The Last of the Light is a meditation on twilight in the Western arts and imagination.
Peter Davidson touches on diverse literary and artistic traditions as he considers the borderlands of the light and the dark: the ‘invention of evening’ in Rome by the ancients; the science of the Victorian evening sky; the urban sunsets of Whistler, Hammershøi and Tiepolo; the twilit modernities of Sebald, Eliot and Baudelaire. Combining prose-poetry, memoir, philosophy and art history, this is a richly rewarding book.
Reviewed by Miranda Seymour in Slightly Foxed Issue 63.
The Twilight Hour
MIRANDA SEYMOUR
I watched the darkness settle across the fields, leaving, faraway, a single bright patch of gold, an unattainable kingdom created by the low rays of the sinking sun. Twilight – the subject of Peter Davidson’s meditative and beautiful book The Last of the Light (2015) – is the moment when nature seems to embrace and enfold us within herself. The ache of bereavement adjusts and resolves itself into acceptance: an understanding that twilight is itself a resignation, a dying of the day, from which renewal arises . . .
Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 63, Autumn 2019
The Twilight Hour
Davidson’s book offers us a series of intense, lyrical and surprisingly moving meditations on landscapes, buildings and mythical settings, as seen at the close of day through the eyes of painters...
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