Fulfilling my obligations to my long-neglected TBR one book a time. Want to know why? I explain it in the first post here. Posting striking lines daily on BlueSky

Here’s an interesting exercise: go back re-read a book you read back in University, a book that you remember as an influence on you. Perhaps a book that laid down some of the bricks on which you’ve based your creativity. A book that perhaps you haven’t picked up in a couple of decades, that you haven’t had to read again because you assumed it was already part of you.

Read that book with eyes that are 30 years older. Do they see the same thing? All of the cells in your body have died and been replaced many times over since then. Does it resonate with the poems in the same ways? New ways? Surprising ways?

If you follow me over on over on BlueSky you already know I post lines I find striking every day as I slowly read through one book or issue each week. This week, I would like to draw your attention to these lines from the poem “My Mother Would be A Falconress”:

I would be a falcon and go free.
I tread her wrist and wear the hood,
talking to myself, and would draw blood.

It has been a number of years since my mother passed away. As a student I remember reading this poem analyzing and marvelling at its structure. How it leaps off from the villanelle and flaps its anapohora and epistrophe circling and circling in a narrowing spiral.

The emotional updrafts and pressure changes were something I don’t remember even seeing. And I guess, that was to be expected. Now, this poems means something different. And that too is to be expected. This is why I read and why I read poetry slowly.