Mary Swann

[dotinthesky]

Although these questions are for K., feel free to answer them too if you have also read Carol Shields' Mary Swann:

1. Of the four main characters, which one was your favourite? Which one was your least favourite? Which one would you enjoy hanging out with?

2. Of the fragments we read from Mary Swann's poetry, together with the final poem, what do you make of her as a poet? (perhaps you can imagine here that you were also attending the symposium.)

3. What do you think of Mary Swann the person, and of her murder?

4. Sarah Maloney says at one point that women carry all their lives the "full freight of their mother's words." Can this be applied to Frances Swann?

5. Rose says, with relation to the Swann museum exhibition, that "the charm of falsehood is not that it distorts reality, but that it creates reality afresh." How do you think this statement fits in with the characters, Mary Swann's poetry, the book itself?

Comments

[rag-and-bone.livejournal.com]

2. Of the fragments we read from Mary Swann's poetry, together with the final poem, what do you make of her as a poet? (perhaps you can imagine here that you were also attending the symposium.)

i actually liked her quite a bit. i think that cruzzi and hilde did a wonderful job of picking the words they did in places where they weren't sure, too. the poem everyone kept quoting about blood was really compelling to me--it was sparse and serious and had a sense of foreboding about it. i liked that swann's poetry was so short, i liked that it dealt with such large subject matter and i liked that her vocabulary was essential. i know it seems obvious (even the book pointed it out with disdain) but i like her for the same reasons that i like emily dickinson. she wrote such simple, true pieces about things that, from the outside, it would seem impossible for her to grasp/understand, much less analyze the marrow of. i would read mary swann's poetry. in fact, i wish carol shields would write a companion volume of it. that would be pretty genius, though the time has probably passed.

[commonpeople.livejournal.com]

I went through conflicting feelings about her poetry. At first, I liked it and wanted to read more; but then I got suspicious that it was a joke on the part of Shields and that i was being suckered in with the rest of them - was it really that good? But I nevertheless felt compelled and mystified every time snippets were given, reading them many times over in order to comprehend what Swann was trying to say, that I think my conclusion is that I liked the poems too.

Emily Dickinson rocks. She was my fave in high school (must revisit her!)