Sparrow & Dove

It’s been a while. It’s been so long, in fact, that it’s no longer particularly hot in Frankfurt (though it will return to your regularly scheduled 28 degrees this weekend, apparently).

Let’s start with a recommendation of actual good poetry, as I think all these posts should. This is kind of a repeat of a stream of Twitter-consciousness, so bear with me and skip this if you’ve heard it before.

Tomas Tranströmer!

One of the few poets of whom I can say I’ve read pretty much everything he published. It started with a kindly soul lending me The Sorrow Gondola, which I read through in two mad sittings (one standing on a tram). I think I’ve said before how I’m not sure how you’re supposed to read poetry volumes – in binges or savouring each offering like a fine, limited edition truffle. Tranströmer, however, I like to binge on. A while after reading The Sorrow Gondola and being totally mystified (and intrigued) by it, I came to Tranströmer’s New Collected Poems on my much-vaunted reading list. This was while I was in the UK visiting home, after having left my phone in Germany, and the poems which had once been so opaque and weird suddenly became everything. The poems of The Sorrow Gondola are also in New Collected Poems, and when I got to them I read them as though it was for the first time. I was finally in the zone. It all made, if not sense, then feelings and images so vivid they were almost concrete. I was almost in dream-Sweden. I was almost between time. I was almost between dreams and reality, slipped down that crack where so many of Tranströmer’s poems take place (if you can say they have a place).

He has a poem about drawing a piano keyboard on his kitchen table and playing for the neighbours which is so weird it becomes universal. Surreally relateable. Don’t ask me how, but it is.

Highly recommend. Here are ten poems of his to get a feel for him, though you might need more to recalibrate yourself to his wavelength.

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I only have one more poem to share from this session. After this I’ll no doubt start moving some other old stuff over here though.

No recommendations today, as I just finished Grey and although I appreciated the closure on the series, you can just imagine a terrible stalking experience except the stalker is a billionaire and there you have it: you have experienced Grey. Congratulations.

I have, however, begun reading Burger’s Daughter by Nadine Gordimer. It’s dense and intense and a very focused read. The difficulty of the language – or rather the obscurity of the sentences – draws you in with that focus, to a world which I believe is (thankfully) unthinkable to most white, Western people of my age, and it makes you think about it. Crazy uncomfortable, but you can’t – mustn’t – look away. More as I progress.

And now for a poem.

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Time to post the second-last of my poetry binge. Try not to be too sad.

Before that though, I have this much-vaunted reading list which is like my actual child right now. I’m never going to get to the end of it. On it go books of films I watch (so Sneak is a reading list KILLER) and the best-known, most prizewinning, or first book by any deceased author I haven’t read yet. That last one is in real time, or else I really would never get to the end of this list. Of course there are exceptions – any book recommended by a friend or anything that just really catches my eye goes down as well.

I mean right now I’m reading EL James’s Grey, so I’m not that much of a book snob, I promise.

But I just wanted to recommend more poetry, because honestly with poetry I just don’t know where to start, and it’s nice to keep a record of the things that I’ve liked. So, through my book list (and haunting the Guardian’s Books section at the slightest hint of boredom) I put down a book by Dermot Healy, called A Fool’s Errand. It’s a book-length poem split into “chapters”, and the theme is a flock of geese migrating from near his Irish home to Greenland and back. I’m glad I started reading it after I came to the end of my poetry-writing spree, because it is good.

The geese scene from TH White’s The Once and Future King was my favourite part of the whole book, and A Fool’s Errand just tapped right back into that scenery for me. Right back into that wet, cold, windy place, and the mysterious ritual of migration. The rising restlessness, the false alarm flights and finally the big lift-off, the amazing journey. Around this you see the geese from all angles, above and below, and Healy was a master of imagery. Birds as orchestra – or orchestra as birds? Simple things like a wind through a house slamming an open door become beautiful things, but always still simple, always just what they are. It’s gorgeous and you should read it.

My own feeble attempt is below, as always. Continue reading →