This week's releases reviewed
White Egrets
Derek Walcott
Faber, £12.99
"The perpetual ideal is astonishment," writes Walcott in his TS Eliot Prize-winning 14th collection, yet very often the predominant tone of Walcott's sequences is one of regret and not astonishment. The "egret" of the title appears again and again and echoes and is rhymed with "regret". One poem begins "in my wheelchair", another wonders whether his gift has "withered". And yet, the poet, aged 80, urges himself to "cherish the uninterrupted light". Taking us around the world to Spain, Sicily, Santa Cruz, Walcott's peripatetic life returns to The Spectre of Empireand America, where mention of Obama is made in a barber shop. An imperious tone and a rallying vituperative reaction to his "enemies" compromises Walcott's more sympathetic moments of self-scrutiny and honesty. What's admirable about this book is how it acknowledges the complexity of the poet's stance throughout his life, his ability to write the words "abandon poetry . . . because you love it", but to keep writing. Paul Perry
Beg, Borrow, Steal
Michael Greenberg
Bloomsbury, £8.99
Composed under the simple editorial dictum that each piece must "spill a drop of blood", these 44 anecdotal vignettes, written for the Times Literary Supplement, serve as self-contained, modern-day parables for urban living. Greenberg has spent a lifetime observing and absorbing the peculiarities of New York City, from its lowliest delinquents to its loftiest pretenders, living among them in his struggles to make it as a professional writer. These struggles – an endless series of dead-end jobs, early fatherhood, a mentally ill daughter – along with a number of seemingly inconsequential encounters, become the snapshots around which his intriguing and often profound musings weave. Greenberg doesn't utilise these memories as emotionally exploitative springboards, indeed his voice of recall is often cold and unfeeling; but what he does do is create an accessible grounding, a personal filter through which abstract thoughts about mental illness, identity, suffering, and death, as well as all manner of literary aspirations and illusions, can be seen in a more vivid hue. Dan Sheehan
Isa May
Margaret Forster
Vintage, £7.99
Grandmothers are something of an obsession for Isamay. It's hardly surprising as her own grandmothers, Isa and May, assisted at her birth when the ambulance didn't make it. They're like chalk and cheese, playing different grandmotherly roles – Isa is posh and rather paternal, May is rotund and earthy – and they have influenced their joint granddaughter's character in ways she might not always want to recognise. The first part of Forster's captivating novel details Isamay's struggle with research into the role of grandmothers such as Queen Victoria, George Sand and Elizabeth Fry for her MA dissertation. While this is interesting stuff, it is in the second half of the book that the story takes off as it emerges that Isamay's own family's secrets are even more intriguing than those of the women she has spent so long researching. The pace picks up towards the last 100 pages and, like a beloved granny's visit, we're a little bit sorry to see the end approaching. Claire Looby
God’s Entrepreneurs: How Irish Missionaries Tried to Change the World
Joe Humphreys
New Island, €13.99
In 1916, two young priests met in south Dublin to organise a missionary expedition to China. Unbeknownst to them, this act would usher in a new era of Irish evangelisation. Taking this "other rising" as his starting point, Joe Humphreys presents a potted history of Irish missionaries and examines the characters involved, their motivations, their experiences, their achievements and their failures. Humphreys doesn't shirk from presenting the dissenting voices who maintain that the missionary movement caused more harm than good – that they were essentially the tool of Western imperialism – and the ongoing controversy surrounding clerical abuse is tackled. Drawing on testimonies from numerous former and current missionaries, this snapshot of the human face of the Irish missions is extraordinarily revealing. Sebastian Clare
Germania: A Personal History of Germans Ancient and Modern
Simon Winder
Picador, £8.99
When Simon Winder encountered the treasures of Strasbourg Cathedral as a teenager, it was the beginning of an enduring fascination with German culture. However, Winder believes that for most people in the Anglophone world Germany is a "Dead Zone", whose reputation has never recovered from the events of the early 20th century. Germaniamakes the case for one of the great cultures of Western civilisation. The book traces the history of Germany from Tacitus's dubious portrayal of first-century tribes to the end of the Weimar Republic, when "everybody who made Germany so remarkable a place packed up". Winder's enthusiasm for Germany has brought him to every corner of the country, and the historical narrative is punctuated throughout by illuminating and often amusing first-hand experiences. These idiosyncratic touches make Germaniaan original and compelling read. Nicholas Hamilton
