I recently received this quarter’s Poetry Book Society choice, The Stone Age by Jen Hadfield.
I haven’t read it all yet, but I am really enjoying it.
The poetry looks on the page and reads in the voice like the ragged, rugged landscape of her home in Shetland. She achieves this through surprising images and unusual points of view, among other skilful applications of craft. I think this is going to become one of my favourite reads.
If any of us made a list of the activities we can’t do at present in the order we miss them, what would the list look like?
I belong to a book group and on my list that would be very near the top – probably in second place behind meeting friends for coffee. I think anyone who belongs to a book group would have a similar pattern on their list.
So it is nice to see that the Royal Society of Literature is starting a whole series of online book clubs.
Several of them are reading winners of the society’s prizes so they’ll be discussing up to date, good books.
One thing we all seem to be getting good at, is accepting alternatives to the things we normally do.
The Royal Society of Literature has published the long list for this prize. Needless to say, I’d like to read all of them, and probably won’t even read a few.
The prize is worth a good deal in terms of money, but winning is probably more important to the writers than the swelling of the bank account.
Reading about success is so heartwarming; good luck to all of them.
Picture from RSL website
This is my first post of the new year/new decade. Where better to go for newness than new poetry books.
The approach of spring revived my interest in shopping so I treated myself to this T S Eliot collection.
Rendang by Will Harris is a Poetry Book Society choice.
The Eliot is what I expected it to be: exciting, beautiful, varied. It was his work that helped me into reading modern poetry.
I haven’t had time to study Rendang, but it has a lot of interesting stuff in it.
Now all I need is time to sit and absorb the beauty and depth of these two fabulous poets.
A few days ago I received the Poetry Book Society Spring choice – Rachael Allen‘s Kingdomland.
I haven’t had time to fully read, let alone digest, all the poems, but the ones I’ve looked at so far are very impressive.
The language is robust with strong stresses and wild, sometimes uncomfortable, images: would you
… just lie down
my ribs opened up in the old town square
and let the pigs root through my chest.
However, I do like the idea of having a
… purple name.
I’m looking forward to the poems I haven’t reached yet.
Who is Muriel and what happened to her to turn her life into a dysfunctional calamity and threaten to do the same to her children? Even at the end of this memoir, set in London in the early to mid 20th century, we have no certainties, only likelihoods.
Muriel’s character was full of discords: in peacetime she was a needy drunk, but in two world wars she was efficient, hardworking and willing to take her work to the front line.
Diana Petre was her daughter and struggled with a confused and chaotic upbringing. But her book is anything but chaotic; in a plain but very clear style she analyses events and feelings, keeps track of several lives and gives us a clear vision of her mother and of Roger Ackerley, her father.
This book is part memoir and part ‘true story’ mystery, and even though the mystery is only partly solved, it is a satisfying read.
I’ve just finished reading this book and can recommend it to anyone interested in a different, beautiful world.
Fleeing the Russian revolution, the author ended up in China and finally in Lijiang in Yunnan province in the late 30s and 40s, where he worked for the government in the Co-operative Movement. He was there for nine years before fleeing again, this time from the Communists.
In the forgotten kingdom of the Nakhi people he seems to have found his true home: the people were friendly and cheerful, the area was beautiful, wildlife plentiful, he made many friends and had enough work to feel fruitfully occupied.
This is not a travel book, he was not passing through but lived the life of a local person. It is more a memoir of a time and a world that no longer exist. Goullart describes the area as a paradise on Earth, despite the bandits and diseases. Whether the people he knew there felt the same will now never be known.
My Poetry Book Society choice for this summer has arrived. Its title is a challenge to start with – do bears and Venus have any relationship?
The book has been widely reviewed and with good reason. I haven’t had time to read it thoroughly yet, but, as one expects from Vahni Capildeo, the poems I have read make me think.
For instance, very few poets deal with the subject of pets. Capildeo doesn’t cover the cuteness or amusingness of domestic creatures, but what it means to be a pet and the deep relationship between two species. Many other poems deal with animals and plants in their natural or semi-natural state. Then there are the places: the roads, the seas, the foreign, the homes.
This is a wide-ranging collection and I’ll be reading it for some time.
Thanks to The Little Red Reviewer for interesting and insightful reviews. I haven’t read any of these books, but might be tempted – if I ever get the time.
June, where did you go? Last I checked it was June 2nd, how is it already July?? I didn’t post many reviews in June, but I did get a lot of reading done. Some of these I’ll write reviews for, some of them will get a capsule review in this post. Here’s what I was up to this month:
I finished this fun little gem:
Spock Must Die is the famous novel where thanks to a transporter malfunction, the Enterprise now has two Spocks. Which one is the “real” one? What will they do with the other one? When war breaks out at the Klingon border, the importance of solving the mystery ratchets up. Even when Kirk is sure which Spock is the true, original Spock, he insists on calling his friend “Spock Two”. When questioned why, Kirk responds that by saying “two” every time he says his friend’s name…
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My motto is
Keep calm and party on
so, when I found in The Art of the Chinese Gardens (published by China Travel & Tourism) a lot of place names associated with inviting guests, drinking wine and generally being sociable, I knew I must make a poem out of them.
The result is below. It may actually be more a semi-found poem as the short connecting lines are my invention.
Party On
Once, in the
Twilight of the Setting Sun
Near
The Sunlight Welcoming Pavilion
In our
Garden of Harmonious Delight,
Guests arrived,Through
The Gate for Inviting the Moon,
Into
The Pavilion for Bestowing Wine –
Pearl of Shichahai.They chattered in
The Pavilion for Enjoying the Scenery
Danced in
The Hall of Cheerful Melodies:
Our
Places of Mutual Affinity.Later we left
The Moon Inviting Terrace
For
The Tower of Clear Voice
In
The Musical Gully.Today
The Solitary Hill
And
Snow on the Broken Bridge.
e a m harris 