The weather in the window this morning is snow, unseasonal singular flakes, a slow winter’s final shiver. On such an occasion to presume to eulogise one man is to pipe up for a whole generation - that crew whose survival was always the stuff of minor miracle, who came ashore in orange-crate coracles, fought ingenious wars, finagled triumphs at sea with flaming decoy boats, and side-stepped torpedoes. Husbands to duty, they unrolled their plans across billiard tables and vehicle bonnets, regrouped at breakfast. What their secrets were was everyone’s guess and nobody’s business. Great-grandfathers from birth, in time they became both inner core and outer case in a family heirloom of nesting dolls. Like evidence of early man their boot-prints stand in the hardened earth of rose-beds and borders. They were sons of a zodiac out of sync with the solar year, but turned their minds to the day’s big science and heavy questions. To study their hands at rest was to picture maps showing hachured valleys and indigo streams, schemes of old campaigns and reconnaissance missions. Last of the great avuncular magicians they kept their best tricks for the grand finale: Disproving Immortality and Disappearing Entirely. The major oaks in the wood start tuning up and skies to come will deliver their tributes. But for now, a cold April’s closing moments parachute slowly home, so by mid-afternoon snow is recast as seed heads and thistledown. Simon Armitage ~ 2021
Archive for April, 2021
The Patriarchs – An Elegy
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Poetry on April 19, 2021| 6 Comments »
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Winter by the Fraser River.
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These “Reviews” and Ratings
I am merely a reader, a consumer of books for amusement and personal instruction, not a professional reviewer - and that is indeed a worthy profession, an important literary craft - so these posts are merely meant to be one person's reading responses, not scholarly reviews.
Early on in this blog I began rating the books I talked about on a 1 to 10 scale; it was meant to be a quick way to communicate my personal degree of satisfaction/pleasure (or the opposite) in each reading experience.
To emphasize: These are very personal, completely arbitrary ratings. These are merely meant to be a measure of the book's success in meeting my hopes and expectations as a reader.
5 & higher are what I consider as "keepers", in various degrees. A 10 indicates that I can think of no possible improvement. Ratings under 5 are rare & I struggle with giving those, but in all honesty sometimes feel them appropriate for, again, undeniably arbitrary and very personal reasons.
Each book is rated in its own context, NOT in comparison to the entire range of literature, which would, of course, be an impossible task.
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Recent Posts
- An heiress and mainly manly men, with horses: Flambards by K.M. Peyton (1967)
- Tell-All Tale of the Suddenly-Single: Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott ( 1929)
- Journey Round the Kingdom: The Search for Delicious by Natalie Babbitt (1969)
- The Virgin Mary Takes an Interest: Catalina by W. Somerset Maugham (1948)
- At War with the Money-God: Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell (1936)
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