Thursday (Winding Down) Musings

This could explain why I always look forward to winter:

Snow is the weather to which poets’ imaginations are most beholden; more often than any other it’s given centre stage in a poem rather than providing the incidental music, as rain or sunlight might…

____________________________________________________________________

I am slowly but surely making my way back to my stack of unread books. This new job and my thesis have kept me away from recreational reading this fall, but I am bound and determined to read more this spring.

I finished Lee Martin’s River of Heaven about a week and half ago, took a brief respite to decorate my Christmas tree and do laundry, and then began Barbra Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

I love Barbra Kingsolver. I read Bean Trees when I was a sophomore in high school and read The Posionwood Bible last fall. I think her writing is beautiful and this new nonfiction book is no exception. I’m only about 30 pages in, but I’ve already copied some of the passages down so I won’t forget them. This passage is from the opening of the book:

This story about food begins in a quick-stop convenience market. It was our family’s las day in Arizona, where I’d lived half my life and raised two kids for the whole of theirs. Now we were moving away forever, taking our nostalgic inventory of the things we would never see again: the bush where the roadrunner built a nest and fed lizards to her weird looking babies; the tree Camille crashed into learning to ride her bike; the exact spot where Lily touched a dead snake. Our driveway was kist the first tributary on a memory river sweeping us out.
____________________________________________________________________
These days, poetry readings might seem a strange concept. Why would you give up an evening of watching The Biggest Loser or Dancing with the Stars to listen to someone read what you could easily read, and perhaps more easily understand, on your own?