Victoria Bennett's Reading List

"Belonging is a beautiful book and also a creatively rich one. Thomson uses language as an evocation of place, and an invocation of something beyond the veil—a naming and calling down into being, if you will. It is a conjuring of place through language and landscape, revealing the connections and fragmentations it holds as it explores what it means to belong in and of a place, and the creative relationship we have with the natural landscape as artists. It is a thinking book, but it is also a meditative book of space and silence and the delicacy of feathers that asks us to be still and quiet and observant, even as the world around rushes by. As Thomson says, ‘this is what belonging is really about. It is about noticing and caring, and taking stock’."

"At the beginning of the book, as Kincaid is leaving to go in search of the elusive meconopsis (Himalayan poppy) in Nepal, she tells us she ‘had the strange sensation that I might be seeing everything in the way I was seeing it for the last time’. This sense of the journey being significant is reiterated in the repetition of the phrase, ‘I left my home’. Although the book begins with the appearance of it being a writing assignment—to go somewhere and write about it—there is a sense from the start that this is much more than that, and that this journey is life-changing. The beauty of this book is in the richness of the writing and observation, which is hardly surprising for a writer of Kincaid’s skill, but it is also a call for us to re-see, to re-enter the world around us. Kincaid brings to the writing a gardener’s eye, and language, using plant names to open up this strange yet familiar landscape. One of my favourite lines, that I kept above my desk when working on All My Wild Mothers, is Kincaid’s observation of rhododendrons, in which she is ‘reminded again that every weed can be made into a treasure in the right circumstance’. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It is a quiet book that asks us to re-see the natural world and its beauty, not in a grand way—in Kincaid’s walk it is the small flowers that are noticed not the immense landscapes—but in an intimate way, so that the awe we might feel in these strange and unknown places might equally be felt in our own back yards. The etymological root of respect is ‘to look back upon, to re-see’, and for me, this is what Among Flowers asks us, as readers and as people, to do."

"Thin Places is an exploration of boundary lines, definitions, delineations. We come up against hard edges, places of pain and wounding in which the human world, with its need to divide and claim, leaves its scars. Yet these scarred places are also places where the veil is thinnest. They are places to pass through, like the cracks in the Leonard Cohen song. There is a beautiful description of swimming with her father and listening to the curlew’s call above: “By the time my father and I reached the water’s edge, where our bodies met the outline of the world, where the waves met the land, another borderline had been wiped off the map.” This ability to pass through what separates us, and find connection, is captured with such delicacy in this book, so that the rawness of it is tempered by a sense that we are part of a larger, longer story. Nature, and connecting with nature, offers us a way of transcending, or perhaps incorporating, these divisions, so that we can see beyond them and find the commonality and connection that underlies them. And therein lies hope—not complacent, but fragile, and in need of continual renewal."

"I am fascinated by the way in which landscape holds the narratives of our absence, leaving behind the traces of our presence to tell our stories. Trace is a complex and beautiful book. Savoy explores questions about identity, race, access, and what it means to belong, through the stories that are held in the land. There is a need to name the landscape—what shapes and scars it—to reclaim its language so that these stories can be told because: “Once given breath, the names incanted spells.” This is what I love about this book. It is at once forensic and expansive, intimate and urgently political. Here, the natural landscape is both surrounding us, and part of us—its stories intrinsically part of our own, and vice versa: ‘The past and its landscapes lie close. They linger in eroded, scattered pieces, both becoming and passing into what I am, what I think we are.’"

"As with all the books I have chosen, there is a commonality of a moment where one feels not outside of the world, but part of it—and a shared wanting to re-find the moment of connection, driven by a yearning to experience that sense of belonging. I chose Upstream because Mary Oliver brings the poet’s eye and sound to her non-fiction. There is a call to be present, to be part of this natural world in the way a child is able to be; to “see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.” This desire to return to a more weightless state of being before the “heavy coats” of adulthood claim us. Upstream has the attention and urgency of a poet’s voice. It is a meditation on the natural world, but also a clarion call. In it, Oliver implores us to “teach the children … show them daisies and the pale hepatica … head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms.” Of course, this is as much a call to us as adults, in our own lives: the need to see and name and be part of the natural world, to be observant and engaged, to learn its language and its music, to let it enter our being and change us, so that we can see ourselves not as isolate and alone, but as part of something much bigger, connected to all living things. Because, as Oliver says, “Something is wrong, I know it, if I don’t keep my attention on eternity.” And the place to discover it, is in the smallest flower and seed. Too many! Recently, I have loved reading Rural: The Lives of the Working Class Countryside , by Rebecca Smith—out in June this year. I came across Rebecca’s writing a few years back, when she was a guest on the ‘ Wild Woman Web ‘ project that I curate. I found this book a fascinating and relevant read, not just for the wider conversation it engages with, but also because it spoke of my own experiences, and that of my family, who have their roots in the rural working-class world of mining and agriculture, and were forced out of their homes because of poverty. I have experienced the other side of rural life, living in social housing in a landscape where chocolate-box tourism is what most people know, and the precarity of rural living without the privilege of money or home ownership. Rural is a timely and urgent demand for attention, but it is also a celebration of the working landscape and the extraordinary ordinary life."