Following the unexpected death of her son, the English poet Denise Riley found herself dislodged from time. The sheer violence of the event had suspended her, like a fly in amber, in a persisting state of a-temporality. Wanting to give a voice to this arresting condition, she kept a diary – later published as Time Lived, Without Its Flow (2012) – in which she attempts to map this disorienting, grief-wreaked phenomenon. In one aside, she writes, “I work to earth my heart.”
This effort of earthing (of a return, if at all possible, from trauma) comes to mind when reading Victoria Hannan. The author’s popular debut, Kokomo – winner of the 2019 Victorian premier’s literary award for an unpublished manuscript – is a nuanced, tenderly comic tale about relationships, love and the strictures of loss. Marshmallow, Hannan’s second novel, is a return to familiar terrain, interrogating the variegated nature of grief and what the path to recovery – or at least a coexistence with pain – may look like.
