These Envoys of Beauty by Anna Vaught

 These Envoys of Beauty by Anna Vaught

These Envoys of Beauty was published on 31st March 2023 by Reflex Press. 

My thanks for the author and publisher for sending me a copy to review and 

Random Book Tours for inviting be to take part on the tour.

Synopsis

In These Envoys of Beauty, Anna Vaught explores her relationship with the natural world, how it fed and feeds her imagination, and how it gave her hope of something different beyond the world she experienced as a child and young person.

She writes about how she oriented herself to the natural world and lived within it while growing up in a rural home; about wishing trees, talking streams, and her early knowledge of plants, animals, and botanical names; about her passionate relationship, even when very young, with foraging and what was edible, how things smelled, licking the rain from leaves, drinking, growing, and cooking.

Over twelve essays, Vaught uses her relationship with the natural world to explore themes of loneliness, depression, and complex and sustained trauma within the family home, issues that shaped her early life and continue to have a far-reaching impact decades later.

The text is both a detailed natural history and a complex mental health chronicle, with an exploration of intergenerational trauma; it is both a personal history and a scholarly work.

These Envoys of Beauty is frank in its treatment of difficult issues but offers many hopeful suggestions and ideas. The book takes its title from Emerson’s description of stars in ‘Nature’, which provides epigraphs and details throughout the memoir.  

The 12 Essays are;

1.Rosebay willowherb and a cure for loneliness
2. On drinking from leaves and bells. Creating hope
3. On depression: flood and mud
4. Herbs and bees therein. Escape
5. The whorls of new worlds. Detailed observance of the inner workings of complex flowers – and dissociation
6. Dew on sedum. Finding comfort where there is none
7. Vines and creepers, sea caves and hideaways. Finding new identity in secrecy
8. On pressed flowers, pipe ends, bottle digging and the broken-winged dove. Walks in fields along hedgerows. Telling stories and easing lying nostalgia
9. On lichen and moss. Patterns, fractals, futures, grief, and survival
10. In praise of holding and being held by trees. Dens, wishing trees, hollows, and dead wood. Fear and its assuaging.
11. Of kelp and the stories it provides. Salt, ancestry, and sharp company when frightened of rejection and anger
12. Stars. Finding routes home, tilting your head for The Plough and comfort in Sirius: scale and light in trying to find joy in darkness

My Review

This is a powerful collection of twelve essays linked together through nature and its ability to help heal and support the mind. Consequently they create emotion on so many levels for the reader. For me this is a book in which each essay needs to be read, and thought about, individually rather than read in straight succession. You need to take time to engage with Anna, and her feelings and memories, whilst also taking time out to let yourself think about the different aspects of nature and its ability to heal and support you through difficult times.

Consequently if you look at the essays as standalone pieces of writing they are very emotive and, at times, not an easy read as you take in all that Anna has been subjected to when she was younger and how the way she was made to feel by her parents affected her in so many ways throughout the rest of her life.

Alongside this the strong links to plants and the nature around her, along with the description of the different plants and flowers in the book has the reader immersing themselves in the healing powers of what was around her and looking at them again through the eyes of a troubled human being and realising the stability and support they gave.

There are many times as you read Anna's essays that you want to envelope her in a hug and take away all the traumas that she has sadly endured throughout her life whilst totally understanding the healing and escaping power of nature as a release from her life.

As I said previously some of these essays make for quite harrowing reading  and I sincerely hope that Anna has found extra relief from being able to put her thoughts  down on paper as she focusses on all the loving, caring people she does have in her life to love and support her. 

About the Author

Anna Vaught is an English teacher, young people’s mentor, Creative Writing teacher and author of several books, including 2020’s novel Saving Lucia (Bluemoose) and short fiction collection, Famished (Influx).

Her shorter and multi-genre works are widely published in journals, magazines, anthologies, and the national press.

She has been a Bookseller columnist and still writes regularly for them, while she is currently a columnist for Mslexia.

Her second short fiction collection, Ravished, was published by Reflex Press in 2022, and 2023 will see four books: memoir, These Envoys of Beauty (Reflex Press), new novel The Zebra and Lord Jones (Renard. UK and commonwealth; Zebra is currently on US submission), plus The Alchemy, her first book about writing.
Saving Lucia will be published in Italian by Milan’s 8tto edizioni as Bang Bang Mussolini.

She is a guest university lecturer, tutor for Jericho Writers, super-nerd, volunteer with young people, mental health campaigner and she has recently established the new #Curae prize for writer-carers with industry-wide support.

She works alongside chronic illness and is a passionate campaigner for mental health provision, including in the publishing industry.

She is represented by Kate Johnson of Wolf Literary in New York.

Anna has recently completed a book of essays on love, called Melt the Stars, and is working on a new  novel " All The Days I Did Not Live".