In No Rush

I've got several books on the go at the moment, and they are all going slowly, extremely so. I suppose this is likely age-related (my age, not that of the texts in question). The younger me would have got quite impatient at the seeming lack of progress, but the older me knows there are no deadlines involved. The funny thing is, when I picked up Mahmoud Darwish's In the Presence of Absence at Wardah Books I thought I would zip though it, but I can't deal with more than one short chapter at a time.

Can't say the same applies to The Complete Poems of Henry Vaughan, though. I suspected it would take me some little time to read the translations and early verse prior to Silex Scintillans, Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations wherein the real mystical poetry flowers and it did. But it felt worth the effort, just to plug into what seems to me verse typical of the seventeenth century and develop a better sense of what came conventionally to the poets of the period. Nice to get to the decidedly unconventional religious stuff, though, which is where Vaughan's individual talent undoubtedly lies.