This is a marvellous book: refreshing, wise, sincere and sophisticated. It is nothing so modest as its subtitle, An Anthology of Memory & Lament, suggests.

The Heart of Things: An Anthology of Memory & Lament
RICHARD HOLLOWAY
(CANONGATE, 176 PP, £16.99)
Tablet bookshop price £14.99 • Tel 020 7799 4064

This is a marvellous book: refreshing, wise, sincere and sophisticated. It is nothing so modest as its subtitle, An Anthology of Memory & Lament, suggests. This is not an anthology in the usually recognised sense, although passages and poems from an intriguing range of writers living, dead and anonymous are included. W.S. Graham’s “Loch Thom” rubs shoulders with Jan Morris writing on Trieste, and Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song is juxtaposed with Simone Weil’s long essay on The Iliad. But The Heart of Things doesn’t merely ­republish the work of some touchstone writers. It’s not even a curated volume with introductory essays. Instead, it is a sustained work of spiritual autobiography.

Defining his project in a Preface, Holloway combines the idea of flowers pressed between the leaves of a book with Michel de Montaigne’s “other men’s flowers”, that phrase made famous as the title of A.P. Wavell’s wartime anthology. “An anthology,” he concludes, “is a collection of poetic flowers that saved or enlarged the life of the reader”: an important and generous definition, though one from which many anthologies one could name fall short. It shows clearly the stakes for this beautifully written memoir, an enquiry into writerly influences on the author not simply as writer, but as self and indeed ­theologian.

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