Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think: Selected Essays by Shirley Hazzard

by
May 2016, no. 381

We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think: Selected Essays by Shirley Hazzard

Columbia University Press (Footprint), $57.95 hb, 248 pp, 9780231173261

We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think: Selected Essays by Shirley Hazzard

by
May 2016, no. 381

In her speech as the winner of the 2003 National Book Award, Shirley Hazzard said, 'We should do our best by the language. We mustn't torture it; we mustn't diminish it. We have to love it, nurture it, and enjoy it.'

Reading Hazzard, as she is variously represented in this collection, is to encounter a writer who has done her 'best by the language' and, in these essays, continues marvellously to do so. Two of Hazzard's distinctive literary qualities are a kind of stately seriousness and a capacity to hold a number of perceptions or reflections or memories in tension without losing either momentum or focus. These characteristics are variously evident but perhaps nowhere more clearly, and certainly more typically, than in the 1982 essay 'The Lonely Word' and in the title essay, 'We need silence ...'

You May Also Like

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.