WEYMOUTH SANDS [Hardcover]

JOHN COWPER POWYS (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: HARPER COLOPHON BOOKS (1984)
• ASIN: B001D24W80
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A calm, grey masterpiece, June 21, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Weymouth Sands (Mass Market Paperback)

Powys's scene is the overarching image for this silent, serene, sad book. The sands at Weymouth, and the sea lapping, or crashing, on them reflect the human drama, the human heart. The book is filled with unforgettable people, and Powys delves quietly beneath their conventional surfaces to reveal their torment, joy, longing.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Finding a gossamer-seed, August 29, 2006

By 

Daniel Myers (Greenville, SC USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Weymouth Sands (Mass Market Paperback)

Another extraordinary (and impossible to review, really) book from John Cowper Powys: The only things to which I can compare it are Proust, from whose depths Powys has clearly imbibed, and The Glastonbury Romance, except that this work seems much the much deeper and sadder of the two Powys works, touching on the subjects most dear to Powys, without any tangents regarding the Holy Grail legend etc. If one could put a name to the abiding undercurrent here, and one can't really, it would be Animism. Every dancing seaweed, incoming tide and rocky promontory seems suffused with a dynamic and personality of its own with a peculiar force over every character. This book is also the sadder of the two, but it is the sadness that arises from the unraveling of the deeps of human existence. Dostoyevsky is NOT the writer to which Powys should be compared---That writer is Proust. Powys is the only writer in English who comes even close to Proustian depths. Laurence Durrell made a stab at it in The Alexandria Quartet, but failed miserably----as far as his stated, hubristic intent to outdo both Proust AND Joyce in those four works. But Powys is not hubristic, thus his success. Becoming absorbed in this book, one eventually gets the feeling

"...as if there were always blowing a faint, supernatural wind through this world, holding a secret of assuagement for troubled hearts, that is only perceptible when it can find a straw, a feather, a gossamer-seed, a leaf, in the debris of circumstance light enough for it to stir." P.541


It is a lovely, sad (at times also comic), deep book of wisdom. Scarce wonder that Powys never made it into a hidebound English Lit. Syllabus!

So, read and take delight. You won't be graded!

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Phantasmagoric, December 7, 2006

By 

Eddie Watkins (Philadelphia, PA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Weymouth Sands (Hardcover)

This one seems to have been pulled from the most watery depths of Powys' imagination. It is saturated with an inscrutable feminine element, a mysterious plexus of forces. As much as I like most of his other books this one seems the most naturally magical, not as often forced as the others. The plot possibly suffers from his giving in to the dreamy depths of his imagination, but I welcome the richness of sheer strange atmosphere he manages because of this limitation.