Six Facets of Light
Ann Wroe

This remarkable new book by Ann Wroe is an extended meditation on light, especially as it plays on the chalk landscape behind the south-coast towns of England, where she has walked since childhood. Like all her work, there are felicities of phrasing and cadence on every page, and each of the six chapters offers something of the taut coherence and closeness of the structure of musical variation.

The theme or ground of all these variations is light itself and Six Facets of Light develops partly as a topography of a specific light-filled land, and partly in its logical, dense and elegant meditations on those who have given their lives to the contemplation of light in and beyond nature. Turner, as the painter and lover of sunlight, finds his place here, as does Goethe in all his intense, passionate speculation on colour in light. Newton’s intensity of thought echoes across to Thoreau’s intensity of vision of the natural world.

At the heart of the book are the small group of poets and painters who have sensed the divine within the landscape of Britain: Hopkins, Thomas Traherne, Samuel Palmer and his teacher William Blake, John Clare. This grouping defines the tone and nature of the book – Wroe has considerable affinities with the school of writers about place and season which now flourishes in England; but she holds to a quiet focus on something which is absent from much of their writing – a sense of the Creator within Creation.