Leaving behind what seemed to me the astringent prose of Kawabata's The Sound of the Mountain (I assume it sounds such in the original Japanese) for the lush lyricism of Laurie Lee's As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning was a very good idea for this reader. I'd forgotten just how brilliant Lee is in his memoirs in conjuring place and mood in vivid, convincing detail. The evocation of the relentless Spanish sun and parched landscape surely can never be bettered. He simply takes you there with him as a sort of invisible companion.
But here's a bit of a conundrum. Many years back, after teaching the equally wonderful Cider With Rosie for 'O' level - to English kids - I got hold of Lee's Selected Poems in a Penguin paperback. I thought I was in for riches, but nothing in the slim volume worked for me. And the same is true today. I read a few of the poems on the early pages, composed at the time of the poet's sojourn in Spain, and not a single one matched any of the paragraphs in the memoir. The poem Music in a Spanish Town is about Lee playing his violin on the streets of Cordoba. In As I Walked Out... every description of his playing the violin as a way of earning the pennies he needs to keep going is deeply engaging, yet the poem seemed to me simply okay-ish.
I suspect as I happily read on in the memoir that I'll hardly bother to cross-refer to the Selected in hopes of further moments of reading pleasure. I'm dealing with a surfeit thereof as it is.
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