He is adamant about resisting the invasive help of the welfare state, but I wanted to beg him to call on his beloved friends, to whom he and his wife have given so much for so many years, to suggest to him the limits of a stiff upper lip and the tonic effects of an afternoon off. Elegy for Iris,'' a title with its own rather dark double meanings, is a celebration of the mystery of human connection, which marriage metonymically enacts. It is wonderfully peaceful to sit in bed with Iris reassuringly asleep and gently snoring. Iris is floating or swimming quietly beside me. Weeds and larger leaves sway and stretch themselves beneath the surface.
Blue dragonflies dart and hover to and fro by the riverbank.
Santayana said that everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, comic in its existence and tragic in its fate. In its evocation of the lyrical, the comic and the tragic, this splendid book enlarges our imagination of the range and possibilities of love. The Shadow Man,'' a memoir.