By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

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Brigid Brophy's intro celebrates Smart's juxtaposition of high-flown dramatic romance and the mundane, whereby a person can be a middle class housewife and Isolde at the same time: “it is tomorrow's breakfast rather than the future's blood that dictates fatal forbearance”.

It is the juicy sound that runs, bubbles over, that intoxicates til I can hardly follow," she wrote in her diary of that first encounter. In the early chapters there were still things I didn't 'get' as much as the above paragraph, I half-lost them in the emotional melee (that she'd be jealous of him pulling a boy; possibly carrying on in front of his wife, who was definitely not agreeable to it – biographical details are hazy on that, and this is poetry, not straight autobio after all). It's a prose poem that sings in places, but mostly whines; a consequence of the poet choosing a manchild as her muse. Para ella era inconcebible pensar en esconder su pasión, amar a distancia, o llegar a un compromiso que satisficiera a los biempensantes. I am shot with wounds which have eyes that see a world of sorrow, always to be, panoramic and unhealable, and mouths that hang unspeakable in the sky of blood.

They never married but Elizabeth bore George Barker four children and their relationship provided the impassioned inspiration for one of the most moving and immediate chronicles of a love affair ever written - By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept . Elizabeth Smart did fall in love with English poet George Barker, and she did sponsor he and his wife to stay with her in California during World War II. This epiphany would eventually bring them together, and even though he was married, they would begin a love affair that would last for years, produce four children, and cause untold grief and heartache for everyone involved. The reviews and comments posted on this site reflect the opinions of individual posters and do not reflect the views of Cannonball Read.

There only hitch in this storybook romance is that George Barker is married to another woman, whom he stays married too. In the novel, the multiple pregnancies are reduced to one, other details of the affair are omitted, and the narrator's lover is barely described, as Smart focuses on her own experience and feelings, which was rare for the male-centric literature of that day. Y en cada una de esas etapas, esta tormenta de emociones queda enmarcada dentro de un triángulo amoroso omnipresente, en el que la relación entre ambas mujeres –la rivalidad, la admiración, la culpa– es tan importante como las otras dos. Er, yes, because the potential to access political power and publishing obviously stopped the overblown passions of Alfred de Musset, and Verlaine and Rimbaud, and the young Goethe. Y un día encuentras un libro que te hace ver que lo que te contaron puede que no sea siempre cierto, pero a veces puede ser cierto.

Elizabeth Smart's novella is an impressionistic "prose poem" short of conventional plot but full of striking language - a book more about feeling than action, but something of a gem nonetheless. Se suele decir que una imagen vale más que mil palabras, y quizá la única manera de expresar una pasión tan profunda como la que sintió Elizabeth Smart sea emplear imágenes, aunque sean imágenes formadas por palabras.

From the corner where the hill turns from the sea and goes into the secrecy and damp air of forbidden things, I stand disinterestedly examining the instruments and the pattern of my fate. I was young, in my second year of university, in the process of having my heightened idea of self which seems to cling to all 19 ( or there abouts) year-olds dismantled very abruptly. But with the disillusion of everything that I believed I knew or know or thought, comes (this is a constant becoming, and not something that has finished with me yet) everything that I could not possibly have known and a learning and a discovery. What hand of fate placed this book in my path after I'd finished a long series of Muriel Spark books I do not know.And the subject matter--obsessive love--is conveyed with the sort of honesty that's humbling ("honesty" actually feels pretty pallid when applied to Elizabeth Smart, but I can't think of a word that means "beyond honesty").

This is undoubtedly a beautifully written book, and as much of the praise of it points out, it feels very timeless. Note: The rest of this review has been withheld due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. I realised that throughout their relationship, the idea of Barker was as important to her as the reality: the journey through the storm was as important as the arrival at his door. Explores a passion between a man and two women, one of them his wife – a love despairing and triumphant upon which the reader may gaze, awed, appalled, or even, perhaps, envious.I never understood my mother's love for my father," their son, Christopher Barker, wrote in this newspaper. Thousands of miles away, Barker was teaching at a university in Japan at the time, but that day in Better Books, on London's Charing Cross Road, Smart came across his poem Daedalus and was instantly smitten. It seems to me the perfect description not only of that work but of the great spark and flame of their relationship.