Pastoral elegy is not what you expect to find in a collection of short stories, but then Ali Smith is a wonderfully unexpected writer.
In the first story, ‘The Beholder’, which was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Award, a patient develops a growth on her chest — ‘woody, dark browny, greeny, sort-of circular, ridged a bit like bark, about the size of a two pence piece’. The doctors are mystified, but a gypsy recognises it as ‘a young licitness’, a pun of mishearing later revealed to be ‘a Young Lycidas’, a rose named after Milton’s pastoral elegy. The rose soon ‘opens into a layering of itself, a dense-packed grandeur that holds until it spills’ — a thing of beauty, conjured in Smith’s dazzling prose, which comforts its beholder in the wake of her father’s death.
The following two stories are loosely fictionalised biographies of the Scottish poet Olive Fraser and the Scottish critic Helena Shire.
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