Brief Book Notes

It's hard to keep up, or even know what the 'day job' is, at present.

This is 'David Green Books' but you wouldn't think so. It looks more and more like David Green Music in the same way that the Third Programme was once BBC Classical Music Radio but by now Radio 3 readily shifts into musicals, jazz, 'world music' and anything else it sees fit to. And why not, we might ask. Because we'd like somewhere to go where it will be orchestral, chamber, choral or solo music by mostly old German men in wigs, thank you.

But I was glad of a tip for Paddy Kitchen's Gerard Manley Hopkins which served its purpose perfectly, not over-burdened with detail, footnotes and more than one really needs to know. It perhaps wasn't such a dark and desperate story as one imagined but that is to his credit given the welter burden of Jesuit teaching he submitted to. 

That such spirited, charged poems came out of a life so overawed by piety is almost a miracle in itself and it's hard to imagine how such righteousness could reduce us to such servility and yet, in other forms, it still does.

I was surprised how often the poems quoted were so familiar, Hopkins having been regarded as significant and avidly read at a formative age and so those lines are baked into whatever it is that constitutes any 'sensibility' I have, for better or worse. For better, I still think.

A re-read of Businessmen as Lovers by Rosemary Tonks revealed it as very 'forward' and 'frank' for 1969 when you think how soon it came after the lifting of the 'Chatterley ban' but that's not really the point. I've tried and failed with Jane Austen a few times, probably mostly because I can't tell which bits are the social comedy and which Jane thought were perfectly normal. I'm better off with Rosemary who is more contemporary and thus less evasive, perhaps less subtle, too, but rarely less than devastating. It's Rosemary 3 Jane 0.

And then, today, still returning to my own library back catalogue because that's what it's there for and there'd be no point living in a house this size were it not in order to contain the books and records, I read chapter 7 of The Return of the Native in Chichester Cathedral while waiting for the concert. It is Hardy's essay introducing Eustacia Vye, including,

To see her hair was to fancy that a whole winter did not contain darkness enough to form its shadow:

and in many ways it is perhaps Hardy's darkest book, Jude notwithstanding, and with it not being among those I read first from fourth-form Woodlanders onwards when I read on after bedtime so very taken with it, it is becoming almost my favourite.

Of course one reads things all the time but not all of them are all-time classics and it is great to go back to seminal, eternal, maybe even sempiternal, things to remind oneself why one read books in the first place.

The reason why this is David Green (Books) was that it was originally intended to be about my books and poems but there weren't enough of them and they're not of quite such sempiternal interest and so it diversified.

However, the very last DG book, using the last ISBN issued to the imprint, is set up and ready to go. Sixteen poems, not all masterpieces but just about worthy of print if all the others were.  Romanticism is ready to go to the printers but I'm not convinced I'm sufficiently excited about it to send it so we will have to see. We could wait another year or two and see what else turns up to be included.