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| spring grass at Willow Manor |
I picked up a lovely hardback copy of Janet Frame's autobiography, An Angel At My Table, at G-Dub last Friday. I fell in love with Frame several years ago, after seeing Jane Campion's film, by the same title. Today I sat down to read, and was bowled over by this brief, but stunning, first chapter:
The future accumulates like a weight upon the past. The weight upon the earliest years is easier to remove to let that time spring up like grass that has been crushed. The years following childhood become welded to their future, massed like stone, and often the time beneath cannot spring back into growth like new grass: it lies bled of its green in a new shape with those frail bloodless sprouts of another, unfamiliar time, entangled one with the other beneath the stone.
Frame's Pocket Mirror, 1967, a collection of some of her poetry is brilliant, by the way.
