Books, Books everywhere nor yet a book to read and other stories

 I don't know if there are 2000 books in my house. It might not be quite that. Waiting patiently for the new Derek Mahon poems to arrive reminded me that this is not a time of year for ordering anything new so having finished my minor Muriel Spark festival with The Girls of Slender Means (not as good as the others but familiarity can raise expectations) I thought I'd find something among the well-furnished libraries of the estate to further entertain myself with.

I was indebted to a friend who had scanned the Christmas TV schedules for her own purposes and taken the trouble to recommend Uncle Vanya on the wireless as being suitable for me. Always ready for a bit of Chekhov, I began with that but excellent in its provinicial desperation as it is, it didn't take long.

The bookmark in Zadie Smith's The Autograph Man was where I'd left it when it first came out, no more than a third of the way in, so I thought I'd try that again but after 10 pages it was doing nothing for me and so, having been abandoned twice, the prospects for it don't look good which is a shame after a piece I'd did on White Teeth was re-routed from an in-house ethnic minorities magazine I wrote for in work in the 1990's to a national magazine that paid actual cash for it. Imagine that. Nobody but a fool ever wrote if not for money.

I really ought to have a few days 'doing' Donne properly. I've even got the sermons, unread, somewhere, but have selected the seasonally appropriate Nocturnal on St. Lucy's Day for the first virtual meeting back of poetry club in the New Year.

So what I ended up reading - it's surely re-reading but I have no recollection of the first time- Her Majesty's Spymaster, about Francis Walsingham, by Stephen Budiasky, which is so far so good. It doesn't suffer as much as it might from a certain American attitude and tur of phrase and the potential big bonus is that it vaguely lit up that rare bulb that alerts me to a poem.

To write a poem one needs an idea and they come few and far between. But one also needs a way of doing it which is the hard part but I might have both and I'll take it gradually. The secret, it seems to me, is to gather ideas, words, lines and 'strategies' and not embark on the writing prematurely. But such 'work' is a pleasure and a greater pleasure than the churning out of commentary.

Wide Realm, my retirement project book on Thom Gunn reached the end of chapter 4 this morning, a bit over 20 thousand words and any excuse for some respite even if I don't do many hours a week on it. If my previous admiration for novelists, compared to poets, was immense then anybody sticking to the task of a book-length critique and staying upbeat about it is a better person than me, too. A significant part of my reservations about the title, role or job of 'poet' is that it's not even difficult.

Things need to be hard to do to make them feel worthwhile. Riding 217 miles on a bicycle in 12 hours was one but good poems don't seem to come from hard work - they rarely benefit from it - they are more like moments when things went right that can subsequently be enjoyed forever, like things that George Best or Derek Randall might have done in a moment that others weren't capable of imagining.

Meanwhile, with another friend telling me he's picked up Douglas Dunn's Northlight, I am reminded of The People Before, the wonderful poem in that book. If, for Douglas, then, 'the lunar honey fell on Buddon Sands', I'm tempted to make the comparison with how winter sun fell on Langstone mud this afternoon. 

 

There could still be time to review the reduced year but until the Mahon book is delivered we still don't have a full set of runners under starter's orders in the poetry sections yet and that was originally the point of it so we will see.