Readiscovery

What I've read and discovered

  • The sensual strut of Dylan Thomas

    The sensual strut of Dylan Thomas

    Ah, the “sensual strut” of Dylan Thomas! I can’t forget those words of his. I couldn’t recall the poem where he wrote those words, so I searched Google and found it. It’s not one of his best known poems, but those two words from it – “sensual strut” – sum…

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  • Hicky and Aveek Sarkar, Hastings and Mamata Banerjee

    Hicky and Aveek Sarkar, Hastings and Mamata Banerjee

    Reading about the first newspaper in India reminded me of Aveek Sarkar, the colourful newspaper proprietor. He is also based in the same city, Calcutta (now called Kolkata), where the Irishman James Augustus Hicky launched the Bengal Gazette or the Original Calcutta General Advertiser in 1780 (see image.)

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  • John Le Carre: The cat sat on the dog’s mat

    John Le Carre: The cat sat on the dog’s mat

    John Le Carre once said, ” ‘The cat sat on the mat’ is not the beginning of a story, but ‘the cat sat on the dog’s mat’.” He knows how to hook a reader. Yesterday, on his 85th birthday, I opened his very first book, Call for the Dead, published…

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  • Life Saving: Why We Need Poetry

    Reading a book of poems can be such a pleasure. There’s the thrill of discovering a poem that absolutely bowls you over, the pleasure of re-reading an old favourite and learning something about the life of the poet or poets whose poetry fills the book. I derived all three pleasures…

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  • Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop

    Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop

    I just read a poem by Emily Dickinson and two poems by Elizabeth Bishop which I had never read before. Emily Dickinson’s poem is about a carriage ride with Death. Elizabeth Bishop’s poems have humour and sadness. I found them in a collection of poems where the poets are introduced…

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  • Bob Dylan, Nobel laureate

    Bob Dylan, Nobel laureate

    I have loved Bob Dylan from the time I heard Blowin’ in the Wind way back in the Sixties. But Bob Dylan Nobel laureate! Winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature! Call me old-fashioned. I prefer to read literature and listen to music.  Dylan’s songs may be poems set…

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  • Unknowingly quoting Shakespeare

    Unknowingly quoting Shakespeare

    You don’t have to know Shakespeare to quote him. Every day we quote Shakespeare, without even knowing we are using his words.  He has become part and parcel of our language.

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  • Anne Sexton

    Anne Sexton

    I just can’t get Anne Sexton out of my head after reading her poem, For My Lover, Returning to His Wife. Written from the mistress’s point of view, it stays in your mind because of its unusual perspective.

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  • Elvis and the Beatles

    Elvis and the Beatles

    Thank you for the music, Fats Domino, Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Joan Baez, Janis Joplin, Rolling Stones, Beach Boys, Peter, Paul and Mary, Drifters, Everly Brothers, Mamas and Papas, and too many to name here. I love you all, but most of all I love…

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  • PS I love you, Beatles

    PS I love you, Beatles

    On this day, on October 5, in 1962, the Beatles’ first single, Love Me Do, was released with PS I Love You on the flip side in Britain. The rest is history. Philip Larkin summed it up most memorably in his poem, Annus Mirabilis:Sexual intercourse beganIn nineteen sixty-three(which was rather…

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