’s own writing as a mode of release lends it an especially powerful emotive quality. Her noted poetic style brings a unique rhythm to her prose, well suited to the romantic descriptions of the Irish countryside, but she is also a gifted storyteller.” Shaya added: “Hubbard’s book is about city and country, home and identity, love and loss, but it is in its traversal of the shaky balance between solitude and loneliness that it finds its unique voice, and champions the role of literature in an increasingly disconnected modern world.” Reviewing the book on the Irish Times Online, Martina Evans remarked: “There is a real sense of Kerry here, and Martha’s empathy with Irish people past and present permeates her solitary adventure. Her knowledge of Irish history and culture is impressive. Even when she uncharacteristically slips twice; using the word ‘crofters’ or anachronistically imagining the sixth-century monks packing soda bread for a journey, it doesn’t jar because we know we’re seeing everything through the eye of an outsider.” Comparing the book to the works of Virginia Woolf, London Guardian Online critic, Stevie Davies, asserted: “Woolfian echoes and quotations pulse through Rainsongs, haunting the reader with the ubiquity of mother love and longing.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
London Independent on Sunday, September 30, 2012, review of Girl in White, p. 68.
New Statesman, October 20, 2008, “In Living Colour,” review of Rothko’s Red, p. 53.
Publishers Weekly, September 25, 1995, review of Everything Begins with the Skin, p. 51; July 30, 2018, review of Rainsongs, p. 64.
ONLINE
Irish Times Online, https://www.irishtimes.com/ (January 20, 2018), Martina Evans, review of Rainsongs.
London, https://www.thelondonmagazine.org/ (January 12, 2018), Leah Shaya, review of Rainsongs.
London Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (February 23, 2018), Stevie Davies, review of Rainsongs.
London Independent Online, https://www.independent.co.uk/ (November 29, 2012 ), Jonathan Taylor, review of Girl in White.
New Welsh Review, https://www.newwelshreview.com/ (September 3, 2018), Ellen Bell, review of The Forgetting and Remembering of Air.
Poetry Archive, https://www.poetryarchive.org/ (September 18, 2018), author profile.
Port Eliot Festival website, https://porteliotfestival.com/ (September 18, 2018), author profile.
Quench, http://cardiffstudentmedia.co.uk/ (November 28, 2012), Francis Smithson, review of Girl in White.
Sue Hubbard website, http://www.suehubbard.com/ (September 18, 2018).
Sue Hubbard is an art critic, novelist, award-winning poet, lecturer, and broadcaster. Twice winner of the London Writers’ Award, she contributes regularly to a wide range of publications including Time Out, New Statesman, and The Independent, and has also written for The Times, the Guardian, and New York Arts Magazine.
Susan Hubbard
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Susan Hubbard
Born
New York
Occupation
Writer, professor
Website
Susan Hubbard website
Susan Hubbard is an American fiction writer and professor at the University of Central Florida.[1] She has written seven books of fiction, and is a winner of the Associated Writing Program Prize for Short Fiction[2] and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize[3] for best prose book of the year by an American woman.
She has co-edited a fiction anthology, 100% Pure Florida Fiction (University Press of Florida)[4] and has written more than 30 short stories published in nationally and internationally circulated journals, including Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, and Mississippi Review.[5] Her writing has been published in more than fifteen countries, including Australia, England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Indonesia, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Taiwan, and has been taught across America and in the United Kingdom.[6]
Hubbard has also received teaching awards from Syracuse University, Cornell University, and the South Atlantic Administrators of Departments of English. She has been a Writer in Residence at Georgia College & State University, Milledgeville, GA; Armstrong Atlantic State University, Savannah, GA; Pitzer College, Claremont, CA; and The National Writer's Voice, Tampa. She has been a guest at Yaddo, the Djerassi Resident Artists Project, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and Cill Rialaig. She has given more than 100 public readings and addresses on the craft of writing.[7]
She is a native of upstate New York.[8]
Contents
1
Bibliography
1.1
Editor
2
References
3
External links
Bibliography[edit]
Walking on Ice. University of Missouri Press. 1990. ISBN 978-0-8262-0752-4.
Blue Money. University of Missouri Press. 1999. ISBN 978-0-8262-1210-8.
Lisa Maria's Guide for the Perplexed. Publisher Red Dress Ink, 2004. ISBN 978-0-373-25061-5
Lisa Maria Takes Off. Red Dress Ink, 2005. ISBN 978-0-373-89517-5
The Society of S. Simon and Schuster. 2008. ISBN 978-1-4165-3458-7.
The Year of Disappearances. Simon and Schuster. 2009. ISBN 978-1-4165-5271-0.
The Season of Risks. Simon and Schuster. 2010. ISBN 978-1-4391-8342-7.
Editor[edit]
Susan Hubbard, Robley Wilson, eds. (2000). 100% pure Florida fiction: an anthology. University Press of Florida. ISBN 978-0-8130-1753-2.
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Sue Hubbard
b. 1948
“ Sue Hubbard pays close and exact attention to the elemental world and the vulnerability of the human within it - Pascale Petit ”
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About Sue Hubbard
Richly visual and with an eye for the telling detail, Sue Hubbard’s poetry is the work of a writer who has also spent much of her life as an art critic. The poems in this Archive recording showcase what Helen Mort has called Hubbard’s “painterly sensibility”, with many pieces taking visual works of art as their starting point. From ‘Room in New York, 1932’, which envisages Edward Hopper’s emotive painting as a moment of deceptive calm where “somewhere down the hall, a door slams”, to ‘Nude in Bathtub’, where Pierre Bonnard’s depictions of his bathing wife become a charged metaphor for ‘the nervy moments / that hemmed in his life’, finding the precise words to match the almost ineffably pictorial is an abiding fascination. As the speaker in ‘Blakeney’ implores, “Oh love, what I want to say / is look”, and it is in looking closely and honestly at the details of our everyday lives that Hubbard’s work finds its power.
Though she began writing at an early age, Sue Hubbard spent many years bringing up her children as a single parent, before she was able to become, in her own words, “a serious writer”. “I had to claim that for myself”, she has said in interview, echoing the experiences of many women writers in a literary culture geared towards the archetypally masculine. But it is precisely Hubbard’s interest in the familial and domestic, not to mention the renewed sense of perspective that parenthood can provide, that invigorates her poems. In ‘Checks and Balances’, the poet finds delicate profundity in a return visit to her childhood home, a place where “I sit hugging that past as the tears / come, trying to find words to unlock, / to name this longing”, while ‘Ghost Station’ conjures a lament for the seemingly minor but emotionally seismic moments of our lives in a list of lost objects: “Think of a bent hair-pin lodged for years under a wooden carriage seat / fallen from a stook of auburn hair, a single collar-stud trapped beneath”.
This Archive recording draws on Hubbard’s three published collections to date – Everything Begins with the Skin (1994), Ghost Station (2004) and The Forgetting and Remembering of Air (2013) – to offer a broad canvas of work, taking in everything from Eurydice in a London underpass to a ship forging through “cerulean ice-fields”, from moments of intense sensual intimacy to a metaphysical encounter with ‘The Idea of Islands’. Throughout, Hubbard delivers her lines with earnestness and urgency, suggesting Martyn Crucefix’s assessment of Hubbard as a “poet who serves as an antidote to the chirpy shallow materialism of much of our culture”.
Sue Hubbard’s recording was made on 4th November 2015 at The Soundhouse, London and was produced by Anne Rosenfeld.
Sue Hubbard is a freelance art critic, novelist, award-winning poet, lecturer and broadcaster.
Her poems have been read on Radio 3 and Radio 4 and she has contributed to
many arts programmes including Kaleidoscope, Poetry Please, Night Waves and The Verb.
Sue Hubbard's latest novel Rainsongs, published January 2018 by Duckworth.
Sue Hubbard is an art critic, novelist and poet. She has written regularly for a wide range of publications including the New Statesman, the Independent, The Sunday Times and the Observer and contributed to radio programmes including Woman’s Hour and Nightwaves. Her latest novel is Rainsongs, a powerful evocation of the rugged beauty of County Kerry’s coastline and the inner landscapes of its characters. Set in the time of the Celtic Tiger it uses richly poetic and painterly language and unfolds as a compelling tale of grief, art, and the fragile, quiet ways in which time and place can offer a measure of redemption. Twice winner of the London Writers’ Award, Sue Hubbard’s poems have been read on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4 and she is well known for her poem Eurydice – London’s largest public art poem – which stretches across Waterloo station, made possible by a grant from BFI and The Art’s Council.
QUOTED: "Despite thin plotting, Hubbard's ruminations on grief carry this novel and should appeal to fans of Kristin Hannah or Claire-Louise Bennett."
Rainsongs
Publishers Weekly. 265.31 (July 30, 2018): p64+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Rainsongs
Sue Hubbard. Overlook, $25.95 (240p) ISBN 978-1-4683-1663-6
Hubbard's affecting but lightly plotted third novel (after Girl in White) takes readers on a brief, refreshing sojourn in Ireland's County Kerry. Martha Cassidy, recently widowed by her half-Irish husband, returns to his writer's cottage on the remote western cusp of the country, where new economic forces and those who wield them clash with homespun locals and their way of life. Upon arrival, Martha encounters a small cast of men emblematic of the conflict: relentlessly ambitious real estate mogul Eugene Riordan; stalwart Paddy O'Connell, a cottage owner at odds with Eugene; and Colm, a young man with fierce loyalty to his home town. Eugene is trying to buy Paddy out of his farmland, but the plucky old Irishman resists him at every turn. As Martha gets to know Paddy and helps him convalesce after an injury, she has time to reflect on her past and begins to truly process the death of her son 20 years before--when he was only 10 years old. Colm is the same age as her son would have been. The conflict between a traditional but decaying Ireland and a newer, greedier one is an intriguing backdrop, but the novel's thin plot never rises to the drama of the landscape, and Hubbard's characters are less subtly crafted than her setting: Paddy is a hasty sketch of a stubborn farmer; Eugene is cartoonishly cold; Colm is comically charming. Despite thin plotting, Hubbard's ruminations on grief carry this novel and should appeal to fans of Kristin Hannah or Claire-Louise Bennett. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Rainsongs." Publishers Weekly, 30 July 2018, p. 64+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A550547472/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e80cde4e. Accessed 3 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A550547472
QUOTED: "a well-crafted collection that ... mines the unique riches of everyday experience."
Everything Begins with the Skin
Publishers Weekly. 242.39 (Sept. 25, 1995): p51.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1995 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
EVERYTHING BEGINS WITH THE SKIN
Sue Hubbard. Enitharmon (Dufour, dist.), $13.95 paper (80p) ISBN 1-870612-49-3
In her first full-length collection, this London poet informs her poems with a painter's vision, sketching intense portraits of domesticity. When her daughter begins menstruating, she refuses to echo her own mother's whispered "The Curse," and urges the girl to "Feel your roots, deep / and damp as rusty beets smelling of earth." Going beyond the visual, these unflinching poems take into account all the senses as they mark one woman's journey from childhood through motherhood, from love through, as one poem is titled, "Betrayal." Focusing mainly on women, Hubbard juxtaposes friends and relatives with legendary and artistic figures in a well-crafted collection that, taking an approach less common in British poetry than American, mines the unique riches of everyday experience. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Everything Begins with the Skin." Publishers Weekly, 25 Sept. 1995, p. 51. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A17489127/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=462c07b0. Accessed 3 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A17489127
QUOTED: "This is a disappointing mix of fact and fiction."
"rather limpid prose style."
Girl in White By Sue Hubard Cinnamon Press [pounds sterling]8.99 **
The Independent on Sunday (London, England). (Sept. 30, 2012): Arts and Entertainment: p68.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 Independent Digital News and Media Limited
http://www.independent.co.uk
Full Text:
This is a disappointing mix of fact and fiction, as Hubbard struggles to bring to life the story of the Expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker. She begins with Mathilde, Paula's daughter by Otto Modersohn, who is mourning the end of her affair with a married American musician by searching out her mother's home in the German countryside. Running parallel is Paula's own story of growing up in a middle-class German family, where she is encouraged by her father to paint, and her time in Paris, before she settles in the artists' commune of Worpswede. Her relationship with the grieving widower Otto is disrupted by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, with whom she has an affair. There is much material here for a superb story. Unfortunately, too much explanation, and a rather limpid prose style, smother the possibilities.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Girl in White By Sue Hubard Cinnamon Press [pounds sterling]8.99 **." Independent on Sunday [London, England], 30 Sept. 2012, p. 68. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A303763235/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9ca2eb02. Accessed 3 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A303763235
QUOTED: "With Hubbard's background in art criticism and poetry, it is not surprising that her writing is painterly and vivid."
In living colour
New Statesman. 137.4919 (Oct. 20, 2008): p53.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
Rothko's Red
Sue Hubbard
Salt, 160pp, [pounds sterling]12.99
Each story in this, Hubbard's first collection of short fiction, is nominally centred around art. But what truly links the pieces herein is the themes of longing, loss and melancholy, and a sense that not even an intimate knowledge of the beautiful and sublime can protect one from the daily tragedies of life.
While several of Hubbard's protagonists ultimately find redemption, it is always at a cost to themselves: the academic who gets away with cheating on his wife, but not without being fleeced by his mistress; the widow who realises that she is content alone, but only after a disappointing sexual encounter with a man she meets on the internet; the middle-aged divorcee who has an affair with an immigrant young enough to be her son and whom she regards with distant amusement.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
With Hubbard's background in art criticism and poetry, it is not surprising that her writing is painterly and vivid. She lingers on colours and textures, edges and scents: "Mummy grew tomatoes, red gems, that's what she called them ... I remember that special smell when she watered them in the early evening after a day of sun."
This collection is quiet, almost to the point of defiance, but in its understated, delicate descriptions of the mundane, Rothko 's Red has an acute power. JHE
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"In living colour." New Statesman, 20 Oct. 2008, p. 53. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A188804028/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=52dcd591. Accessed 3 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A188804028
QUOTED: "The ... self-awareness of Hubbard’s own writing as a mode of release lends it an especially powerful emotive quality. Her noted poetic style brings a unique rhythm to her prose, well suited to the romantic descriptions of the Irish countryside, but she is also a gifted storyteller."
"Hubbard’s book is about city and country, home and identity, love and loss, but it is in its traversal of the shaky balance between solitude and loneliness that it finds its unique voice, and champions the role of literature in an increasingly disconnected modern world."
Review | Rainsongs, by Sue Hubbard
Jan 12, 2018
Sue Hubbard’s Rainsongs has a unique and beautiful emotive quality that shines through its delicately constructed prose in a love-letter to Ireland, memory and parenthood, taking advantage of its mature narrator to speak with resonance and depth. In a contemporary world of instant connections, Rainsongs returns to an age just prior to the boom of social media – 2007 – in an exploration of what it means to be truly alone.
Rainsongs is a book filled with characters who are alone, by circumstance and by choice. Martha Cassidy has lost her husband and only son; twice-divorced Eugene Riordan and farm devotee Paddy O’Connell eschew relationships, finding they are happier living on their own. Accounts of community, large families, childhood friendships, are all recalled, dreamlike, from a distant past. Permanent loneliness haunts the narrative as a threat, but it is from solitude that the most beautifully haunting and thoughtful reflections in the book arise. Whenever Hubbard’s varyingly anthropophobic characters do enter a social setting, such as Eugene’s New Year’s Eve party, Brendan’s funeral, or the various local pubs, bars and restaurants, other people in the crowd are sketched accurately but unflatteringly, reduced to their worst.
However, as the supplies in Martha’s cupboard dwindle at the beginning of each chapter, the unsustainability of hermitage becomes clear. Paddy ends up in hospital by attempting to pull a heifer out of a ditch alone, an impossible task. Martha, despite her disdain for the pity she detects in all her interactions, is forced to ‘stay connected’ by the PhD student who rents her top room, and even out in the country cottage in the middle of nowhere finds herself mobbed by undesired visitors, local families, Eugene. It is impossible to stay alone forever, as the monks who travelled out to the Skelligs found all those centuries ago.
Estranged from and disliking most other people, it is through writing that Hubbard’s narrator first finds community. The intertextuality of Rainsongs is established from its very beginning with opening quotes taken from Woolf, Shakespeare and Irish proverbs, which inspire and in some cases structure and speak through the novel. Martha Cassidy cannot relate to anybody around her but finds a companion in Mrs Ramsay, and notes that despite her childlessness, Virginia Woolf ‘understood’ her loss. Similarly, she finds that Shakespeare ‘understands’ the utopian promise of a desert island in his Tempest. Although this promise of utopia, as of the trip to the Skelligs, is ultimately empty, Martha discovers the possibility of human empathy and companionship through text.
Brendan, perhaps the only extrovert described in the novel and hauntingly absent, is only present through the words of his remaining diaries and letters, which open up a previously closed side of himself to his wife. This allows her to connect with him in a way she never could when he was alive, revealing his secrets, and highlighting her loneliness even when she was with him. Her burgeoning relationship with the young Colm Nolan hinges around the reading of his poetry, again providing an elsewhere non-existent insight into his true feeling. Still grieving, complicatedly, for Bruno, Martha unconsciously seeks out a boy protégé in Colm, much as Brendan did – without her knowledge – in his lifetime. In continuing his mission of getting his poetry published, she is able to complete their foreshortened joint parenthood, relating to Colm as the adult that Bruno never became. Hubbard handles the development of their relationship so sensitively that the questionable circumstances of their intimacy – the age difference, Martha’s recent widowhood and maternal void – do not cast a shadow over their relationship, rather illuminating a pure, emotional connection. It is poetry that acts as the catalyst for this, as the publication of Colm’s work, dedicated to Bruno, effects a change in Martha, allowing her to finally achieve closure. Eventually, she is able to reconsider her future, deciding to build a life teaching English to young refugees, refilling her role as teacher; the element of selfhood that she has been completely without for the first part of the novel, existing only in relation to the deceased men of her life. When she finally returns to the Skelligs, she is not alone but accompanied by her healed memories of Bruno and her newfound human connections, again effected through her language.
The subsequent self-awareness of Hubbard’s own writing as a mode of release lends it an especially powerful emotive quality. Her noted poetic style brings a unique rhythm to her prose, well suited to the romantic descriptions of the Irish countryside, but she is also a gifted storyteller. The combination of endearing details such as Paddy having used the same comb since childhood, together with eye-watering descriptions of the new-money luxury spa that Eugene plans to build and a cutting turn of phrase that sketches a couple as ‘the director of a string of local supermarkets and his heavily Botoxed wife’ bring two very different realities together at once, painting a convincing portrait of pre-recession Ireland. Politics barely surfaces, just existing in the background as Republican flags wave in pubs and children wear orange, white and green T-shirts to watch a football game; Hubbard is more interested in the everyday lives of her characters, and drinking champagne instead of Guinness becomes a motif that is aware of its own ironies. Empathy for refugees past and present targets questions of compassion and connection more than it does government quotas, and the EU is a seemingly independent fluctuating circumstance in the lives of the locals.
Hubbard’s book is about city and country, home and identity, love and loss, but it is in its traversal of the shaky balance between solitude and loneliness that it finds its unique voice, and champions the role of literature in an increasingly disconnected modern world.
Rainsongs is available online and in bookstores now.
Leah Shaya
QUOTED: "There is a real sense of Kerry here, and Martha’s empathy with Irish people past and present permeates her solitary adventure. Her knowledge of Irish history and culture is impressive. Even when she uncharacteristically slips twice; using the word 'crofters' or anachronistically imagining the sixth-century monks packing soda bread for a journey, it doesn’t jar because we know we’re seeing everything through the eye of an outsider."
Rainsongs by Sue Hubbard review: A pilgrimage during the Celtic Tiger
An English woman’s journey to her dead husband’s Kerry summer cottage leads to a series of discoveries
Sue Hubbard
Martina Evans
Sat, Jan 20, 2018, 06:00
First published:
Sat, Jan 20, 2018, 06:00
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Book Title:
Rainsongs
ISBN-13:
978-0715652855
Author:
Sue Hubbard
Publisher:
Duckworth Overlook
Guideline Price:
£10.99
Sue Hubbard wasn’t kidding when she chose the title for this wool-soaked odyssey on the Iveragh peninsula – I could feel and smell the rain all the way through, and when the sun broke in now and then, I felt that too. This is a novel with many strands, but its primary preoccupation with the light and darkness inside every human being begins at the winter solstice.
A recently widowed English woman, Martha Cassidy, is driving in the dark, lost somewhere outside Cahirsiveen. Her husband, Brendan Cassidy, has died suddenly of a heart attack, and she is on her way to his remote summer cottage on the headland. The practical need to sort and pack up his things is clearly more than that. “Coming here forces her to accept his loss. This was always his place.”
As Martha contemplates her loneliness here at the end of the world with Skellig rock in her sight line, the medieval monks who survived on that rock symbolise faith in the face of darkness and privation. But Skellig also represents unfinished business for Martha, a trip that was never taken. The epigraph from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse at the beginning of Rainsongs points to many parallels between the two novels:
“‘Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow’ said Mrs Ramsey, ‘but you’ll have to be up with the lark.’” When this quote is echoed by Martha later on, it sends a sharp shiver through the novel, heralding a deeper, more unbearable buried grief coming to the surface.
Brendan’s affair
What deepens the loneliness at first is not only the memory of Brendan’s affair, which almost wrecked their marriage, but also a series of discoveries Martha makes in the cottage, revealing other aspects of Brendan’s life in Kerry hitherto unknown to Martha. And although these interests may seem outside his life’s work as an art historian, his special interest in the St Ives group of painters draws another parallel between Co Kerry and Cornwall. Martha wonders if it was not only his interest in his Irish heritage that drew him but also the similarities in both landscapes. “The grey-greens, the yellow gorse and dry stone walls, the surf gnawing away at the rugged cliffs.”
Hubbard’s precise descriptions of the physical landscape are tremendous and moving. There is a real sense of Kerry here, and Martha’s empathy with Irish people past and present permeates her solitary adventure. Her knowledge of Irish history and culture is impressive. Even when she uncharacteristically slips twice; using the word “crofters” or anachronistically imagining the sixth-century monks packing soda bread for a journey, it doesn’t jar because we know we’re seeing everything through the eye of an outsider – and an outsider who arrives at the height of the Celtic Tiger has much to see.
Greedy developers
That is the other grief of the novel – the damage inflicted on an almost unspoiled landscape by the greed of property developers, principally personified in the novel by the unhappy, acquiring Eugene Riordan. When Martha attends Riordan’s ostentatious New Year's party, the shadow of epic property development seems to be falling across the land as relentlessly as Joyce’s snow in The Dead. Even Martha’s neighbour Paddy O’Connell, who lives on a small family farm, is threatened. The future of Ireland looks dark.
But the new year is not just a date in the calendar here. While Martha continues to sort through Brendan’s possessions at the cottage, she gets to know young local poet and musician, Colm Nolan, who represents a new generation and acts as a creative foil for Riordan’s unhappy emptiness. It’s clear that Riordan will never have his fill, but Martha makes her own small stand against his plans for a luxury spa facing Skellig rock.
Riordan seems unstoppable at this stage, yet the readers are aware of a dramatic irony: The financial crash is just around the corner. And so as everything begins to change again, we are reminded of the other epigraph to this novel, “Is beag an rud is buaine ná an duine” – The smallest of things outlives the human being. Change brings better weather in more than one sense and a symbolic pilgrimage to Skellig for Martha:
… on this remote rock, high among the clouds … She can feel the world breathing. The tide echoing inside her. In out, in out ... Who said: every story has a beginning, a middle and an end, just not necessarily in that order?
Martina Evans is a poet and novelist. Her books include Petrol and The Windows of Graceland: New and Selected Poems
QUOTED: "Woolfian echoes and quotations pulse through Rainsongs, haunting the reader with the ubiquity of mother love and longing."
Rainsongs by Sue Hubbard review – healing and loss
Memories soak through the landscape of the Kerry coast in a widow’s elegiac story
Stevie Davies
Fri 23 Feb 2018 11.59 GMT
Last modified on Sat 24 Feb 2018 00.10 GMT
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An early Christian monastic outpost on Skellig Michael Island, Ireland. Photograph: Alamy
L
andscape and seascape are central to poet Sue Hubbard’s elegiac story of loss and valediction. Newly widowed, Martha Cassidy returns to her husband’s writing retreat, a cottage on the Kerry coast, “the end of the world with nothing between her and America except the cold sea”. Brendan, an art critic, had specialised in the work of the St Ives artists. Rainsongs allusively links the western edge of Ireland with St Ives and the Hebridean island of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, which provides a wider frame for the novel. Martha embraces anchoritic solitude, within ancient terrain that remembers the monks who in 520AD set sail in curraghs to found a community in the barren Skellig Islands.
Collapsed houses recall waves of Irish emigrants escaping famine, “skin kippered from turf smoke ... lungs thick with phlegm”. Here Martha confronts her own ghosts. Beautifully, the novel’s structure raises to consciousness an anterior trauma buried in Brendan’s loss that had opened a rift in their marriage. Their only son, Bruno, died in childhood. Scarcely mentioned in the earlier chapters, he is gradually reclaimed for Martha through a landscape of memory.
Decades ago, the child had agitated to visit the Skellig Islands, which exert a magnetic pull like Woolf’s lighthouse rock. Woolfian echoes and quotations pulse through Rainsongs, haunting the reader with the ubiquity of mother love and longing: “she thought, he will never be this carefree again ... No chance of the Skelligs today, Bruno, said Brendan.”
Minor characters – odious property developer Eugene, decent farmer Patrick and young poet Colm – dramatise the struggle between old and new. But Hubbard’s most profound effects occur when, keeping the narrative tight to Martha’s consciousness, she evokes what Romain Rolland’s famous letter to Freud called “the oceanic feeling” – the sensation of being one with the cosmos. “When there’s nothing left,” Brendan had written, “there’s still the ocean and the sky”; and his widow finds healing, “merged with the rough brown scrub ... the grey mountains”.
• Stevie Davies’s Awakening is published by Parthian. Rainsongs is published by Duckworth. To order a copy for £9.99 (RRP £11.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
QUOTED: "The Forgetting and Remembering of Air is a stunning piece of work – an achingly moving narrative of love for a child, parent, sibling, lover or icon. In these poems Hubbard is travelling through love and its possibilities of home, moving fast towards the acceptance of the disappointment, the ruin of it, like that great house of the cover."
NWR Issue 101
The Forgetting and Remembering of Air
by Sue Hubbard
The cover image of The Forgetting and Remembering of Air, Sue Hubbard’s third book of poems, is one of devastation. An immense edifice, a once imposing mansion, stands, like Manderley, razed to the ground. Only its façade remains, the rest blown through, empty. The landscape is bare, treeless, against a Titian sky. A turquoise blue. A promise of blue.
The collection is in three parts. Part one, A Meaningful Speech, is about voices: the undeclared, imagined voices of the slipware vessel in ‘Conversation with a Bowl’; the artist’s model in ‘Naked Portrait 1972-3’, ‘After Lucian Freud’; the silent daughter in ‘Figs’, contrasting with the juddered puttering of sounds in ‘Radio Days’. Part two, Over the Rainbow, begins with ‘The Fall’, the story of a suicide. Described with the luminescent graphicness of a Jane Campion film, Margaret Moyes lies ‘amid the smashed lilac and fallen birdcage, [her] spine snapped like a twig’. Her descent, her death, with her ‘black silks billowing’, is a thing of beauty, as are the deaths of the other notorious characters who populate this second section. Dora Carrington in ‘Dora’, Eva Braun in ‘Eva’, Marilyn Monroe in ‘Eve Arnold Remembers’, Assia Hughes in ‘Note for Ted’, Diane Arbus in ‘Last Supper, After Diane Arbus’ and Isabella Blow in ‘Blow by Blow for Isabella Blow’. Such a relentless, exquisite falling, one after another – begun with Yves Klein’s ‘stepping out from that high window’ in ‘Klein’s Blue’ and ending with the ‘flash, the muffled boom’ of the suicide bomber in ‘Black Widow’. Part three, The Idea of Islands, represents a stripping down of life’s rich promise – the Black Widow’s reward of ‘cool gardens’ lies ravaged and desolate. The poet is exposed, like Mary Oliver in ‘The Journey’, to ‘the wild night and the road full of fallen branches’, as she strides ‘deeper and deeper’ into the world, the inner world of self – a self that she has come to realise has ‘more loving within than those who are easily loved.’
Hubbard, a poet envious of the artist, tries ‘to write a line of colour’. And she does, masterfully. Her poems are a shock of colour – zinging and connecting with hue. The ‘endless’ ultramarine of ‘Klein’s Blue’, flooding into the ‘welkin hyacinth, azure and Prussian blue’ of ‘White Canvas’. The yellow of the marigold gloves in ‘Keeping Hens’, finding the yellow in the Chinese dressing gown ‘hanging limp upon the door’ in ‘Dora’, the infirmary green of the model’s skin in ‘Naked Portrait 1972-3’, remembered in ‘the glutinous green mucus in the cold bathroom sink’ in ‘Bronchitis’. Colour and deftly chosen detail stands us still, picking out the moment like an Edmund Dulac illustration in a children’s book, resonant with bejewellled exquisiteness. And yet there is horror too at noticing, amid the destruction, the Mayflower cooker and the smell of Vosene in ‘Note for Ted’, the Ladybird Airtex vest in ‘Nits’ and the Ferragamo shoes in ‘Eva’. Repetition sets the tone, tells and moves the story on through its repeated saying – the unremitting use of words like ‘water’, ‘rain’, ‘mist’, ‘wind’, ‘ink’, ‘window’, ‘home’ creating an impasto of sensation that drums at our feelings like storm-rain on a pane.
The Forgetting and Remembering of Air is a stunning piece of work – an achingly moving narrative of love for a child, parent, sibling, lover or icon. In these poems Hubbard is travelling through love and its possibilities of home, moving fast towards the acceptance of the disappointment, the ruin of it, like that great house of the cover. ‘The Idea of Islands’ finds her acquiescent to the dark – the ‘forgetting’. In these final poems the voice – ‘I’ rather than ‘he’ or ‘she’ – holds us rapt. The promise of blue, the previous sumptuous oozing of colour, of life, has gone; there is just the ‘green fuse, the quiet heart beating’. Hubbard drags her nascent grief, like Robert Bly’s black bag, through the body of all these poems – a heavy journeying through which she ‘had hoped for miracles’ and the ‘merging of I with you’ but finds only a ‘returning again and again’ that is ‘always indifferent’.
‘…Yes’, the final poem in the collection, is the same word that greeted John Lennon in November 1966 as he climbed that ladder in the Indica Gallery. Before doing so he had been handed a card that simply read, ‘breathe’. Hubbard, with such tender self-compassion, shows how pain, fear and rejection of life make us hold our breath. And that to breathe, to remember air, is to will, to contract oneself to life, to yield to that ‘fragile… yes’.
Ellen Bell is an artist and writer currently living in mid Wales.
QUOTED: "The power of Hubbard's novel for contemporary readers is in its distillation of dilemmas which, of course, are still pressing for women today."
Girl in White, By Sue Hubbard
Jonathan Taylor
Thursday 29 November 2012 10:03
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"In art," the Expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) declared, "one is usually totally alone with oneself." For a female artist in the early 20th century, such aloneness was radical in itself. It is Modersohn-Becker's radical aloneness, as artistic pioneer and independent woman, which particularly fascinates Sue Hubbard in her new novel, a fictionalised account of the artist's life.
In Girl in White, Modersohn-Becker's life is portrayed as a series of struggles to assert independence, or "aloneness", freeing herself from the conventions of German art, from financial dependence on men, and from the binds of family life. In all these struggles, she is only half-successful, never satisfied that her paintings quite attain her aesthetic vision.
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During her most productive period - her last stay in Paris - she is destitute, and repeatedly compelled to appeal for financial aid from others, including her estranged husband. Ultimately, she returns from Paris to her husband in Germany, forced by history into this "compromise". As one character puts it, "I don't believe the world is yet ready for a woman artist to make it alone."
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Yet it is precisely this "aloneness" that is a prerequisite for art. "Art without pain, without sacrifice, without loneliness," says Rainer Maria Rilke, one of Modersohn-Becker's lovers, is "impossible". It is the impossibility of Modersohn-Becker's position - torn between the loneliness of art and enforced selflessness of her role as wife - that destroys her. After returning to her husband, she falls pregnant, and dies shortly after childbirth.
The power of Hubbard's novel for contemporary readers is in its distillation of dilemmas which, of course, are still pressing for women today. As Rilke wrote of Modersohn-Becker in his great poem "Requiem", it is her spirit which, of all his dead friends, most seems to haunt the future.
Jonathan Taylor is the author of the novel 'Entertaining Strangers' (Salt) and the memoir 'Take Me Home: Parkinson's, My Father, Myself' (Granta)
QUOTED: "Using knowledge she has gained from her study of Becker, as well as, admittedly, a little of her imagination Hubbard’s skill here is to literally bring Becker back to life."
"This is an incredibly nuanced and intense work."
Review: Sue Hubbard’s ‘Girl in White’
November 28, 20123 Min Read
Francis Smithson reviews Sue Hubbard’s emotive novel focusing on the life of artist Paula Modersohn-Becker.
Set against the backdrop of the darkness of Germany 1933, Girl in White begins its narrative with the character of Mathilde, a young woman pregnant by her married Jewish lover. Fleeing to the remote village of Worpswede, previously a commune for artists, she begins the emotional journey of unravelling the life of her mother – the artist Paula Modersohn-Becker.
Paula Becker is not a well-known artist, nor was she much admired by many of her contemporaries. Reading this novel I have no doubt you will wish she was. Hubbard, having studied the events of Becker’s life through her paintings and letters, obviously believes this is a story that needs to be told and how right she is. Using knowledge she has gained from her study of Becker, as well as, admittedly, a little of her imagination Hubbard’s skill here is to literally bring Becker back to life. The depth of the narrative reveals the tortured and lonely soul of Paula as she struggled to gain the revered status she desired. The reader feels her pain and sacrifice as she fails time and time again to reach her own ridiculously high standards, yet her unwavering belief in her potential to get there shows an admiral level of self-courage and belief. Often lonely, often brave and often selfish the reader gains real insight into Becker’s ambitious and obstinate mind, desiring her success as much as she does.
This novel is an incredible testimony to the tortures and struggles many artists see necessary to put themselves through.
Any artist reading this book will feel a great amount of empathy with Paula. I particularly recommend this to those with an interest in the art world as it captures perfectly the romance and excitement of the industry while sympathetically capturing the dark emotions, poverty and confusion that often follow alongside. With particular nostalgia it delves into the Expressionist’s community of isolated and beautiful Worspswede; thus emphasising the alienation of many of the Expressionist poets and artists and the strong bonds they formed between one another. The use of characters such as Rilke and Rodin shows how the novel is a great exploration of this great cultural movement.
Hubbard’s use of the entirely fictional character of Mathilde creates a deeply emotional resonance within Paula’s story as it is slowly revealed in alternating chapters. As the reader delves into Paula’s secrets and thoughts so is her daughter – now just as vulnerable and lonely herself. Paula’s unsettled mind and the conflicting society of Worpswede become reflected in the unsettling Germany that now exists and the uncertain future that awaits Mathilde. What is never called into question though is the strength and courage of the Becker women. This is an incredibly nuanced and intense work and one which I strongly recommend.
Frances Smithson