Slow Progress

I've got several books on the go at the moment, a habit I've tried to break myself of. And spectacularly failed to do so. The problem is the sense that I'm not really doing complete justice to any single book that I'm reading as I keep putting one aside to pick up another. But the thing is that since everything I'm reading is excellent it's just too difficult to resist going back to each isolated case of excellence, and I don't mind taking so long to read each item since there's so much enjoyment in the individual encounter.

Case in point: I can't remember exactly when I started reading Derek Walcott's narrative poem Omeros, or started a rereading, I should say, my first reading having been completed some years back. It feels like a long time back as it's been a regular enough feature of my very late night reading to have its own spot on my bedside table. But I've only just reached Book Three, about a third of the way in. I reckon I'm reading every line at least twice, and probably more. It's just so astonishingly good that it demands instant revisiting just to try and take in what's on the glittering surface, though this reader has a powerful feeling that there are depths he's not managed to plumb - though he has, at least, managed to recognise them.

Walcott's use of the hexameter as his standard line has convinced me that this is the natural line for any narrative verse in English, by the way. And who knew that tercets could be this flexible?