Words, Words, Words

The great thing about poetry, apart from the fact that so much of it is just plain great, is that you can get on with reading it even when ultra-busy and feel that you're genuinely engaging in the full experience of reading, because that's exactly what you're doing. Case in point, I just read the last five poems in Charles Simic's Walking the Black Cat, and finished the volume as a result, whilst eating a fish meal at McDonald's. In fact, I read two whilst queuing up there with the Missus.

And, of course, it's fantastic value for money - the poetry, not the fish meal - at least in the case of Mr Simic - since as soon as you finish one of his poems you want to read it again just to check if it's really as weirdly compelling as you thought the first, or second, or third time of reading. Mind you, there's a sequence of five or six poems towards the back end of the collection that managed to entirely creep me out and to which I won't be returning soon (though, inevitably, one day I'll be back for more goosebumps.)