Böcker av Graham Davidson

Mid-19th Century, Australia, Blue Mountains.Ten-year-old Patsy rescues what she believes to be a fairy from a spider web, triggering a sequence of events that challenges everything she's ever believed about herself and the world around her.A perilous journey into the realm of an evil spider queen brings three generations of witches together. On their own, their power can be contained. Combined, they're more powerful than any of them could have imagined.In the ensuing years, Patsy will find herself travelling through myriad crossworlds-universes that coexist with our own-and battle against creatures that defy existence, including giant catapillars excreting acidic venom and god-like beings whose motives are never what they seem. She'll be forced to mature into a role she never wished for, and which her mother had tried for years to protect her from, as the inevitability of her destiny unfolds.

From its first publication, what is now known as the Immortality Ode has been praised for the magnificence of its verse and disparaged for its paucity of meaning - the ¿immortality¿ of the subtitle unsubstantiated, and the ¿recollections¿ insubstantial. Yet Wordsworth¿s idea of immortality has clear precedents in the seventeenth century, and recollections of childhood are Traherne¿s starting point for the recovery of a lost vision comparable to Wordsworth¿s. Via the power of the imagination, or reason, they believed they could experience a renewed vision that both termed variously Paradise, or infinity, or immortality. Graham Davidson traces the origins of Wordsworth¿s poetic impetus to his resistance to the Cartesian division between mind and nature, first adumbrated by the Cambridge Platonists. If reunited, Paradise was regained, but this personal trajectory was tempered by a deep sympathy for the woes of mortal life. Davidson explores the consequent dialogue through some of Wordsworth¿s best-known poems, at the heart of which is the Ode. In the last section, he demonstrates how Wordsworth¿s publishing history led the Victorians and modernists to misinterpret his work; if one considers Eliot¿s Four Quartets as odes, facing several of the same problems as did Wordsworth, there is some irony in Eliot¿s dismissal of the Immortality Ode as ¿verbiage¿.