He seems a little (lot) crazy, but he's like a real life Wile E Coyote, clawing his way up the cliff, having just held the ACME dynamite stick as the Roadrunner scooted off down the road.
But damnit, he's back with a new hair-brained scheme. And this time he's pretty confident he's worked out that pesky bird..... this time.... There may just be an anvil involved.
* * *
This is my one purchase from the big Wellington Book Fair. It is a book I already have a copy of (the revised edition). I got the original edition at the fair, with the more psychadelic cover (below). This is a book my mother had. My copy has her signature in the front cover. It was, I assume, one of her teaching resources. I'm not sure, but someone I got hold of it in my formative years and it became my favourite.
It has lots of lovely poems. There are nonsensical and humorous ones - they were the ones that I liked as a teen. There are more philosophical or reflective ones - they are the ones I like now.
Anyhow, it has long been my very-special-book and I quite like that I now have two copies of it. It is the book I picture when I say 'I love poetry' more than any other, for as much emotional as practical reasons. It has yellowed pages that have been traced by my fingers and gorgeous words that I have wrapped around my tongue a savoured (you talk on tiptoe) (it is the scar on a beautiful young man's face).
I was lucky to have a mother who gave me poetry books written for children every birthday, with beautiful illustrations. As a teenager I had to raid her Roger McGough anthologies and it wasn't until a few years ago that I accidentally fell across Carol Ann Duffy and Simon Armitage.
Along the way I waded through the classics at university, none of which I'd pull out and read for pleasure (though I often think of the messages of some of Gerald Manly Hopkins's works). I have taken some pleasure in the visual elegance of ee cummings and the crispness of William Carlos Williams, and in the almost pop-music catchiness of Robert Frost.
But this book is the one that is familiar and fond - every page.
2 comments:
Dryden is my favourite and most highly regarded poet. But William Carlos Williams is what I grab off the bookshelf for a casual read. :)
I'm also fond of Rod McKuen, but mostly as a performer rather than simply as a poet.
I reckon part of really enjoying poetry is being able to read it outside of all those ideas like "classics", "university" and "wading".
Pull-off-the-shelf-and-read-for-pleasure stuff, I like Frank O'Hara and his lunch poems (basically what he did in his lunch break, written when he got back to work). Though sometimes I also like wading, eg, sitting down with a collected poems-type edition and reading it cover to cover like it was a novel.
there was also the time I got Thom Gunn's latest book out of the library as soon as they got a copy and reading that from cover to cover in Clarke's by accident.
("Boss Cupid". I really recommend it)
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