MUSTREADS Out now in paperback
THE HURLEY MAKER’S SON by Patrick Deeley (Transworld)
THE awardwinning Irish poet Patrick Deeley grew up on a small farm near Loughrea, Co Galway.
His father Larry had a carpentry workshop where he turned the wood he had cut and seasoned himself into hurleys.
Patrick and his four siblings — Ena, Bridie, Simon and Vincent — grew up in the Fifties and Sixties in a rural Ireland poised on the cusp of change.
Oil lamps were being replaced by electricity, the traditions of storytelling by television, the old turns of speech by standard English and the wild landscape by lead and zinc mines.
This haunting memoir is a vivid evocation of a vanished way of life which Patrick left behind when he went to train as a teacher in Dublin, and is also a tender elegy to his parents, who loved their children dearly, but rarely told them so.
WHITE SANDS by Geoff Dyer (Canongate)
FOR Geoff Dyer, all paradises are tainted. He is never happier than when noticing the disappointing detail in a glamorous destination, and his collection of essays is a virtuoso exercise in anti-travel writing.
A trip to French Polynesia to write about the artist Gauguin is beset with misfortune: Dyer loses his research material en route and succumbs to heat rash.
Gauguin’s grave proves ‘pretty much a non-- experience’ and the whole project proves an exercise in waiting to go elsewhere.
A journey to the Arctic to see the Northern Lights ‘was like a lifetime of disappointment compressed into less than a week’.
Driving to El Paso with his wife, he picks up a hitchhiker, only to see a sign warning motorists against doing any such thing.
For anyone weary of the syrupy superlatives of conventional travel writing, Dyer’s wry, intelligent prose, riffing jazzily on art, philosophy and jeopardy, is the perfect antidote.
THE LONG, LONG LIFE OF TREES by Fiona Stafford (Yale)
EVEN in the most arid of urban environments, you are never far from a tree.
As Fiona Stafford points out in her glorious celebration of them, the table you dine at, the chair you sit on, the book you read, the wooden spoon with which you stir your cooking — all once had roots and branches where birds sang and insects burrowed.
Trees haunt our spiritual and imaginative lives, too, from the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden and Yggdrasil, the mythical ash tree that connects the nine worlds of Norse cosmology, to the mistletoe beloved of the druids and the ancient yew trees, some older than Stonehenge, from which the archers of Agincourt made their bows.
Stafford devotes a chapter each to the most beloved of our trees, including the oak, ash, elm and apple. When you have finished reading, she hopes that you will go out and plant a tree of your own.