The Irish writer and artist Sara Baume is still best known for her 2015 debut, Spill Simmer Falter Wither; Seven Steeples, her third novel, is a glacially beautiful book. I am almost certain it’s a ghost story, but it’s a novel that gives up its secrets warily. Bell and Sigh are a couple who leave the city with their dogs to rent a cottage by the sea and withdraw steadily from their lives, seeking to live in an atmosphere of continuous temporariness. I couldn’t help but think of the ring of bells and the sound of sighs as stock motifs of ghost stories the world over.
But I believe this novel will mean profoundly different things to different readers, because its own presiding spirit is surely Elizabeth Bishop, who worked so carefully at keeping feeling unspoken under the surface of her poetry, only revealing the heart through the physical world: she understood that emotion would shine out through detail, through specific, close observation. As if in tribute, Baume offers up an astonishing prose poem that keeps close religiously and lovingly to the physical throughout.
