Reviewed by Magdalena Ball
Through a Glass Darkly
By Libby Hathorn
Ginninderra Press
March 2026, 216 pages, Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1761099298
Libby Hathorn’s Through a Glass Darkly opens with its protagonist Evie Walsh sitting by a pond reflecting, both literally and metaphorically, on her life. Evie’s cloudy late-life reflections move back and forth in time between key moments, places, most powerfully Sydney and the Blue Mountains, which are depicted with delicacy against a lifetime of love, loss, poetry, reminiscence and resurrection. Of course the title is is a phrase from the Bible, quoted in the opening pages, which means to see reality in an obscure, imperfect, or distorted way, as though through glass, and in this book, perhaps through the pond of memory, imperfectly reflected. Verse is the right form for this novel, which resists linear certainty and Instead it accumulates meaning through image and pause, a thought interrupted, and above all, the continuity of the nature world around the pond:
Then she could easily look and look
into the dark water deep
rippling slightly now and then
announcing a tadpole or a zephyr.
Or into the stillness, a pond
that could carry the sky
at midday in full sun,
even clouds, alternately dark, then blue.
Fecund – she felt fecund there
even now. And why that word? (“In the Garden of the World”)
The book is as peopled with characters and settings as any novel. Hathorn sets up the book with a list of some of the more prominent ones, particularly the men who have been important in Evie’s life. Rob Connor is one who continues to show up, repeatedly disappointing Evie and ultimately revealing his secrets and his failings. There is Evie’s husband Tom, who travels with her to various places, particularly Normandy, where the marriage falls apart, Lucas, a lover, and Henry, her first serious relationship. All of these men sit in past tense, existing primarily through the lens of Evie’s memory. Similarly, there is her aunt and uncle, Totti and Toby, who leave her the house with its pond and‘sheltering’ garden. They too are gone, but they are deeply linked with the setting:
In some inexplicable way it had dawned on her
that there were still moments to gaze
in dark mirrors and see light reflected after all.
Totti and Toby’s voices, their sheltering house,
their sheltering garden, and overgrown pathways,
her house now, her garden now. Her world. (“Some promise”)
Hathorn uses the medium of poetry effectively, allowing rhythms, imagery, and especially white space, absence functioning as a narrative force. What is not said becomes as significant as what is:
What about the dream-like night
the sky upside down in the harbour, walking,
on her way from Circular Quay to the bus home.
Watching the water, slicks of oil coiling like magic things,
ferries chugging in, butting the wharf,
the moon at large.
She was swooped up into another life again (“Rob unexpected”)
Central to the work is the instability of what we see, how identity is shaped not only by what is visible, but by what is obscured or misinterpreted. The title’s allusion to partial vision comes through Evie’s growing self-recognition, rendered in language that is both delicate and exacting. Hathorn avoids overt dramatisation, instead trusting the cumulative power of small moments: a shift in tone, an image or character that recurs with altered meaning, from happiness in all of its forms, dreams, time, marriage and divorce, care and loss:
Caught out of time,
trapped in a cocoon of place
where dreams were in the making
and they knew it
and time to be considered in different ways.
Each day a kind of loitering and lingering, (‘Today I have been happy’)
The result is a reading experience that feels intimate and revealing as it moves through Evie’s challenges, travels, marriage breakdown, and above all, her emotional journey to maturity. Through a Glass Darkly is a rich and moving novel that takes us on a journey through Evie’s life in poems that transition us from the past into the present moment where all memories congeal.