In this bleak novel Elizabeth Gaskell deftly weaves a dark thread of history into her narrative tapestry. While war hovers on the margins of the novel, no one is left unaffected by its horror. After a sometimes painfully slow setup of domestic life in the seaside town of Monkshaven in the first third of the book, the sense of doom grows increasingly palpable. Sylvia, the novel's heroine, is isolated by her supposedly protective domestic sphere, but Gaskell shatters the delicate domestic circle that surrounds her. While Sylvia is left to bear emotional scars, becoming an impassive, hardened woman, Charley Kinraid, her true love, returns from war a ghost, haunting the margins of Monkshaven to hide his terrible physical scars. The full realization of the blight on Sylvia's life comes when the novel spirals down to its inevitable conclusion, where even reconciliation and understanding brings a powerful sense of loss.

I had never heard of either Mother Meera or Andrew Harvey until I picked up this book. I found the author's overwrought, hysterical experiences and conclusion that Mother Meera is the avatar of the Divine Mother to be interesting, but unconvincing.

A search on the Web reveals some interesting material. The author, Andrew Harvey, has subsequently bitterly denounced Mother Meera for her failure to bless Harvey's homosexual relationship and for the horrible, horrible crime of "homophobia".

Interestingly, the other books written about Mother Meera have also been penned by homosexuals. An odd "coincidence".

If your spiritual inclination is to dissolve your ego/self in the all consuming embrace of the "Divine Mother", I suppose that a trip to Mother Meera's HQ in Germany may be in order. I'll pass.

The first half of the book is a real adventure as the author seeks spiritual fulfillment. The second half tends to drag-on as he takes the reader through many of his effulgent experiences.

The story is about the authors experiences with Mother Meera, however She steals the show. I had never heard of her before but for me her authentic power shines through everything that is written in this book. If read with a genuine search for the truth it can change lives for ever.

I really enjoyed this book a ton, but its message should be taken as only a small part of Mr. Harvey's spiritual journey since he eventually left Mother Meera (something that seemed unthinkable if you read "Hidden Journey")because she was intolerant of homosexuality. (This is certainly an aspect of an "enlightened" being which I totally don't understand! ) Still, this is a fascinating and unique story, and very well written.

Marvell's is not an easy life to write. His remarkable caution in a remarkable time led to a dearth of biographical source material. Murray, at times, seems to have limited sympathy for Marvell, and the thinness of his source material sometimes gives the impression of 'slightness' to his treatment. But in the last third of the book, I got a glimpse of a Marvell I'd never seen anywhere else - tough, fearless and at risk in ways we can't imagine. I give the book THREE STARS, but relative to other available biographies on Marvell, it probably deserves FOUR. If you're interested in Marvell, it's well worth reading.

The impression I get from reading this poetry is that underneath all of the poetic techniques and references to other poets there is very little. It is too safe, mediocre and polite. It is full of things like 'invisible and silent but the deep/ Foundation of ourselves, our cornerstone'. This attempt at quiet profundity doesn't work for me.

Nothing is transformed in this poetry. The world would be the same place without it.

His poem for the British victims of 9/11 was 3 stanzas and one sentence of musing on death, competently written and with poetic techniques used, but of no probity regarding the event.

Likewise his poem against the war, the point of which seemed to be the 'irony' that the region is a place historically associated with civilisation and now is the site of a war. So what? That kind of comment can be found in any newspaper column.

A review of a book is a a singular piece of advice from a 'point of view' of the reader, to another reader? Andrew's selection of Keats' work is a well worthy read for any 'newcomer' or, for that matter, anyone interested in poetry and prose.

The convincing emotion in this selection of poems is grief and Motion's unending quarrel with his mother's early death is the pulse of his career. The opening poem wanders in a present life but closes inexorably in the past, with his father's hand pushing back hair from a hospital bed-ridden mother's "desperate face" and "the way love looks, its harrowing clarity."

It is not clear what did for her, "A Blow to the Head" one long mid-career sequence calls it, but the emotional shut-down of the mother, her eyes that "refuse to recognise..and turn away", leave a residue in all the things Motion considers and it is grief where he finds full throated voice.

There are syntactical, grammatical infelicities in the earlier poems - "the more I think back to your house/I grew up in" - which jarrs and the poems have been revised for this volume and such blips are absent from later poems so I wonder why these are still here. But grief, even in the guise of another person's feelings, another person's excuses for grief, spills most strongly from the poems, even if it's grief for an animal which suddenly arises, compassion disguised as a social comedy in the late poem "The Spoilt Child" and its abandoned, wounded dog. And it is grief which Motion becomes more articulate, more debonaire in handling over the course of these books, grief, which is the cost of things.

Dramatic monologues and historical pastiches are a strong suit - these miniature novels often cram the sketch of a whole life consummately into a page or five. But the theme's the same: in "Independence" the long saga of a career and courtship in the Punjab and its aftermath only becomes more than history book clippings when the character loses and mourns his wife:
"collapsing dresses into tea chests,/scooping up the baby things, /your belts, a thrown-down petticoat... So much of you to find!" Which story ends with the Motion speaker's usual emotional pitch when not spurred into mournful song: "Sun is no more/than a white, widening slit. The sea/ a blank horizon returning to grey."

There is great temptation with the biographer of Larkin, let alone another Laureate-in-waiting, to compare his work with that master's - but only here and there does he strike a Larkinesque attitude - very successfuly. The poem "Hull" acknowledges Larkin before the speaker, at the end of the affair, looks out of the flat of his soon to be abandoned lover at the plant house below where strangers "nod to each other through floppy-tongued leaves" and a minah bird will say nothing "except- if you scare him badly enough - his name." The little humour piece "It is an Offence" discusses the defecation of the neighbour's whippet ("surprisingly slow for a whippet") with similarly Larkinesque clipped moans.

But it is the two animal stories I like best - "The Dancing Hippo" where Motion ably ventriloquises a circus manager and the trainer of a hippo who after learning to dance ("that we thought nothing/but seemed to them a miracle") is burnt to death. In his grief the trainer burst into the manager's van: "I know it was useless, of course, her dancing./I know. But God above it was beautiful!/Beautiful! God! - or something like that." Motion here is a master of the foreign voice, the colourful detail and does not show an inch too much of the borrowed gaberdine.

And then there is "Reading the Elephant" where another mourning spouse of sorts is "turning time back on itself" on Safari in Africa where he tries to get back to the beginning of things: "They never last long, these moments. With half a chance/We drop back to life as it is. I understand that./I'm not quite a fool. So to keep myself airborne I always/snapped open some book (some parachute) just as my trance/was ending..." then he gets stared out by an elephant coming upon him suddenly, to leave him "with everything clear." And so Motion actually is, a mind ready to fall back into distances and literary fugues unless it is jerked to by that death or other dangers which always recall that death, still holding him fast "standing on a frozen pond/entranced by someone else below the ice" ("Dead March"), and it is only the death of a friend, Ruth Haddon, and her elegy "Fresh Water" which can end in some second hand peace as he imagines her drowned form leaving the sunk ship, The Marchioness, "swimming back upstream, her red velvet party dress/flickering round her heels as she twists through the locks" back to the source of the Thames, the "wet mouth of the earth" where she vanishes, his mother.

Sorry. I mistakenly said in my review just submitted that the author spent 3 yrs living in the Aran Islands. He actually spent under just one year. He had been there 3 years previously. Sorry for the mistake.

The first chapter is very good. The last chapter is excellent. It's the 200 pages in between that are problematic. If you suffer from insomnia, rush out and buy this book. The only thing that kept me going is that I have been to the Aran Islands --... The story line skips around and seems to have no continuity or narrative flow... I still don't understand why the author, at college age, spent 3 years living on the island... What an odd glop of uninteresting stories, poetry, observations on corncrakes, and education on fishing lines and rabbit hunting. I did learn some new vocabulary words, though. Like "monody," which might be the kindest way to describe this book.

An Aran Keening is the personal and compelling memoir of Andrew McNeillie, a man who traveled to the Aran Islands off the Atlantic coast of Ireland and stayed there for eleven months. McNeillie is clearly filled with admiration for a land of profound natural beauty and an appreciative people who work hard to maintain their traditions and culture from one generation to the next. Unique, superbly written, highly recommended and rewarding reading, An Aran Keening is a book of considerable insight and justifiable reverence.

This collection is a travesty indeed. Great poems no doubt, but abysmally read. Furthermore they should have put all the introductions together separate and apart from the poems. It's nice to hear intros the first time around. But who wants to hear the intros everytime you listen to the poems? Sometimes I want to hear just a stream of poetry without any interuptions and this format makes that impossible. It's incredible that such a great concept could be so terribly executed.

I could not get this back to the store for a refund quickly enough. While the poem selection is great and the poem introductions are narrated well, the choice to use "modern poets" as the readers made this compilation utterly unlistenable. The only one that I found acceptable was Anthony Hect--the others were notably bad. In particular, I found Jorie Graham's "readings" to be abysmal. She reads each poem as if it were simply a string of unconnected words, giving equal stress to each, with halting pauses between them, never breaking out of a drowsy monotone. Other readers were not much better.

There are three major flaws in the readings:

1) The readers are no better than the average untrained person, and often much worse. (You've just got to hear them for yourself to appreciate how bad they are.)

2) Successive poems by the same poet are read by different "readers." It's jarring to hear 3 or 4 poems from Poet X, each in a wildly different voice.

3) No regard is given to matching the sex of the poet and reader. In general, it is really annoying to hear your favorite poet read by the wrong sex. In particular, making this mistake on "gender specific" poems (like having a woman read Poe's "Annabel Lee") is unforgivable.

Why is this all so upsetting? Because it is practically impossible to find poetry collections on CD, making this a serious waste of limited resources. If you are looking for a good collection on CD, buy "81 Famous Poems CD" by Audio Partners (ISBN 0-945353-82-0). It's a good collection on two CDs and is read by professionals: Alexander Scourby, Bramwell Fletcher, and Nancy Wickwire. In the meantime, we can only hope that the producers of this collection will eventually come to their senses and re-record the poems with the services of trained professionals.

If you are prepping for the GRE in literature or are trying to gain a basic understanding of literary periods and poets, this audio-collection is a must. It features a brief introduction about each poet's life. It also includes a brief introduction about the theme of each poem. The fact that you have to listen to these introductions before listening to the poem inculcate the poem and aids retention. If literature has turned into a cumbersome and overwhelming task, this collection will not only provide you with a sense of direction but will also make literature far more pleasurable.

For those acquainted with the breadth of scholarship in this field, it is impossible to deny that Andrew Breeze's introduction to the literature of medieval Wales is, overall, something of a disappointment. This is particularly so because Breeze is a scholar of no mean ability and many of his published notes and articles have proved of great value. Specifically, the breadth of his understanding of medieval Christian devotion and religious expression in Wales is second to none, and his analysis of the sources for these is frequently illuminating. Some of those qualities are indeed evident in the study under review. It is also true that in `Medieval Welsh Literature', Breeze has set himself a task few would envy, namely the broad survey of an entire field of medieval vernacular literature whose complexity is only part of the hallmark of its richness. The scholarly equipment necessary for such an undertaking is daunting, and given its own premise, the reader is left with the feeling that this is an attempt which does not quite come off. However gentle, no reviewer could fail to remark on some of the inexplicable features of this study. To illustrate this, one need go no further than the publisher's own blurb, which boasts that Breeze's book is `the first general history of the literature of medieval Wales'. This simply is not true and, given that he himself lists in his bibliography an English translation of Thomas Parry's `Hanes Llenyddiaeth Gymraeg hyd 1900', Breeze surely knows this as well as any. (Reference might also have been made to the first two volumes of the more recent English survey of the field, `A Guide to Welsh Literature', a series of studies which do provide the kind of generalist introduction to which this volume lays claim.)

There are inexplicable omissions which require comment. Although listing in his bibliography no fewer than sixty-two items of his own work, Breeze mentions, for example, only two by Professor D.J. Bowen, one of the foremost scholars of the Cywyddwyr, the Poets of the Gentry. No reference at all is made either of the primary research of Sioned Davies into the Welsh storyteller's art and technique; nor of the magisterial edition of the Poets of the Princes published from the Centre for Celtic Studies at Aberystwyth and which were available to Breeze at the time of writing; nor yet of the work of Iolo Goch by Dafydd Johnston. These and many other editorial choices are puzzling. One would prefer not to think of them as deliberate, and suspects that the material for the research undertaken by Breeze was limited to what was available to him in Pamplona - not, perhaps, the most convenient place for an academic endeavour of this kind. The courtesy of scholarship does, however, suggest that one's peers should at least be acknowledged.

The book's unusual emphases continue. Cynddelw Brydydd Mawr is alluded to in a total of four pages, while the interesting but putative attribution of early poetry to one Master John of St David's (Breeze's own theory), on the other hand, is discussed in twelve. For a book supposedly written for newcomers to the subject, the stress in `Medieval Welsh Literature' appears to be on points of debate. It is therefore a question as to which kind of `newcomer' one could legitimately offer this study. In his analysis, it is not the introduction to the field but its cruces which seem uppermost in Breeze's mind. And so the great selling point of `Medieval Welsh Literature', the supposed attribution of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi to a woman, none other than Gwenllian ferch Gruffudd ap Cynan herself, is presented as definitive rather than one interesting theory among a number which the scholarly community are currently engaged in debating. This may be well enough for the floor of a Celtic conference, but seems out of place in a purported introductory volume of this kind.

In short, one could have wished for a great deal more from a scholar of Andrew Breeze's calibre. Free use is made of others' work, particularly in translation; little enough acknowledgment is given to the ground-breaking research of his predecessors, to say nothing of his peers; and for all its style and good prose, for me `Medieval Welsh Literature' simply does not achieve its own stated purpose. It remains a collection of at times interesting, at times highly contentious articles which belong in another forum altogether.

But even gently critical reviewers should, of course, beware. By and large, few enough reviewers even acknowledge the inordinate power their privileged position offers, let alone rise to its challenge, and the work of none of us is beyond criticism. To draw attention to this book's lacunae is, hopefully, to challenge both author and reader to undertake a still more comprehensive analysis of a field of study which is ever rich and ever new, and from which both cannot but emerge the wiser.

I am not sure how to rate this book. It is a reference book so I can't hold it to the same standards as a work of fiction. Reference books should be rated on their usefulness and accuracy. Since it is mostly reviews, which are subjective, accuracy does not really apply and how useful can a book of literary criticism really be? That said this book does contain some information about Terry Pratchett's early work that I did not already know about, and I'm a fairly fanatical fan. The type and the margins are small, so all 88 pages of text are stuffed as full of words as they possible could be. You are definitely getting your money's worth. Andrew Butler does have a sense of humor, which is important since he is reviewing a humor writer, but some of his jokes may prove confusing to people who haven't read the books. Sarcasm and irony are hard to pull off in fiction; they are even harder in non-fiction. In general I found his criticisms irritating if you know what he is talking about and misleading if you don't. He gives each book a rating and admits "The purpose of this last is clearly to annoy people!" And it succeeds admirably.