Points Of Entry

I was talking yesterday about the difficulty of engaging in genuinely sustained reading lately, but, as so often is the case these days, reading individual collections of poems has been a way for me of sustaining encounters with individual writers despite being time-starved. In fact, I've now completed the collections I picked with the book tokens I got from this year's Lit Seminar.

I mentioned a few posts ago that I was reading Julia Copus's The World's Two Smallest Humans with some enjoyment (at least, I think that's what I said) and it just kept getting better for me. Wonderful variations of style and content in a single slim volume. The short sequence that concludes the volume, a series of poems about the writer's unsuccessful IVF treatment going under the overall title Ghost, was beautifully modulated and very touching. I'm keen to read more of her stuff.

But perhaps not quite as keen as I am to read more from Owen Sheers, because his verse-drama Pink Mist knocked me sideways, upside-down and every which way. It's about three guys, lads really, who enlist and find themselves in Afghanistan. The language is their language and convincingly so, despite the verse. That in itself is quite an achievement. I suppose you might see this as Owen (Wilfred) up-dated since, amazingly, it's absolutely his equivalent in terms of its evocation of the pity of war - in this case a harsh, unsentimental, deeply moving pity. It's got the WOW factor big-time.

After I'd put that to one side (but not out of mind) I moved on to Mary Oliver's A Thousand Mornings. I read another collection by her last year and was impressed with individual poems, though a bit puzzled by a few others, but my experience of reading this one was entirely different. I seemed to sweep effortlessly through half the volume, finding the poet an amiable companion until the feeling that this was all a bit light-weight, a bit samey, a bit too positive in its unremitting sense of wonder derailed me. The blurb on the back mentions being, open to the teachings contained in the smallest of moments, and I think that captures something of the flavour of the poems. I suddenly didn't trust them, in the way I don't quite trust anyone who's trying to teach me something. And I'm still not sure I do, though I completed the book the other day, and still enjoyed it. I really can't place this one, and have to remind myself that we read poems not to place them (despite what the critics would have us believe) but to enter into them and let them enter into us.