{"id":288,"date":"2014-03-05T23:16:37","date_gmt":"2014-03-05T23:16:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/?p=288"},"modified":"2014-03-05T23:31:32","modified_gmt":"2014-03-05T23:31:32","slug":"marriage-for-beginners-reviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/?p=288","title":{"rendered":"Marriage for Beginners: Reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From Geoff Page,\u00a0<em>The Canberra Times,\u00a0<\/em>February 13, 2010:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u00a0As a poet [Bateson] has a novelist\u2019s eye for character and narrative development \u2026 she is never less than accessible. Her subjects are taken directly from everyday experience and then energised with metaphorical language.\u00a0<em>Marriage for Beginners<\/em>\u00a0is most memorable perhaps for its half-dozen or so love poems \u2026 here Bateson manages to combine the intensity of a sometimes reckless sexual desire with a certain \u2018recollected in tranquility\u2019 feeling which serves to generate both perspective and memorability.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>From Bronwyn Lea,\u00a0<em>Westerly<\/em>, 2010<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Speaking of luck, Catherine Bateson takes up the theme and spins it on its head\u2026 Feeling distinctly unlucky \u2013 the speaker in the unlikely guise of \u2018a day\u2019 \u2013 shows, as do many of Bateson\u2019s poems, that poetry and comedy are good bedfellows.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>From Heather Taylor Johnson,\u00a0<em>Wet Ink<\/em>, 2010<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Every review of Catherine Bateson should begin with Catherine Bateson grew up in a second hand bookstore because that just might get the point across that this woman really knows writing. Her latest collection of poetry, Marriage for Beginners, is her third in as many decades, and though she\u2019s put out a number of novels for children and young adults (some winning major awards), fans of Bateson\u2019s poetry should be cheering aloud for the end of the eleven-year wait.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><p>Marriage is heavily scented with everything female: position as daughter, reactions to motherhood, memories of a mother, a daughter and lovers. The poems for lovers are my favorites. The opening poem \u2018Learning to Swim\u2019 captures the rapture of a woman\u2019s first experience with \u2018good\u2019 sex:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I\u2019d always had boys before, stumbling through their paces<br \/>\nlights off and everything, even their knees, strange in the dark.<br \/>\nThis was so different, like learning to swim<br \/>\nafter years of walking your hands in the shallows<br \/>\nfooling nobody.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>While \u2018Love poem\u2019 manages to find a bablance between the rhapsody and comfort of an enduring partnership. Perhaps the success of these poems, and so many others in the collection, can be attributed to the personal nature of the narrative and thus the emotion captured, both raw and pulsing. . . Marriage for beginners is a gift. If I read \u2018Sailing on the grey\u2019 after breakfast, lunch and dinner, it wouldn\u2019t be enough.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From Geoff Page,\u00a0The Canberra Times,\u00a0February 13, 2010: \u00a0As a poet [Bateson] has a novelist\u2019s eye for character and narrative development \u2026 she is never less than accessible. Her subjects are taken directly from everyday experience and then energised with metaphorical language.\u00a0Marriage for Beginners\u00a0is most memorable perhaps for its half-dozen or so love poems \u2026 here [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=288"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":289,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288\/revisions\/289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johnleonardpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}