poetry

Book review: Mother, Brother, Lover: Selected Lyrics

Mother, Brother, Lover: Selected Lyrics by Jarvis Cocker.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars.

So Pulp, eh? Possibly – nah, probably – the best band to emerge from the Britpop years of hype and arse-smacking heroin chic.

The group – in existence since 1978, if you can believe it – weren’t typically sexy. I mean, there was an effort to evoke a certain PR sexiness from lyricist Jarvis Cocker’s gangly frame, but it wasn’t the body that made him sexy: it was the combination of his writing, and of sex itself.

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Book review: The Penguin Book of Oral Poetry

The Penguin Book of Oral Poetry.The Penguin Book of Oral Poetry edited by Ruth Finnegan.
My rating: 3 of 5 stars.

Just a short review, as it’s almost impossible to adequately review anthologies of poetry, I find.

First, this took a long time to read – almost two years on and off – because I found I couldn’t inhale whole tracts of it at a stretch. It’s probably best used as an occasional thing, as something you dip into when the mood strikes. I think it’s probably doing a disservice to the cultures covered to whip through all of their inclusions in one setting, anyway.

Two verses and THEN the solo, right? 


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Planning the pages

So there’s this.

Words.

Buncha words. Also, I should really mop this floor.

As I wrote just a couple of days ago, 2018 is the year I’m going to take the whole reading challenge thing a bit more easily.

I usually try to shoehorn 52 books into each year in some kind of book-a-week plan. Some years I’ve done more than 100 book per year. But mostly, I feel kind of hampered by there being a goal at all: I know I want to read more, and I know that how many books I read, I feel I should have read more. (more…)

The Priest of the Invisible

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As part of an attempt to become more organised (and to eke more out of my hours) I’ve recently begun scheduling things I’d like to do. It’s not quite as cold as it sounds, and it affords me the ability to ensure I do things I like, but which often suffer in the throes of a Wikipedia hole or a TV Tropes vortex.

One of the things on my list is to read a poem a day. Every day. One poem. This is to counter the fact that though I like poetry, and though I spent four years at university reading books – some of which were made up of poems! – I still feel myself to be a low-watt bulb when it comes to poetry. It’s something I like, and have liked for a long time, but something I feel kind of stupid around, like I’ve turned up to a fancy restaurant in tracksuit pants. (more…)