Susan Blanshard

Memoir: Honey in My Blood Susan Blanshard

Susan Blanshard's poetic narrative is a literary love story which spans 40 years of deep love, sexual desire, sensuality and creative art. Impressions of love and life are given through use of extended figurative language. More literary weight is given to thoughts - her impressions are born from the surrounding context which provides the reader with a sense of love and art that has been 'processed' by the mind through the heart. And vice-versa. Where a definable border exists between memoir and literary prose, Susan Blanshard crosses the boarder with her literature. While prose writers concentrate mainly on sense, some crossover authors have experimented with prose that utilized sound and image: Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Elliot, Rilke, Borges, Solzhenitsyn, Williams. Blanshard uses exquisite prose for the communication of feeling. In a sense she images on the reader's mind. Through shades of language, she allows us to see into the poet's life. She uses "impressionism" in prose; her literary style is characterized by the use of details and mental associations to evoke subjective and sensory impressions rather than a re-creation of objective reality. When you let the lines of the narrative blur, they reveal meaning on a deeper level; the whole world of two, a love for life and a life for love. She does not achieve this by photographs or description of techniques: she simply draws us in through her prose. Confessional and reflective. It is Susan Blanshard's ineffable heart that feels, and paints the phrase, or words, onto the window of the psyche.