Six Facets Of Light

'She's a genius, I believe, because she lights up every subject she touches.' Hilary Mantel 
 
A Spectator Book of the Year 
 
Goethe claimed to know what light was. Galileo and Einstein both confessed they didn't. On the essential nature of light, and how it operates, the scientific jury is still out. There is still time, therefore, to listen to painters and poets on the subject. They, after all, spend their lives pursuing light and trying to tie it down. 
 
Six Facets of Light is a series of meditations on this most elusive and alluring feature of human life. Set mostly on the Downs and coastline of East Sussex, the most luminous part of England, it interweaves a walker's experiences of light in Nature with the observations, jottings and thoughts of a dozen writers and painters - and some scientists - who have wrestled to define and understand light. From Hopkins to Turner, Coleridge to Whitman, Fra Angelico to Newton, Ravilious to Dante, the mystery of light is teased out and pondered on. Some of the results are surprising. 
 
By using mostly notebooks and sketchbooks, this book becomes a portrait of the transitoriness, randomness, swiftness, frustrations and quicksilver beauty that are the essence of light. It is a work to be enjoyed, pondered over, engaged with, provoked by; to be packed in the rucksack of every walker heading for the sea or the hills, or to be opened to bring that outside radiance within four dark town walls. 
 
Lifescapes by Ann Wroe is coming in August 2023.

'She's a genius, I believe, because she lights up every subject she touches.' Hilary Mantel 
 
A Spectator Book of the Year 
 
Meditations on the mystery of light

She is a stylist with a wide-ranging and subtle mind. She’s a genius, I believe, because she lights up every subject she touches. Why [ is she] underrated? She is personally modest, and her work doesn’t fit into a category. She is too original for the market.

This is a wonderful book, and almost not a book at all, more a window into another mind… It is a gift Wroe shares. She registers commonplace things with poetic intensity… A rich, radiant ramble… More, please. Yet if she had written an autobiography it would almost inevitably have followed a standard pattern, wheras Six Facets of Light is unprecedented, unpredictable and unforgettable.

Ann Wroe is a versatile and adventurous writer, and Six Facets of Light is as delightful as it is unexpected. Here the world's most mysterious medium has found its most passionate hymnist.

You get a sense that Ann Wroe took great delight in writing this book… It takes an emphatically personal approach… Wroe’s quicksilver prose brings her meditations to glinting life. The attuned eye of the naturalist combines with the poet’s sharpened sensitivity in descriptions as intricately detailed as they are idiosyncratically evocative… As far as this reviewer is concerned, it put the light in delight.

[It] lays the writer bare and offers up a host of treasures, some of which will resonate and stick and become part of the reader’s own armoury of images and anecdotes… There are some wonderful pickings in this allusive, largely Christo-centric book.

A wonderful series of lyrical and luminous meditations on the mysteries of light.

[It is] deeply researched and richly peopled… A pleasurably rhapsodic investigation… Wroe’s finely wrought prose slips past so hypnotically that its meaning is not fully revealed. Lulled by its lovely rhythms and glancing impressions… This is hardly a chore, for this is surely a book to return to, its mysteries likely to reward those willing to give it the time it deserves.

The effects of Rowe’s writings are rare, beautiful and elusive – like dust suspended in sunlight.

A superb, intensely poetic collection of essays.

Wroe has become a daredevil writer… Light of myriad types may blaze in the mind’s eye of the reader…elegantly produced, lightly illustrated volume… Wroe’s style here is rhapsodic and meditative.

A passionate and meandering love letter to a natural phenomenon… Six Facets of Light reads as if you are in Wroe's mind, listening to her mosey from her own astute observations to celebrations of light by famous names. The pace of the narrative is just like going on a long, rambling walk on the South Downs Way in summer, making it a book best enjoyed at your leisure in the great outdoors.

[A] remarkable new book… Felicities of phrasing and cadence on every page…each of the six chapters offers something of the taut coherence and closeness of the structure of musical variation.

[A] remarkable new book… A love song to light… Ann Wroe is perfectly equipped to deal with this rich mix.

A unique voice in nonfiction… Six Facets of Light exists in a world of quivering immanence.

She switches from thoughts about an English lane to Coleridge, Thoreau, Samuel Palmer, larks, ragwort and Ravilious’s taste in poetry, in effortless and beguiling succession.

A wide-ranging and imaginative work of non-fiction… Never less than engaging.

Six Facets of Light is dazzlingly original.

Six Facets of Light is a book that is making me look and think more closely, and closer again. In its own way this feels like a hymn of praise, a thanksgiving and a celebration of something replete with mystery… Slowly the shackles of modern scientific thought and progress and theory slip away and I find myself observing light as if I have only just realised it existed. How clever a book has to be to achieve that.

A genre-crossing consideration of what light has meant to writers, painters and lovers of landscape.

An exquisitely written study of light in the works of various poets and painters.

A wonderful literary meditation… This book is suffused with vivid personal memory and precise, delicate observation of Nature. Wroe’s feeling for landscape is both sensitive and acute; her style is lyrical and precise.

People of faith talk a great deal about light, and we would do well to learn more about it from Wroe’s quick-eyed love of it.

Wroe passes her elusive subject, light itself, through the prism of her dazzlingly well-read mind, and the resulting rainbows fairly dance across the page… An utterly original book that will leave you, in every sense of the word, enlightened.

Ann Wroe’s Six Facets of Light is a fascinating and original meditation [on light]. Six Facets of Light is an exquisite collage of relations, a prose poem to “what escaped” absolutely everyone – and to how madly, brilliantly, they tried to “be in step”.

A Life in Songs

Francis

**LONGLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2019** 
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE CATHOLIC HERALD BOOK AWARDS 2019** 
 
A life of St Francis in verse 
 
Throughout her career Ann Wroe has constantly confounded expectations, following her own unique path. Now, in Francis, she turns to verse to tell the life of St Francis of Assisi. This is a sequence only Ann Wroe could write, combining a troubadour's musicality with full grasp of the moment, and a luminous sense of Francis as both myth and man, across history and culture, in nature and community. It is a remarkable and immensely beautiful book. 
 
St Francis was one of the most compelling spirits the world has seen. He was also a poet, a musician and a dancer. His world was coloured by troubadour lays, brightened by birdsong, ordered by the bells and chants of the Church and transfigured by the angel-lyres he heard about him. For Ann Wroe, this seems a good reason to write his life in songs. It is also an excuse to record, in songs, the many ways his presence and his music still linger round us. They surprise us in chance encounters in city streets; they waylay us amid the humdrum banalities of working life; they persist in the beauties of nature. Great spirits never leave us. They echo on and on.

The most beautiful book I have read in a long time.

This passionate series of engagements with the life of St Francis will stay in my mind for a very long time – I hope forever… This is a poet with a distinctive voice, a command of form and a lightness of touch matched by a depth of heart… Wroe so triumphantly [exercises the imagination] in poem after poem.

[Ann Wroe] turned her formidable gifts to the saint of Assisi in Francis: A Life In Songs. It has a remarkable structure… (of which I am sure the saint himself would approve). It is a book which, written by one individual, manages many voices, and is almost choral in its glory.

In our secular age, the book seems literarily heretical – triumphantly unfashionable. But do not imagine it to be conventionally devout. It does what poetry is meant to do, and seldom does: it takes you to another place while making you reflect on what it is to be here… Even as a non-believer, you want to hold on to this writing, as if to a book of prayer.

A superb verse biography of St Francis, by the queen of the unexpected life-in-brief… This is a book to press into the hands of anyone who has decided they have given up on “difficult modern poetry”. It’s so quietly traditional, so unashamedly lovely, that it seems almost radical… [Wroe] recalls John Clare in her close attentiveness to the natural world and the way she conveys a sense of spontaneous joy.

This extraordinary book… is quite haunting… [Francis] is one of the saints who is appealing even in a secular age… this isn’t a book just for the faithful; it’s for lovers of poetry in life and literature... a wonderful little book.

Each poem is beautiful. The book as a whole knocked me for six.

Ms Wroe's is a rare and beautiful telling. She takes the miracles of St Francis and sings them in four keys.

The ever-inventive biographer [Ann Wroe] retells the life of Francis of Assisi in deft, lyrical rhyming verse.

The poems themselves are beautiful and clever… Wroe is at her exquisite best when directly tackling the most sacred of Christian images.

[Wroe] captures here the essential spirit of the saint – himself a poet after all, whose work has never died – making this a delight to read. A book not to be missed.

This is a book full of complex engagements with the word and the flesh, and the counterpointed rhythms of the sacred and the secular. Wroe’s book is a praise song, vindicating the worlds beyond our rationalist compass.

The spiritual is vivid through quality and vitality in this poetry. Wroe’s writing method is incarnational, translating the apparently mundane into rich parables.

An elegant hardback with ambitions beyond the poetry shelves… Ann Wroe’s unusual and impressive book is less a Life of Francis than a series of…epiphanies and personal revelations inspired by his imagined company.

The Song of Life

Orpheus

For at least two and a half millennia, the figure of Orpheus has haunted humanity. Half-man, half-god, musician, magician, theologian, poet and lover, his story never leaves us. He may be myth, but his lyre still sounds, entrancing everything that hears it: animals, trees, water, stones, and men. 
 
In this extraordinary work Ann Wroe goes in search of Orpheus, from the forests where he walked and the mountains where he worshipped to the artefacts, texts and philosophies built up round him. She traces the man, and the power he represents, through the myriad versions of a fantastical life: his birth in Thrace, his studies in Egypt, his voyage with the Argonauts to fetch the Golden Fleece, his love for Eurydice and journey to Hades, and his terrible death. 
 
We see him tantalising Cicero and Plato, and breathing new music into Gluck and Monteverdi; occupying the mind of Jung and the surreal dreams of Cocteau; scandalising the Fathers of the early Church, and filling Rilke with poems like a whirlwind. He emerges as not simply another mythical figure but the force of creation itself, singing the song of light out of darkness and life out of death.

A powerful and poetic work of history on the figure of Orpheus: his life and myth, and his representation and imagining from the sixth century BC to the present day. 
 
Winner of the Criticos Prize 2011.

This insightful and visionary study, treading a perfect line between imagination and scholarship, is as readable and necessary as a fine novel. Ted Hughes, another mythographer, would have loved it

Ann Wroe has an acute eye for pastoral detail...and takes a novelist's care in exploring character and evoking atmosphere... [Orpheus] will leave you dancing

This is a most remarkable book...  most rewarding... [a book] that will surely enhance Ann Wroe's already considerable reputation

Orpheus: The Song of Life is a book of wonders, learned, playful and passionate...For all her studies, her wide reading, her historical dilligence, Wroe's method is instinctive, as she searches for inspirations and connections across the millennia

Curious... there are moments of sublime writing

This one really is a song ... It evokes, but it also embodies, its subject

Manages, in prose both rhapsodic and precise, to convey the allure of the legendary bard from ancient Greece to modern times. This myth has flowered into truth

Life in a Partitioned Medieval Town

A Fool And His Money

Few books have captured the atmosphere of daily medieval life as well or as movingly as A Fool and His Money. Rodez, in southern France, was divided for centuries by a feud between two masters. This partitioned town thus acquired two distinct cultures. The story focuses on the strange case of Peyre Marques, a merchant who forgets where he has buried his gold. To read A Fool and His Money is like opening a shutter on to a sunlit medieval street teeming with characters, talk and noise - all coloured with the vibrancy of truth.  --'Wroe is an excellent historian and an engaging writer with a beady eye for detail and an attractive turn of phrase. Best of all, she conveys a true feeling for the recreation of period and persons and place' Daily Telegraph --'History lives best when it is loved, and nobody who reads this book can doubt the author's love of her subject' Sunday Telegraph

'Popular history at the highest level' Independent

The Poet's Search for Himself

Being Shelley

Four questions consumed Shelley and coloured everything he wrote. Who, or what, was he? What was his purpose? Where had he come from? And where was he going? He sought the answers in order to free and empower not only himself, but the whole human race. His revolution would shatter the earth's illusions, shock men and women with new visions, find true Love and Liberty - and take everyone with him. 
 
Ann Wroe's book takes the life of one of England's greatest poets and turns it inside out, bringing us the life of the poet rather than the man. The result is a journey that is as passionate and exhilarating as it is astonishing. This is Shelley as he has never been seen before.

A startlingly original new look at Shelley, a stunning work of scholarship and imagination by one of the most remarkable non-fiction writers in Britain.

Indispensable... vital... startlingly good and original... Wroe is a writer of unusual excellence and a reader of exceptional sensitivity

Being Shelley becomes a mirror of the poet himself - whimsical, various, subtle, and iridescent and evanescent. That is, no doubt, the book that Wroe proposed to write and she has succeeded

Fascinating, experimental... A voyage into the mind that wrote the poetry and struggled with ideas, some mad, some sane, all interesting... As a history of how an unusual creative mind worked, it offers a new departure in the way biography is written

Amazing new book on the poet... Abandoning the usual conventions, she relates Shelley's life in an incomplete and non chronological way... It's a bold and risky concept and she pulls it off brilliantly... this really does convey the poet's mind and the excitement of reading the original ... Ann Wroe's wonderful, effortlessly eloquent book is like sharing a corner of his mind

It is the closest thing to a masterclass with Shelley himself

A wonderful achievement... At any single point the narrative is aware of the entire trajectory of Shelley's mind and career, so thorough is the assimilation of his intellect, imagination and emotional life. It succeeds wonderfully in getting inside what it was like to 'be' PBS'

Her collage shimmers like reflections on water, trembles, dissolves and returns to form under the action of an invisible breeze or current... Wroe's emotional responses to her research are palpable

Ann Wroe wanting to do Shelley's exasperating spirit justice, sets herself a challenge... She persuades us; we read Shelley with new eyes, freed of the gossip of conventional biography and academic doggedness... she reads process back into the work, occasions back into the poems. And she gives us what we need to read the work whole

There is biographical information in the book - a wondrous, copious flow of it

Perkin

The story of Perkin Warbeck is one of the most compelling mysteries of English history. A young man suddenly emerged claiming to be Richard of York, the younger of the Princes in the Tower. As such, he tormented Henry VII for eight years. He tried three times to invade England and behaved like a prince. Officially, however, he was proclaimed to be Perkin Warbeck, the son of a Flemish boatman. A diplomatic pawn, he was used by the greatest European rulers of the age for their own purposes. All who dealt with him gave him the identity they wished him to have: either the Duke of York or a jumped-up lad from Flanders. It is possible that he was neither. It is also possible that, by the end, even he did not really know who he was. In Perkin Ann Wroe tells again a marvellous tale that is on the brink of being forgotten. She also dissects the official cover story. In doing so she delves into the secret corners of European history and produces a portrait of the late fifteenth century that is breathtaking in its detail.

An extraordinary work of history by the author of Pilate.

Extraordinary... Perkin is a masterclass in how biography can breathe life into the darkest and most inert pockets of the past

An unforgettable book... The best book I have ever reviewed in these pages

Gripping... With Perkin, Wroe has breathed new life into an obscure figure

A book that captures the temper of an age

Ann Wroe

A Biographer’s Search for the Soul

The acclaimed biographer and obituarist for The Economist reflects on a career spent pursuing life and capturing it on the page 
 
*** A FINANCIAL TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES AND TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT BOOK OF 2023*** 
 
'Lifescapes is the universe in miniature' 
DAILY TELEGRAPH 
 
'She's a genius, I believe' 
HILARY MANTEL, author of Wolf Hall 
 
'What is life?' asked the poet Shelley, and could not come up with an answer. Scientists, too, for all their understanding of how life manifests, thrives and evolves, have still not plumbed that fundamental question. Yet biographers and obituarists continue to corral lives in a few columns, or a few hundred pages, aware all the time how fleeting and elusive their subject is. 
 
In this dazzlingly original blend of memoir, biography, observation and poetry, Ann Wroe reflects on the art and impossibility of capturing life on the page. Through her experiences and those of others, through people she has known, studied or merely glimpsed in windows, she movingly explores what makes a life and how that life lingers after. 
 
Animated by Wroe's rare imagination, eye for the telling detail, and the wit, beauty and clarity of her writing, Lifescapes is a luminous, deeply personal answer to Shelley's question.

Ann Wroe

Lifescapes

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