Bedside Books Number Two

This is a very thin book but it has taken me a while to read because it's poetry and as any fule kno you do not read poetry books straight through at a sitting from the first page to the last. I have been rationing myself to three poems a day so that I could give due consideration to ( most of ) the poems. 

I bought this at the Gaskell Society Conference this year, which I never got around to blogging about because life was very busy in the summer, but I did enjoy it very much and here's a good tip for you; Never order a glass of wine to go with a meal at a Best Western Hotel, unless you want to be charged for two glasses,  and then patronised and ignored when you subsequently ask them to acknowledge and apologise for their mistake. In fact, it might be an idea to avoid Best Western Hotels altogether, I know that's what I'm going to do ...

But I digress. Why, you are wondering, or even how, did I come to buy a book of C20 poetry at a conference about a C19 novelist, and it's a good question. The Society always arranges for a local book dealer to have a stall at the conference and obviously they largely bring along C19 stuff. I tend not to buy any of this because I have all the good lit crit stuff on Elizabeth Gaskell, and indeed some of the bad stuff too. I also have more than enough books about the Brontes, and will buy no more  until someone writes something that asserts that the Bronte novel most worth reading is Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. I am not holding my breath in this respect but I have certainly read more than enough about the loathsome Charlotte and the exasperating Emily to last me a lifetime and then some. That said, I always have a browse of the stall and occasionally buy something, and this year it was the Gunn and Hughes poetry book. I think I paid all of a fiver and as I have nothing of Hughes' and Gunn was really just a name it seemed worth a punt. 

I have, as they say, issues with Ted Hughes, to do with his treatment of women, not that that should affect by one iota a judgement of his poetry. Previous acquaintance with his work had been limited to reading 'Thrushes' at school; a poem which is in this collection and rather better than I remembered it. That says much much more about me than the poem. What I found interesting was that even days after reading his poems if I picked the book up and read the title or first line I could remember what the rest of the poem was about. Some of them were funny, some were nasty, the occasional one was lyrical; they were all clever. Will I now invest in Ted Hughes' Collected Poems? No. Will I revisit some of these in time to come. Absolutely yes. 

Gunn is a complex poet, almost metaphysical in his approach to form and metaphor, and therefore some of the poems were difficult to follow or understand. But I bought the book on the strength of the poem that the book fell open at when I first looked at it; Tamer and Hawk    which totally captivated me. I won't be investing in Gunn's Collected Poems either, but I'll be looking out for a biography and some criticism in due course. 

Next bedside book is a lot less highbrow, but also not yet finished ....