Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
If the early love poems play with all the dimensions of delight and surprise that can surround physical love, the devotional poetry and prose linger on the equally diverse and complex realities of human mortality. “Donne hunted death, battled it, killed it, saluted it, threw it parties,” as Rundell splendidly puts it, and he did so in the face of his own death, using protracted illness as an occasion for intense and intricately composed meditations, and quite literally posing for a portrait in his shroud. I was completely absorbed by Super-Infinite, grabbed from the first sentence. Rundell’s erudition helps us understand Donne the thinker, her storytelling genius brings Donne the man to life, in his ‘hat big enough for a cat to sail in’. Vivid, exuberant language pulls this unpredictable, sometimes unreadable man, into our grasp. Her sizzling prose blows away the cobwebs of academia and makes this a deeply satisfying, joyful read.”
Super-infinite | Katherine Rundell | Granta Super-infinite | Katherine Rundell | Granta
What a Super-Infinite delight is this, this is the rich, textured and excellent biography that I have always wanted to read about Donne - it brings the poet, his poetry, his many lives and his turbulent Elizabethan and Stuarts times vividly to life.”
Forthcoming Events
Helen Dunmore wins posthumous Costa poetry prize". BBC News Online. 2 January 2018 . Retrieved 2 January 2018.
Super-infinite by Katherine Rundell | Waterstones
Each this and that’: his work suggests that we might voyage beyond the blunt realities of male and female. In ‘The Undertaking’, probably written around the time he met Anne, the body can take you to a grand merging: An insider’s account of the rampant misconduct within the Trump administration, including the tumult surrounding the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021.
Church Times Bookshop
England had been so shot through with religious violence in the sixteenth century that there was ample evidence to cast either side as villain. Mary I, a Catholic, had burned at least three hundred Protestants, and now with Protestant Elizabeth on the throne a concerted effort was made to channel national ire at the Catholic minority. John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs had been published in 1563, nine years before Donne’s birth, and its frontispiece illustration served well to remind those in doubt of where the country stood: on one side Catholics with bulbous noses are seized by gleeful demons, while on the other Protestants with aquiline profiles burn in the fires of persecution and rise to glory. Self-bifurcating molars and state-endorsed torture: these were the things of Donne’s early years. It was a darkly particular way to grow up; not only the terror and injustice, but the strangeness of it: how unhinged the world must feel, that you are persecuted for professing that which you believe to be the most powerful possible truth. Not ‘strange’ as in ‘unfamiliar’, for being killed for your religion was hardly new; strange as in unmoored from all sense, reason, sanity. Rundell, Katherine (28 August 2014) [first published 2013 in English as Rooftoppers by Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers]. Le ciel nous appartient. Translated by Ghez, Emmanuelle. Les Grandes Personnes. ISBN 978-2361932664. It was there that his sister Elizabeth, Donne’s mother, came to minister to him, and to secretly carry messages between Jasper and another Jesuit, William Weston. If caught, Elizabeth would not have been safe from punishment by virtue of her sex: in 1592 a Mrs Ward was hanged, drawn and quartered for helping a Catholic priest to escape his pursuers in a box; a Mrs Lynne was put to death for harbouring a priest in her home. Once, Weston disguised himself in other clothes and came with Elizabeth into the Tower, an act of astonishing bravery or stupidity or both, to go into arms’ reach of the jailers. Weston was terrified: ‘I accompanied her to the Tower, but with a feeling of great trepidation as I saw the vast battlements, and was led by the warder past the gates with their iron fastenings, which were closed behind me.’ Donne, aged twelve or thereabouts, accompanied them, perhaps as a way of making the party seem innocent and familial; he wrote, later, that he was once at ‘a Consultation of Jesuits in the Tower, in the late Queen’s time’. Heywood petitioned his one-time playmate the Queen for leniency. She granted it: he was deported to France, and from there to Rome, never returning to the country of his birth, where they were so liable to cut him into four. Donne seems to deserve the questionable recognition of being the first to so use ‘purse’ for female genitalia. The ‘exchequer’ implies that those who travel down the body must pay a tax: and ejaculate is the fitting tribute. (Men were believed to need a huge amount of blood to form sperm within the body: a ratio of 40:1.) A ‘clyster’ is an enema tube which was used to carry nutrients to the body via the rectum. The argument – that those who don’t consummate love are as mad and upside-down as those who try to nourish the body via the anus – has teeming desire in it, but very much resists the tradition of Petrarchan flowers. It refuses to be pretty, because sex is not and because Donne does not, in his love poetry, insist on sweetness: he does not play the ‘my lady is a perfect dove’ game beloved by those who came before him. What good is perfection to humans? It’s a dead thing. The urgent, the bold, the witty, the sharp: all better than perfection.
Great Deal 
New Comment