Under Scrutiny

I'm making oddly intermittent progress in Archie's Ammons's Glare, his long poem from 1997 which I'm now undertaking as part of my read-through of the second volume of the Complete Poems. It's a wonderfully engaging work, generally even looser in its construction than the equally engaging Garbage from four years earlier and, possibly, funnier. But I'm finding that I tend not to pick it up on a daily basis. Rather I reserve it for weekends and tackle long stretches in single readings, as I did today. And I find myself reading it at quite a lick, faster I think than when I first read it as a single volume some years back. A fast-paced reading works well, I think, in keeping somehow with the improvisational spontaneity of the verse.

In addition I've got a novel on the go, this being Mary Durack's Keep Him My Country, passed to me by Angela who picked it up on a trip to Australia - I think, since it's very much an Australian novel. The nice thing about reading novels that someone else passes on is the sense of expanding one's horizons in that these are rarely things one would have chosen to read oneself. I'd never heard of Ms Durack and this work from 1955 but, judging from the introductory chapters, she's a talented writer and I'm finding myself happily engrossed in the harsh terrain of northern Australia, a land of which I know next to nothing.