Breathing Just a Little

is there anything more boring than a poem about a strange dream where the house is sold but you forgot, and you haven't  started packing, but you must get out next Tuesday also the house is not actually your real house it's a trick mirror version, all weird angles and hidden rooms decaying walls, brick dust and everyone still here, even those who moved out no one gone and you can't find or can't remember  where all the paperwork is at and no one wants to help pack and when you try Googling "packing services" Google just gives endless hits of sad poems

 I have recently finished two books that I was reading simultaneously (actually I'm reading three, as my Agatha Christie re-read project continues, but two new-to-me books!) One of them was a book I'd not read by one of my favourite authors of all time, the incomparable Ursula K. Le Guin. The other was a recently popular book that is my book club's selection for this month, so I was reading it to be able to discuss it properly at the meeting. I finished the two within a day of each other (Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven first), and I think that my judgement of Chosen Family, the other book, was undeniably harsher because of how incredibly good the Le Guin work is. This really magnified my disappointed feeling that Chosen Family was incredibly unsuccessful - as a story, as a character study, as a piece of writing. Had I not been spoiled for the mundane by Le Guin's elevated prose and complex ideas, I might have judged Chosen Family a little less stringently, although I...

One of our Month of Poetry challenges in January was to write a contrapuntal poem, something I had never done before. Contrapuntal poetry involves interweaving or combining two or more poems to create a new poem. It uses two or more poems that are distinct in tone and subject matter but are, in some way, in conversation with each other. The term “contrapuntal poem” gets its name from contrapuntal music, which features more than one melody playing simultaneously. This is my effort. It can either be read as two separate poems down each side (Cat's Poem and Bird's Poem), or as one poem about both animals. I don't think I mixed the tone up enough for this to be a really good exemplar, but it's my first one, maybe I'll get better with more practice. It was literally inspired by watching my little cat staring out the window at the crested pigeons, who staring back at her, both giving out little peeps every now and then.

It's been another low-reading (by my standards) month so far in March, and not likely to pick up a lot of pace, although I do have some hopes for the next two weekends, which are uncharacteristically free of too many commitments. However, I have got through three new-to-me books, one of which (although I enjoyed it) doesn't really warrant a review, but the other two, I think, do. One is a literary fic with a central theme of disability, and the other is a Lovecraftian-coded horror dystopia SFF, so extremely not the same kind of book (and I would recommend them for very divergent audiences!), but I enjoyed both of them. This is the story of two Hong Kong sisters - Marlowe, 27, who is a graduate student of entomology in England where she lives with her boyfriend Olly, and Harper, 20, who has Down Syndrome and lives in Hong Kong with the sisters' English father and Chinese grandmother, working part time in a library and enjoying her relationship with her boyfriend Louis (who a...

Christie re-reads have been happening! I find them relaxing in between new books - gives my brain a rest of sorts, while still engaging me enough to be enjoyable. I'm no longer even pretending to follow any kind of order, I'm just reading to mood now :-) I'm almost at the halfway point now (27 read from a target 57), and overall, my feeling is that the books hold up very well as mysteries, somewhat well as entertainment, and are a very mixed bag in terms of cultural and social expectations and norms (some having some truly awful moments).  That said, I am feeling confirmed in my view that Christie is the Grande Dame of the Golden Age for a reason. Her vivid, clever and original plots jump off the page, and are just as twisty and fun in 2025 as they were in the 30s, 40s, 50s etc.  I am really enjoying the process, and the deep comfort it brings me to slide into old favourites when I'm tired, stressed, or otherwise over myself. It's also been great fun to discover som...

across the world bombs are falling fire is raining down in Persia, and who knows what ends will come of it the plain truth, now: no one ever knows or can know where war will lead, to what destruction to what crush of empires and of women and men  stories swallowed whole in the sunlight, only the bones spat out to grow dry in the unshielded sun falling into dark like the Incas did, and also the Picts like the Etruscans when Rome rose bloody and teeming like the Hittites, and the Phillistines like the great city of Carthage, tamped out as a candle flame razed and sown in salt  and here is our age: sliding towards disaster, run by billionaires and idiots and, here, tucked up against the tailbone of the earth fretting against civility, is a country that does not seem to know its fortune so far from bombs and battle and, still, fractious, chafing, and the sky looks heavy, today grey and gloom-soaked, with rain in its face and, here, the pigeons croon to the burdened light still, an...