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

Referring to the stack of books I’m going through slowly this year as my To Be Read (TBR) pile isn’t wholly accurate. TBR could also be called TBF, “To Be Finished,” because in a couple of cases, I have started to read a book or issue and just not gotten around to finishing it for whatever reason.

This week’s issue of “Poetry”is an example of this. I eagerly dug into it last year when it arrived in my mailbox because a friend’s spouse has a couple of poems in the issue. It is rare for a Canadian poet to make an appearance in “Poetry” let alone one from the relatively smaller centres like Edmonton. M.L. Martin is the recent exception to this.

Not only is M.L. a local, she is also one of the few poets I know of who are working with Old English source material doing new translations, and new interpretations I’d guess you’d call them, of some of the oldest written material which forms the basis of western European culture. So when this issue arrived, I eagerly dove in to read her stuff. I then set the issue aside meaning to get to it later but then later turned into several months and so last week I decided to pick it back up and finish the volume. This issue has some truly cool stuff in it including some work from Gwendolyn Brooks which was new to me.

But, getting back to M.L. Her work is awesome. You absolutely need to pick her stuff up. If you follow me 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. Here is a bit from the poem “We, &” translated from the Old English:

when we were two
islands
surrounded by battlefields

& every
thread
of joy
was woven with fear
/anger
/hatred
/mourning