Volume 39, Number 20 · December 3, 1992
Sighing Fields
By Gabriele Annan
O Caledonia
by Elspeth Barker
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 152 pp., $18.95
Elspeth Barker is the widow of the English poet George Barker. He died last year and was reincarnated on the British stage this year as a member of London's Bohemia in the Forties. The play—Colquhoun and MacBryde, by John Byrne—is about two Scottish painters who were part of that scene. Elspeth Barker was not. She did not come into Barker's life until the early Sixties when she was a student at Oxford and fell in love with his poetry after reading some of it in a bookshop. This is her first novel, and the interviews she gave when it appeared in London last year suggest that it is autobiographical—a memoir of her childhood, except for the end (flashed forward in a prologue), when the sixteen-year-old heroine is stabbed to death.
Review, 1219 words
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