Understatement

Someone told me to read a novel called Remember me by Trezza Azzopardi, read it last night and disappeared into it, a feeling of being sucked in - thank goodness it's over, a depressing and scary world, about a woman with an intellectual disability living as a derelict, a bag-lady. Wonderful writing, in terms of imagery and of getting inside the head of someone like her, but also lacking in some ways, practical things not thought through. Azzopardi's first novel The Hiding Place was short-listed for the Booker in 2000. Her father is Maltese and her mother Welsh, she grew up in Cardiff.

Today is my uninterrupted day, got a lot done, have prepared poems for emailing on Thursday. Year-long resume next, tomorrow morning, mainly based on this blog.

Read Dylan Thomas's Where once the waters of your face, an ode to the sea, or is it the tide?
Expressions I noticed: 'The dead turns up its eye' , 'your clocking tides','the dolphined sea'. He eliminates words, changes others, creates concentrated expressions, the language becomes rich and fresh. That's from his book The Loud Hill of Wales.

A Scots friend lent me Selected Poems by George Mackay Brown (1971 & 1977, Hogarth Press). The first poem, from his Loaves and Fishes collection, is entitled The Old Women: they

"...fix on you from every close and pier
An acid look to make your veins run sour."

and at the death of a "...gray-eyed sober boy..." would

"...weave into their moans
An undersong of terrible holy joy."

The use of holy!