Novels & Poetry

I love words and so enjoy the delightful pleasure of reading. Carola Dunn, Patricia Wentworth, Alain de Botton, Masanobu Fukuoka and Zadie Smith are a few of the authors whose works I have been enjoying. I am currently reading, The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, not a light read and not for everyone, but interesting thus far. Poetry is another love of mine, I don't claim to know the ins and outs of the medium and haven't ever studied it as a subject, but I enjoy what speaks to me (whether or not it is touted as good by those in the know). I read a lovely review of Music for Landing Planes By, by Eireann Lorsung and look forward to reading it sometime. Billy Collins, a favourite poet of mine, has a wonderful way with words. He was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States for 2001-2003. A review by The Washington Post had this to say, "[Collins] takes the mundane thing and shows you its mystery. And he takes the mysterious and strips it naked." I will leave you with a poem I am fond of from his book, Questions About Angels (1991):

The Man in the Moon

He used to frighten me in the nights of childhood,
the wide adult face, enormous, stern, aloft.
I could not imagine such a loneliness, such coldness.

But tonight as I drive home over these hilly roads
I see him sinking behind stands of winter trees
and rising again to show his familiar face.

And when he comes into full view over open fields
he looks like a young man who has fallen in love
with the dark earth,

a pale bachelor, well-groomed and full of melancholy,
his round mouth open
as if he had just broke into song.

Glorius Red Bud Blooms

"As for me, I know nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under the trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love,
Or sleep in bed at night with any one I love,
Or watch honey bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon...
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown,
Or of stars shining so quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring...
What stranger miracles are there?”

~Walt Whitman, 1819-1892