They say when in doubt start with a joke. So here goes. What do you get when you send a poet to a poetry hating literary agent? One answer is Louise de Bernieres and a very successful career as a novelist. Having always set out to be a poet, it was being paired up with an agent who said “I don’t like poetry, I don’t get poetry and there is no money in poetry” followed by a period of convalescence following a motorbike accident that produced his first novel and a fast career track onto the best sellers list. It then took twenty years before he published Imagining Alexandria, his first collection of poetry.
With both a new evocatively titled novel The Dust That Falls From Dreams and another collection of poetry, Of Love and Desire, his interview before a fairly full Arts Centre auditorium was both revealing and insightful. It is clear De Bernieres has his head in more exotic climes, by his own admission an older, timeless Anatolian idyll is definitely one of them and the heat and passions of these heady environments certainly fall from his pages.
For many people who only know him from the wonderfully rich Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, which spawned a not quite so wonderful, or rich Hollywood film adaptation, there is a lot more to LDB than meets the eye. With books spanning Colombia and an acknowledged influence of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, war torn Cephalonia and Turkey and even Western Australia, and poetry both wonderfully parochial and effortlessly global, he is certainly a writer worth exploring to the full.
