So, aside from all the submissions of poetry, I’m trying to keep up with recent collections by Vahni Capildeo and Claudia Rankine. Both really worth putting in a little effort to understand! There is an interesting move in poetry, influenced by the U.S., I feel, towards more prose poetry and a spoken word looseness which is a good thing, I’ve decided. I am not comfortable, yet, with publishing some of the more ‘spoken-wordy’ stuff that is submitted so far, but maybe in the future. I guess for me it has to work foremost on the page and then aurally. Not the other way around. A reading of the work, if it’s done well, should enhance the poem. However, it has to exist on the page always and forever.
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I’ve now read Jill Munro’s Man from La Paz published by GBP. A pleasant read, well produced. The poems are accessible and entertaining, although the humdrum domesticity becomes repetitive and the chatty, jokey style tends to create in the end a feeling of self-satisfaction. But I nevertheless enjoyed it, so congratulations to both poet and publisher.
I rarely read poetry, but when I do, I’m always surprised at how much I like it. My favorites, not really, are Emily Dickinson, WH Auden, Lermontov (not in translation). But I spend most of my time reading novels. Two of the very best, recently, are Peter Mathiesson’s “PARADISE” and Richard Flanagan’s “THE NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH”. Both are about the same era; one written by the narrator’s looking back and the other in two times, in the present of the action and in the present of the looking back at the past when the action took place. Powerful, intelligent, brilliant.