Just when I thought I wasn't going to get a Valenine this year...

...I think the ribbon needs changing though, so every cloud etc.

Le Retour of The Two Islands Review

When you've edited a review as long as I have, it's difficult not to become jaded. If truth be told, in recent years I have felt myself fading away from the high standards I have declared myself dedicated to diffuse, just as George, despite his best intentions, had done before me. The depressing decline in literary standards has led me, an austere, reclusive man, to spend many a night in my peasant apartment on the Île Saint-Louis, leaning perilously on the wrought iron balcony railing, after I have poured myself one Jean Gauthier too many, watching the Seine drift along past the Quai d'Orleans and the rue le Regrattier. 

If my own career as a novelist has been derailed by a lack of compelling ideas, appalling sentence construction. and sub-par grammar, I have always considered myself a keen spotter of talent in others. Thus you can imagine my excitement when my Portuguese awoke me at 14.00 this afternoon with a badly facsimiled copy of W Curran's tribute to Valentine's Day. It is as if Wisława Szymborska had been recast as a penniless Irish fishwife! 

Her words brought me back to the golden years of middle age, when I palled around with the Harry Gallaghers up on the Quai de Bourbon. How dear. darling, Louisa, Harry's wife, with her fine, shapely legs, and aquiline nose, would have been moved by these thoughtful words! It is difficult to imagine the pleasure she would have taken from the author's daring dismissal of the bourgeois requirement for a rhyming poem to scan, not to mention it's daring recasting of cliches. I particularly like the lines:

"I wait all day with bated breath,

For my bouquet I'm left bereft,

How can we miss what we've never had,

It doesn't really make me mad"

It reminds me of the last time I saw Louisa before she took a large bottle of aspirin, a sheaf of eight or nine sleeping suppositories, a bottle of Nembutal, and a half bottle of vodka. She told me that she had always loved me more than Harry, and wanted to have an affair with me. I calmly informed her that I couldn't begin to think of her in a romantic context, and she took it badly. If only she had read Curran's poem, she might have known not to get mad about what she could have never had, and moved on with her life, instead of ending her days in the American Hospital. 

Then it occurs to me: I must bring this poem to others, so that new lives may be saved anew. I tell my Portuguese to telex the printers in Eindhoven. 

The Two Islands Review is back!

By Jack Hartley