Time for a reality check, to see what I have reread since last July. I really am having a hard time understanding where my head was at during the first life of this thread. btw, the kitchen renovations still aren't completed.
The Atlas of Middle Earth has been fairly constantly at my side, while LOTR, The Hobbit and The Silm have seen piecemeal readings, mainly for RPG purposes.
As for other reading, I have reread parts of Brontë's
Shirley, in response to a chat with Belin Ibaimendi, but haven't touched any other classic novels.
But much poetry has been reread: Jane Urquhart's
Some Other Garden. Several of Anne Carson's books of poetry:
Glass, Irony and God,
Men in the Off Hours,
The Beauty of the Husband, the last of which drew me back to Keats'
Letters, which of course then led me back to his poetry.
Rereading Rimbaud's
Une Saison en Enfer (now who would have prompted me to do that) led me on to read his
Illuminations and then his earlier poetry for the first time. Oh, his prose! Rereading
Les Fleurs du Mal by Baudelaire in conjunction with another friend also inspired a wider reading of his work, which suffers in comparison with Rimbaud's, I think, for its contained forms.
Mainly I have been immersing myself again in Anne Michael's work--her novel
Fugitive Pieces and the poetry of
The Weight of Oranges/ Miner's Pond. And this had taken me to her new
Skin Divers. Her metaphors awe me; her lines dance through my memory; the luminosity of her writing, completely unsentimental sentiment, draws me back over and over again.
Yet the poetry of one other person should be mentioned. It was the death of one of my friends from grad school two years ago which motivated me to join discussion rooms on the Net. Her poetry I had helped edit at grad school and when she died her family knew nothing of it until I told them to look for it. Her work, too, I have been rereading as the anniversary of her death approaches:
Quote:
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Oh my dears--here I am with a pen in my hand--not dead.
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Bethberry
[ February 26, 2003: Message edited by: Bethberry ]
[ February 26, 2003: Message edited by: Bethberry ]