For just because one loves blue does not mean that one wants to spend one’s life in a world made of it. And yet even with time and attention it is unpickable, it is beautiful and sad, it is like reading poetry mixed with philosophy. Like The Argonauts, Bluets is a complex piece of writing which warrants some time and attention to unpick. Nelson weaves the end of a relationship into her musings about blue, as well as a friend who was involved in an accident which left her quadri-paralytic, an accident which left her ‘ like a pebble in water’. It is also about sadness, loss, about pain, about ‘blue’ as in an emotion, feeling blue, being blue. Over the years I have amassed countless blue stones, blue shards of glass, blue marbles, trampled blue photographs peeled of sidewalks, pieces of blue rubble from broken buildings, and though I can’t remember where most of them came from, I love them nonetheless.”īluets is another unusual book, a book comprising 240 prose poems centred around the colour blue, Nelson’s love for the colour blue and the obsessions involved in thinking and writing about it. But a blue bouquet is no homage to the bush. When one begins to gather “fragments of blue dense,” one might think one is paying tribute to the blue wholes from which they came. Since I’ve been reading fewer books, I’ve had my eye on Bluets, in fact I’ve been struggling not to just go out and buy it, but thankfully the wonder that is Lancashire library service saved both my purse and my good intentions again. It was unlike anything I’d ever read before, unforgettable, and it cemented Maggie Nelson, even if only for that one book, as one of my favourite writers. When I read Maggie Nelson’s book The Argonauts last year it completely blew me away it is a short but unusual book, raw and vibrant, unguarded (or seemingly so), beautiful and honest and smart. I returned there yesterday and stood again upon the mountain.” That this blue exists makes my life a remarkable one, just to have seen it.

This half-circle of blinding turquoise ocean is this love’s primal scene.

Blue maggie nelson