May you enter now as otter without falter into water

It makes me very happy that my niece seemed so taken with her own copy of The Dark Is Rising (1973) which I inscribed for her in the December of her eleventh birthday. She liked the idea of a world springing out behind the world in winter. The Sign-seeker's chant intrigued her and she looked forward to finding it in the text. She told me she would take the book to school and read it. She was more ambivalent about Ellen Klages' The Green Glass Sea (2006) until she had taken off the dust jacket and spread out its Alamogordo landscape, at which point she declared that she would read it with her father. Earlier this year, it was still her own preference that I read to her. She seems to have leapt suddenly into books on her own terms and I can accommodate.

The thing about the Book of Gramarye as Cooper writes it is that it replicates the experience of reading, particularly as a child, where so much more is packed into the words than they strictly seem to say: But instead of presenting him with a story or instruction, the book would give simply a snatch of verse or a bright image, which somehow had him instantly in the midst of whatever experience was involved. Which is also an ideal of writing, that immersive evocation, and many of her own lines of prose achieve it.

My mother took a chance on a dress for my niece who mostly wears leggings these days and in fact she loved its embroidery of a submersible and all the creatures of the lightless depths around its hem, anglerfish and viperfish, firework jelly and bristle worm, luminously coiled tentacles of octopus and squid. An astonishing, clear world of beauty and pitilessness and bleak cold survival.