Dressing up Box
Publisher: Comma Poetry
Published: 2019
Language: eng
Number of pages: 247
ISBN-13: 9781912697212
Subjects: English literature
Description: "Against the backdrop of war, a group of children barricade themselves in an abandoned townhouse, cherishing what&#x2019;s left of their innocence with the help of a dressing-up box... A deep-sea diver takes to being suspended for hours at a time on the end of a line not long enough to reach the seabed... An aging widower moves into the shed at the end of his garden to plan out his &#x2018;endgame&#x2019; surrounded by a lifetime&#x2019;s worth of hoarded curiosities... The characters in David Constantine&#x2019;s fifth collection are all in pursuit of sanctuary; the violence and mendacity of the outside world presses in from all sides &#x2013; be it the ritualised brutality suffered by children at a Catholic orphanage, or the harrowing videos shared among refugees of an atrocity &#x2018;back home&#x2019;. In each case, the characters withdraw into themselves, sometimes abandoning language altogether, until something breaks and they can retreat no further. In Constantine&#x2019;s luminous prose, these stories capture such moments in all their clarity; moments when an entire life seems to hang in the balance, the past&#x2019;s betrayals exposed, its ghosts dragged out into the daylight; moments in which the possibility of defiance and redemption is everything."--Provided by publisher.