Mrs Death Misses Death by Salena Godden Canongate A Review by Guy Thornton

Mrs Death Misses Death by Salena Godden Canongate
A Review by Guy Thornton
Mrs Death Misses Death Paperback - 6 Jan. 2022
Publisher : Canongate Books; Main edition (6 Jan. 2022)
Language : English
Paperback : 224 pages
ISBN-10 : 1838851224
ISBN-13 : 978-1838851224
Mrs Death Misses Death: Salena Godden Hardcover - 28 Jan. 2021
Publisher : Canongate Books; Main edition (28 Jan. 2021)
Language : English
Hardcover : 320 pages
ISBN-10 : 1838851194
ISBN-13 : 978-1838851194
"Salena Godden is one of Britain’s best loved poets and performers. She is also an activist, broadcaster, memoirist and essayist and is widely anthologised. She has published several volumes of poetry, the latest of which was Pessimism is for Lightweights, and a literary childhood memoir, Springfield Road.
Mrs Death Misses Death is her debut novel and was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize. A BBC Radio 4 documentary following Godden’s progress on the novel over twelve months was broadcast in 2018. In November 2020 she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature."
canongate.co.u...
#Books #Reviews Mrs Death Misses Death by Salena Godden Canongate Review @canongatebooks
The robin was once seen as a messenger from the land of the dead, sent to summon those about to die. Yet, yet still, in the dying moments of a winter's evening, high in a cage of bare twigs, she opens her throat and breaks your heart with her rapturous song. If 'Mrs Death Misses Death' is haunted by the presence of the dead, still Salena Godden's prose sings and her poetry defies the approach of the night. For if the day is short and the dark certain, then the trick is to live life while we can. Poignant and lyrical, poetry and prose tangle and entwine, and whisper, warm and witty, hot breath on your cheek. Speaking to you and you alone, as only a poet can. Entrancing and memorable like a melody heard once, and never quite forgotten.
There is no need to seek death out, to climb a tower and scan the horizon, to force your head under the cold water and search amongst the discarded shopping trolleys, to brave midnight graveyards, she is always there, at your shoulder, one cold hand clutching your sleeve. There is no use in running away, she is always a little distance ahead, she will wait for you to arrive.
The business of death is a lonely one and Mrs Death has stories she needs to tell, histories that need recording. She has passed unseen down the dark alleys, the battlefields, the hospital wards of history, with no one to hear her tales, until now. Wolf Willeford has seen death at work, in flame and smoke, in blackened towers, Icarus falling, now she meets Death herself and the troubled young writer begins to write the Life of Death. She travels through time recording the lost lives of lives lost, sat at an old desk purchased from a curiosity shop, a desk through which the memories pour. In a hungover, strung-out, chaotic dawn, Wolf leads us through the time-drenched streets of London, the London of child exploitation, of the Ripper and the Kray twins. Who is the black woman, head down on a passing bus? The woman buying wine with small change, the beggar, the hospital cleaner, the figure caught by a lightning flash leaning over a body in a dark alley, need you ask?
And I think of Aphra Behn, of Spenser, Blake and Dickens, who wandered these same dark streets, of The Wasteland and Nina Simone leaving Ronnie Scotts with a plastic carrier bag in her hand. I am haunted, haunted as I was by Carol Morley's Dreams of a Life, a drama-documentary about Joyce Carol Vincent, who lay dead among the Christmas gifts, she was wrapping, television on, for three years, lost.
Willmore: There is no sinner like a young saint.
Aphra Behn
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
Prothalamion
By Edmund Spenser
I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
London
By William Blake
We need be careful how we deal with those about us, when every death carries to some small circle of survivors, thoughts of so much omitted, and so little done--of so many things forgotten, and so many more which might have been repaired! There is no remorse so deep as that which is unavailing; if we would be spared its tortures, let us remember this, in time.
Oliver Twist
By Charles Dickens
Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
The Waste Land
By T.S. Eliot
Nina Simone
Songwriters: Edmondson John B / Medley Cynthia
#MrsDeathMissesDeath #SalenaGodden #Review

[@SalenaGodden]

So beautiful, thank you so much.

[@bwthornton]

It's a wonderful book, that will mean a great deal, to many people, thank you.