Stan Carey at Sentence first:
I was sad to hear that Edna O’Brien had died. She lived a remarkable life and leaves an amazing body of work: she was, in Eimear McBride’s description, ‘one of the last great lights of the golden age of Irish literature’.
The controversy over O’Brien’s taboo-breaking early books – starting with The Country Girls (1960), which was banned in Ireland – had ebbed by the time I started reading her, but the elegance of her writing and the power of her stories remained, and remains, undiminished.
Recently, revisiting her short story ‘Madame Cassandra’, which was published in the 1968 collection The Love Object and again in 2011’s Saints and Sinners, a rare word in its opening paragraph caught my eye:
I always love the way the bees snuggle into the foxglove … for the coolth and the nectar.
I don’t think bees are snuggling into foxgloves for the coolth, but it’s such a pleasing idea that I don’t mind the poetic licence.
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.