Matthew Spencer – författare

Robert Frost and Edward Thomas met in a bookshop in London in 1913. During the next four years, the two writers—Frost, an unknown poet who had sold his farm in New Hampshire in order to take his family to England for one last gamble on poetry and Thomas, a sad literary journalist—formed the most important friendship between poets since that of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Their friendship only ended with Thomas'' death in Arras, France, a casualty of the First World War. The story of Edward Thomas'' turn to poetry, in fact, has been dominated by the account of Robert Frost''s injunction: to break his existing prose into lines, bringing his musical cadence and his direct speaking voice into conversation with formal prosody. Thomas himself had already championed Frost''s own early work: These poems are revolutionary because they lack the exaggeration of rhetoric.... Their language is free from the poetical words and forms that are the chief material of the secondary poets. The metre avoids not only old fashioned pomp and sweetness, but the later fashion also of discord and fuss. In fact the medium is common speech.... Mr. Frost has, in fact, gone back, as Whitman and as Wordsworth went back, through the paraphernalia of poetry into poetry once again.This book presents for the first time the full record, arranged chronologically, of what the poets wrote to, for, and about one another—their letters, poems, and Thomas'' review of Frost''s first two books. They reveal a warmth and charm that give us the key to the relationship between Frost and Thomas.

The elite neighborhoods of Sydney are becoming a serial killer’s hunting ground. But for a city—and a detective—on the edge, not everything is as it seems in a twisting novel of suspense.During a stifling summer in Sydney, the body of a chaplain’s daughter is found wrapped in black plastic on the deserted grounds of an elite boarding school. Is it the work of the killer who’s been stalking the privileged neighborhoods along the Parramatta River? Gut instinct tells Detective Sergeant Rose Riley something even more devious might be at play.Eager to find the so-called Blue Moon Killer before he strikes again, Riley forms an uneasy alliance with Adam Bowman, a journalist with a valuable, and unsettling, link to the school’s history. As Riley’s investigation takes her deep into the secret lives of Sydney’s prominent citizens, Bowman delves into the darkest places of his own childhood for answers. When their paths converge, Riley must use every bit of her cunning to stop another murder.Excavating Bowman’s past might just be the key to unlocking the case. Or it could prove to be Riley’s undoing. Because clue by clue she’s being pulled into the sights of a killer.