"A word after a word after a word is power" - Margaret Atwood

BRIDGET WHELAN

A blog for readers and writers

A blog about the stories we tell each other and how we tell them...

Thursday, 24 June 2010

BITING BACK when you hate the review

Terry Eagleton is highly critical of the poet Craig Raine's first novel, Heartbreak in this week's London Review of Books. Eagleton - the Professor of Cultural theory at the National University of Ireland - wrote: 
the publishers have represented it as a novel, rather as Jedward are represented as singers...The description is true but misleading...
Raine is most famous for his 1970s poem A Martian Sends A Postcard Home (which I use regularly in my creative writing classes and seems very popular in American High Schools judging from the number of youtube films on the subject). His response to the damning review?
I really enjoyed not reading Terry Eagleton's review almost as much as he enjoyed not reading my novel

No comments: