She might be accused, now and again, of taking a poetic notion too far; for instance, in the scene set in a hotel room in Ypres at the end of the First World War: Harriet has spent the day visiting the battlefield where Owen died. With some coal and a piece of cardboard, she begins to draw swans.
"What I wanted was the simple pleasure of seeing you again. But you didn't come, couldn't come. I don't know how to make you return to me.
"But I did come to know the black swan. I knew the long snake flex of its neck, knew that the shape of the body was a leaf, a wing, an open hand, the human heart. I fastened these images to paper, called them swan. And then I rose, black dust dripping from my hands, my arms spread empty to the empty sky, as I walked out through broken streets feathered with shadow-darkness lifting me home."
These lines seem overwrought, until one recognizes them for what they are: an expression of grief so nakedly, painfully true that the reader is tempted to look away.
Harriet's swan essay turns out to be the first of her written "descriptions." Back in Coventry, she will spend her spare time studying, observing and delineating the city's historical structures and natural life. One winter day, Harriet recalls, she "wandered over the snowy fields outside Coventry, following the weave of old stone walls across the landscape. She was trying to write a description of the walls, had become obsessed with them, how they were made by human effort though they looked so natural. Harriet remembers that day as joyful, a rarity in her days. Somehow the walking and the cold and the wave of the walls and her foggy breath pulled her back to early childhood, to a feeling of being wholly present and wholly purposeful."
Jeremy's mother, Maeve, on the other hand, is an artist. She is never to be found without the sketchbook in which she records whatever aspects or objects strike her fancy. Humphreys offers artistic expression - writing and drawing - as an innate response to human experience.
Coventry is a small-format book of 175 pages, easily completed in a single sitting. Humphreys's simple, declarative sentences reel us into the novel and never let us go. She captures, most alluringly, the joyful and solitary nature of the human heart, which she renders as a swallow flying above the cathedral: swooping, soaring, untethered, free.
Donna Bailey Nurse is the editor of Revival: An Anthology of Black Canadian Writing, and author of What's a Black Critic To Do? She is writing a literary memoir of the U.S. South.
