Come on, Venteknackers!

Perhaps a certain autumnal mouldering is creeping over us as the bright poets of summer are gently lowered towards their wintry shallow hibernation (like polar bears).

And is it any wonder if we lose heart in these days of Mammon?

Still, there is always the sweet pleasure of reading. This summer my favourite moments were spent reading Anne Carson's Eros The Bittersweet, a book about romantic love beginning with an interpretation of Sappho's famous fragment 31.

Fragment 105 seems right for the season:

As a sweet apple turns red on a high branch,
high on the highest branch and the applepickers forgot -
well, no they didn't forget - were not able to reach...

I also loved reading a book found by chance, remaindered in a Kerry pound shop; a recent biography of James Joyce by Edna O'Brien (Irish Independent). The beauty of this book comes from a great writer's particular insight on and recognition of the true artist's necessary ruthlessness and also its price. 'His exile was so complete within himself that interruption could not endanger it, only time could do that. Time in which he would begin his ''book of the dark'', Finnegans Wake, a book in which people were not only people, they were as well rivers, bushes, mounds, boundless embodiments of Irish mythological figures, human longings, human impulses caught in an archetypal sweep. New words, phantasmagoric words ''breathing in upon his breaking brain''. 

What books were other Venteknackers reading this summer I wonder? After the long silence let's share.

And what were we all writing? I was working on an interminable novel. My one poetic effort was this:

Wren in the Holly bushes

spoon spill of song from a Silver Birch,

        crow passages cloud tumble across blue,

throb of a harvester somewhere

        caught by a breeze at the edge of wind,

and the river on my side,

washing all away,

washing all away.

I'd love to hear from you. Fiona