Waxing Poetic

Found myself reading Sketches by Boz, in one of those very old little hardbacks that Collins used to publish, in the middle of Melbourne as the crowds completing Christmas shopping ebbed and flowed around me (I was sitting on a bench), Noi and the girls having gone off to do some serious shopping of their own. I got my edition second hand  for 30p some time in the last century, but never read it cover to cover, just dipping in at random really. I'm now going through it sequentially, as I've been doing with the various poetry collections on my shelves. Actually it's a bit of a substitute for not having any of the Inimitable's novels to read - having read them all. It's fairly obviously apprentice work with none of the hallucinatory drive of the great fiction, but any Dickens is good Dickens in my estimation (except for the bad Dickens, of which there's a bit somewhere in everything he wrote - even Dorrit, I'm afraid.)

It was interesting trying to sustain images of Dickens's London in the sweltering heat of the distinctly multi-racial Melbourne - in fact, in some ways it was surprisingly easy to do so as one sort of foreignness seemed to make another imaginable.

But this is all a bit off the point, for it was my intention to make note of how much the reading of poetry has dominated this trip for me - when I have been able to get any reading done, that is. The big book has been Merwin's narrative poem The Folding Cliffs which, as I have had occasion to mention in this Place previously more than once, had proved to be seemingly beyond my powers to make any real progress in. I am happy to say I've now got halfway through the sixth of its seven sections and I should finish the whole thing before we leave Australia. I'm also happy to say that this is a truly great piece of writing, proof that sometimes what may seem obscurity for obscurity's sake can be more than worth the demands it makes. More of this when I've got more time.

Oh, and I've also been dipping into Paul Muldoon's Maggot (in sequence, mind you), which might also be accused of a certain wilful obscurity but which, again, offers rewards when you persevere. And that was true of Jo Shapcott's Of Mutability which I finished when I was in KL. Except you don't really finish these kinds of collections because you know you're never really getting the richest possible experience of every poem when focused re-reading will open up further connections, understandings, possibilities.

And now a random apology for yesterday's rather bitchy comments on our current city of residence: the centre of Melbourne is, as cities go, a decent sort of place. It's not Paris, true, but it's several steps up on Manchester. It's the south bank of the Yarra, where we are situated and the big new developments are taking place that the bleakness lies. Follow the money, as they say.