Mahler Erasures

Once a fêted literary figure, the former lover of B-list movie star Lucida, but now derelict, incontinent, asexual, ageing poet Harold Lime turns his back on material modernity, withdrawing to a basement in the university town of Cambridge, England. But human connections will prove difficult to sever completely, and he is drawn out of himself by a fox hunt saboteur (＂the sab woman＂), with whom he forms a poignant, uneasy relationship and who acts as his mutual confessor. In the isolation of his basement, Harold Lime obsessively listens to Mahler, whose nine symphonies, unfinished tenth, and Earth Songs, each corresponding to a separate chapter of this innovative poetic novel, will reawaken the sensitivities he has tried to erase, taking him back to his Australian childhood and youth, fostering a growing awareness of intertwined body and soul, of commitment and connectedness, of the ecology of rootedness and unrootedness in an unjust world.

John Kinsella is the author of many prize-winning volumes of poetry, including Peripheral Light: Selected Poems, Jam Tree Gully, and Drowning in Wheat: Selected Poems. He has written numerous works of fiction and criticism, and taught poetry and literature in the USA, UK, and Australia. He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and Professor of Literature and Environment at Curtin University. Dalkey Archive Press published his novel Lucida Intervalla in 2019.