New words

I read Allen Curnow last night, re-read in fact, and that was good. Did not finish the book yet (The Bells of St. Babel). I don't know if St. Babel exists. The book title is taken from a poem of that name. No St. Babel in my on-line encyclopedia search.

Re-reading an old (February this year) review of Saramago in The Guardian, there are two words I am not comfortable with ; "Death at Intervals begins with a striking conceit..." conceit in the sense of an idea, a notion, always sounds like something out of Jane Austen to me, and the writer using the word considered "up himself, or herself". The other word is trope "...the simplicity of the central trope..." My online dictionary says:

1. A figure of speech using words in nonliteral ways, such as a metaphor.
2. A word or phrase interpolated as an embellishment in the sung parts of certain medieval liturgies.

I am not sure the author (Ben Bollig) uses it correctly. It did get past the editor...Never mind.

I checked the requirements of the course - number of poems for the final work, but there were no specifications regarding the number of poems in the first draft. Went back to my own project description: I had specified twenty. It would be good to write more, but it does remove the pressure a bit.