The Griffin Brain

Despite the fact that eleven very various deaths are recounted in these four stories (plus an ineffective attempt at mass murder), it is the variety of lives and voices that this collection celebrates. As John Kerrigan wrote of Russell's first collection of poems, I find an exciting range of structures in the collection, always reaching out for a scale that can catch the amplitude of life. We hear how a super-head's life is brought into the light by a cerebral event and a trip to Paris, how a Cambridge philosophy postgrad's budding sense of moral outrage blossoms into tragedy, how a Californian schoolteacher in the very early years of the 20th Century is accidentally given a fatal power that leads her to Greenwich Village, and how a seemingly blind actor comes to wonder if his dreams are illuminating or occluding his life.