![]() Porter has an amazing facility with voice. The book is divided into sections titled ‘Dad’, ‘Boys’, and ‘Crow’, and it’s in the various voices of these three characters that Porter’s mix of styles finds its justification. ![]() Hughes’ mythical vision of some apocalyptic, undying bird is gone and replaced by an altogether more human, more suburban evil, that cradles with one hand and chokes with the other. If capital-c Crow sounds like a familiar beast, that’s because he is explicitly the same Crow from Ted Hughes’ Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow, though Porter’s incarnation is quite a different beast. ![]() What I can say for certain is that it’s a fantastic book that tells the story of a father struggling to raise his two boys in the wake of their mother’s death when Crow arrives, offering either absolution or something altogether stranger and darker. Max Porter’s debut book, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, is part novel, part poetry collection, and also neither of these things. I’m not inherently opposed to formal experimentation, but this description tends to be a euphemism for works that are puffed-up with self importance, endlessly pointing to themselves as ‘literary’ and ‘experimental’. Whenever I receive a book recommendation that comes with the claim that it ‘splits the difference between a poem and a novel’, something inside of me groans. ![]()
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