On Top

18 Ramadhan, 1444

I'm deeply into Kenneth Cragg's The Event of the Qur'an, so I can declare my Islamic-themed reading for the fasting month as quite a success, even with a couple of weeks left (which should be ample time to finish Cragg's book.) Happily I've also managed to find time to keep going on the second volume of Archie Ammons's Complete Poems, helped along considerably by the fact that I'm now reading the segment dedicated to the poems published in 2005's Bosh and Flapdoodle. I loved the book when it came out, so much so that I read it too fast. I'm finding myself doing something similar now, but because my time reading has to be more carefully rationed than usual I'm slowing up enough to feel an even greater engagement with the material - which is basically Archie as an old man railing, sort of, against the dying of the light, but in a gloriously wise, funny and crusty manner. Definitely the kind of work to appeal to a crusty old chap like myself.

The funny thing is that I keep thinking of a time I'll re-read this in the single volume paperback I got hold of when it was first published. And another sort of funny thing occurs to me: it's difficult to pick out single poems from Ammons's work as standalone pieces, just as it's difficult to quote from Archie. It's the cumulative nature of the poems that impacts the reader. I just kind of bookmarked a lovely poem entitled Thoughts, from Bosh and Flapdoodle, a sort of meditation on the work and death of A. E. Houseman which was very funny, deeply moving and a little bit scary, all at the same time, but I'm pretty sure my sense of it as an individual piece somehow apart from the rest of Bosh will fade. And rightly so.

Just decided: this (Bosh and Flapdoodle) is my favourite book from Ammons, for now, at least. TOP BARD, eh?