If you want to write, you must read. This is common advice and quite easy to follow when you have a half-formed ambition to write mystery novels. Reading a mystery novel is generally a delight, although the pleasure is somewhat diminished by the lack of editorial discipline revealed now that self-publishing is so easy.

Yes, I read a lot of low-brow books…

I don’t find reading poetry quite so easy. I lack the attention span, or boredom threshold, and the intellectual capacity to process it in a scholarly way. A book of poetry soon blurs, merges and becomes dull.  It becomes an exercise in tenacity. But to read it slowly and apply thought to each individual poem soon exhausts my mental capabilities.

That’s what put me off poetry in the first place, and all English literature, to be honest. I don’t want to read a book of techniques and allegory and cleverness and concealed meaning. I want a book where good triumphs over evil and where you can be sure that after the hero throws the bad man off a cliff he will go home and live happily until he has to throw another dastardly villain from a cliff/into quicksand/out of an aircraft. Some deviation is acceptable with a touch of angst and a little regret and even the possibility of ambiguity.  In general, I read novels because I like a puzzle and I like to see good triumph over evil.

It’s the same with poetry. I read Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, because I want to rave at close of day, and catch the sun in flight and because I know it’s all slipping away from me.  Not because I want to admire his use of repetition. I’ve actually just read a couple of articles on the poem. I suspect the first two were done by AI as they mentioned repetition, but managed to get all the way through without mentioning the word villanelle, which is one of the most notable aspects of the poem. Thomas didn’t get up one morning and say to himself, I think I might write a poem with some repetition in it. He got up, probably with a hangover, and decided to write a villanelle.  I’ve written two. They are not for the faint hearted. I fully intend writing a third, but I’m resting and gathering my strength for what is more like a full frontal assault on the English language than the writing of a poem. One definition of poetry is putting the best words in the best places, in a villanelle you have to select the best words to be put in several places, which have already been selected by the history of the form. They have to make sense and the repetitions have to contribute to the poem and, if you are really good they have to be capable of subtle changes.

Not the Library of an Intellectual

Of course, as poems go, it is much enhanced by a good reader. This is Dylan Thomas having a crack at it.  He’s no Michael Sheen, but to be fair, Michael Sheen is no Dylan Thomas when it comes to writing poetry.

Today I finished off Quantum of Menace, which is an excellent book, though the ending felt a bit rushed. It needed a few more baddies to meet a sticky end, but I suppose Q doesn’t do that sort of thing. It’s by Vaseem Khan – writer of The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra and the Malabar House Series. In Quantum of Menace, Q, who has been made redundant, from MI6 becomes the lead character. That in itself is difficult, but Khan’s Q fits right in with what I would have expected. He also avoids that trap that Richard Osman, I’m afraid, fell right into with his Thursday Murder Club books. Just because you have an ex-spy as a character doesn’t mean they can be used to answer loads of difficult questions. Omnipotence  may come easy for the host of a quiz show but it doesn’t really work in a whodunnit.

Ring-Necked Parakeet

I also watched Chris Packham’s documentary on Ring-Necked parakeets. Ironically, after him saying that we needed more facts and fewer opinions, he seemed to be short of facts and plentifully supplied with opinions of his own. It did feature a scientist who had eaten both pigeon and parakeet to see why urban Peregrines seem so partial to parakeets (100 taken in a month by just one London pair with chicks). She said that parakeet tastes better than pigeon. Frankly, unless we can tell how a Peregrine views palatability, I’m not sure this is science. However, she also said that in the month after fledging she believes that young parakeets are easier to catch than pigeons. Being bright green I imagine they are easier to spot too.

Little Owl in its nest

Anyway, that will probably do for now. I will now find some photos and get on with posting. Parakeet and Little Owl photos are from Wikipedia.