A ‘commonplace book of smelly thoughts’
The Star-Nosed Mole, An Anthology of Scented Garden Writing
Isabel Bannerman (Pimpernel Press, £20)
SOMEWHAT mole-like, feeling blind and in a fog’ is how Isabel Bannerman describes herself as she began to nose her way through the literary canon on her quest to discover how smell has been conveyed in writing. That might seem a quirky aspiration, but it’s one that makes perfect sense when you know that the anthology follows on from her previous book, Scent Magic, a memoir about scent in plants and gardens.
In researching that, Mrs Bannerman gathered together many ‘scraps of literature, prose, poetry and garden writing’. Arranged into seasonal order and served up with her own wonderfully discursive introductions, they form the basis of this book. It was during that research that she came across the eponymous star-nosed mole. This extraordinary animal, with its 22 fleshy feelers containing 25,000 sensory receptors, can, in only eight milliseconds, decide whether something is edible or not.
‘The selections range across time and place with abandon’
It’s Mrs (‘the woodbine spices are wafted abroad, and the musk of the roses is blown’) and John Clare’s sweet peas ‘perfuming the evening’, but then she throws in the Imagist poet, known as H. D. In (from , 1916), Hilda Doolittle rails against its cloying comforts:
