Of late, I realize, I've only updated my livejournal to post writing news; and this post is no exception. My life has been so consumed by academia that I've barely written more than lyrics and some fragments of story in the last month, and I've had to go cold turkey on silly quizzes. This will change, I hope, before the end of the semester. But right now, I'm reduced to praying that whatever reviewers praise wasn't a flash in the pan: I can't believe how much more free time I had as an undergraduate than a graduate student. Life must get better after exams. It must. Dear God, it must.
That said, I finally tracked down the Locus review. (Thank you,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
hans_the_bold and News Haven.) It's by Rich Horton. And it makes me extremely happy.
Singing Innocence and Experience, Sonya Taaffe. (Prime, 0-8095-4479-2, $17.95, 272pp, tpb) June 2005. Cover by John Williams Waterhouse. [Order from Prime Books, PO Box 301, Holicong PA 18928; www.primebooks.net.]
Sonya Taaffe is a writer of some of the most intense and image-drenched prose around. Line by long, exquisite line her writing is desperate and involving. She made her first major impression on me as a poet—and she may be the best poet working in the SF genre right now. But she has also been publishing short stories all over the place, often on mythical or traditional fantastical themes but always individual and always centered on a central character's obsession. In his introduction Tim Pratt suggests Theodore Sturgeon among others as an influence, and that seems apposite: not just in her thematic concerns but in the desperate feel to some of the prose. If there is a fault it is that, read back to back, Taaffe's voice begins to sound bit too similar story to story, the emotional register seems to be always pitched the same. (And here a look at Sturgeon—a writer who could and did vary his register greatly—is instructive.) But this is a mild fault—taken each by itself the stories are moving jewels, and Taaffe seems a writer poised to grow into her powers (her latest stories, not included here, seem to me to be her best yet).
Singing Innocence and Experience is an excellent introduction to Taaffe's work. It collects 16 stories and 7 poems, dating back to 2001. The poems are characteristic of her work, with the same long lines and sharp images as the prose, and with complete and logical sentences: not just syntactical elements thrown against the wall, as with some poets.
My favorites among the stories include "Constellations, Conjunctions," an early piece that I was lucky enough to discover in the tiny 'zine Maelstrom (to which, I should note, I was also a contributor). It's a sweet and mysterious story about a young man, an astronomer, who falls for a young woman significantly named Stella, with a curious quality to her skin. "Featherweight" is another pure love story (many of these are love stories, and emotionally true love stories, of one sort or another), about a man looking for a heart for a mysterious creature—woman? Machine? Alien? No prizes for guessing where he finds it, but the story gets to its conclusion in a lovely fashion. Back to back stories deal with people obsessed with the sea. "Till Human Voices Wake Us" is about a teenaged boy staying for the summer with his older sister who loves a merman; and "A Ceiling of Amber, a Pavement of Pearl" concerns a woman commissioned to write a song for a man trying to find again the city under the sea he saw while drowning.
For the most part these stories are set in what seems to be our world, our time, though the slant viewpoint, and the gorgeous prose, give the settings a fantastical gloss. But occasionally Taaffe takes us elsewhere, as with "Time May Be," set in strange Aruis, and telling of a mysterious woman, Josza, perhaps not human, who takes in a lost young man. Images of the tarot mix with slow revelations of Josza's past and of the geography of Aruis.
I don't have the space to describe each story, but each is a heady brew. The poems are similarly striking. As I said, perhaps the stories cluster around too similar emotional poles, and perhaps at times they go on a bit too long. But they remain fascinating, and the collection is at once fine work and a promise of even better work to come.
(Cut for thoughts and quotation.)
( Read more... )
That said, I finally tracked down the Locus review. (Thank you,
hans_the_bold and News Haven.) It's by Rich Horton. And it makes me extremely happy.Singing Innocence and Experience, Sonya Taaffe. (Prime, 0-8095-4479-2, $17.95, 272pp, tpb) June 2005. Cover by John Williams Waterhouse. [Order from Prime Books, PO Box 301, Holicong PA 18928; www.primebooks.net.]
Sonya Taaffe is a writer of some of the most intense and image-drenched prose around. Line by long, exquisite line her writing is desperate and involving. She made her first major impression on me as a poet—and she may be the best poet working in the SF genre right now. But she has also been publishing short stories all over the place, often on mythical or traditional fantastical themes but always individual and always centered on a central character's obsession. In his introduction Tim Pratt suggests Theodore Sturgeon among others as an influence, and that seems apposite: not just in her thematic concerns but in the desperate feel to some of the prose. If there is a fault it is that, read back to back, Taaffe's voice begins to sound bit too similar story to story, the emotional register seems to be always pitched the same. (And here a look at Sturgeon—a writer who could and did vary his register greatly—is instructive.) But this is a mild fault—taken each by itself the stories are moving jewels, and Taaffe seems a writer poised to grow into her powers (her latest stories, not included here, seem to me to be her best yet).
Singing Innocence and Experience is an excellent introduction to Taaffe's work. It collects 16 stories and 7 poems, dating back to 2001. The poems are characteristic of her work, with the same long lines and sharp images as the prose, and with complete and logical sentences: not just syntactical elements thrown against the wall, as with some poets.
My favorites among the stories include "Constellations, Conjunctions," an early piece that I was lucky enough to discover in the tiny 'zine Maelstrom (to which, I should note, I was also a contributor). It's a sweet and mysterious story about a young man, an astronomer, who falls for a young woman significantly named Stella, with a curious quality to her skin. "Featherweight" is another pure love story (many of these are love stories, and emotionally true love stories, of one sort or another), about a man looking for a heart for a mysterious creature—woman? Machine? Alien? No prizes for guessing where he finds it, but the story gets to its conclusion in a lovely fashion. Back to back stories deal with people obsessed with the sea. "Till Human Voices Wake Us" is about a teenaged boy staying for the summer with his older sister who loves a merman; and "A Ceiling of Amber, a Pavement of Pearl" concerns a woman commissioned to write a song for a man trying to find again the city under the sea he saw while drowning.
For the most part these stories are set in what seems to be our world, our time, though the slant viewpoint, and the gorgeous prose, give the settings a fantastical gloss. But occasionally Taaffe takes us elsewhere, as with "Time May Be," set in strange Aruis, and telling of a mysterious woman, Josza, perhaps not human, who takes in a lost young man. Images of the tarot mix with slow revelations of Josza's past and of the geography of Aruis.
I don't have the space to describe each story, but each is a heady brew. The poems are similarly striking. As I said, perhaps the stories cluster around too similar emotional poles, and perhaps at times they go on a bit too long. But they remain fascinating, and the collection is at once fine work and a promise of even better work to come.
(Cut for thoughts and quotation.)
( Read more... )
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