The Guardian's Blog, page 183

Summer voyages: In Pursuit of Spring by Edward Thomas

Written just before the first world war, this vivid account of a journey through the English countryside is a vivid and poignant portrait of a vanished age

In Pursuit of Spring is the classic literary tale of one man and his bicycle. The reader piggybacks Edward Thomas on his week long journey from Clapham Junction in London to the Quantock Hills in Somerset and is enlightened by a guide who never fails to acknowledge the different species of birds, plants and trees along the way.

The piece has a strange fantastical quality – perhaps it is the age of the book (the journey it records took place just before Easter in March 1913), the stretches of open roads with a striking lack of motor vehicles, the colloquial style with light and often lyrical passages or Thomas's invention of "the Other Man" whom we meet several times along the way. These days there's no escape from cars on the roads, and the meadows have almost disappeared. Thomas writes:

"A motor car overtook me in the village … as the thing passed me by … rapidly I slid down, crossed the railway, and found myself in a land where oaks stood in the hedges and out in mid-meadow, and the banks were all primroses, and a brook gurgled slow among rush, marigold, and willow."

Nothing much happens, but this is a remarkable journey and one that builds to a crescendo. From a bleak, claustrophobic starting point, in a "mysterious and depressing" set of rooms where "the furniture gloomed vaguely above and around the little space", there is a sense of confusion and restlessness over the "false Spring" weather. Hampered by the rain falling hard at Haydons Road Station, Thomas shelters by a pet shop selling caged birds. It is Thomas's alter ego, the Other Man, who buys a bird and then a few hundred yards away sets it free.

By the end of the journey Thomas is himself free, not only from the Other Man, but of winter. The account reflects his mood: "the road was like a stream on which I floated in the shadows of trees and steep hillsides". It is when he sees the bluebells and cowslips that by chance a child had gathered "on a glorious sunlit road" where "the million gorse petals seemed to be flames sown by the sun" that spring finally arrives and is the ultimate ending. Thomas's uncertainty lifts and he has a clear vision for the first time: "I had found Spring, and I was confident that I could ride home again and find Spring all along the road."

The account was written at a time when the threat of a European war created an uncertainty and deep suspicion of change that sharpened the longing for the British countryside. Throughout the book Thomas muses on what he finds and it becomes a personal journey of life, death and legacy. The epitaphs and engravings – or their absence – on fountains, statues and tombstones build upon this notion and so do the lovers walking hand in hand and children chatting or playing. At one point life and death come gracefully together:

"… two boys were doing the cleverest thing I saw on this journey. They were keeping a whiptop, and that a carrotshaped one, spinning by kicking it in turns. Which was an accomplishment more worthy of being commemorated on a tombstone than the fact that you owned Glastonbury Abbey."

It is perhaps fitting that at this time Thomas's attitude towards his work changed. He sought guidance from his friend, the poet Robert Frost, who gave him encouragement to utilise imagery from his prose and began in 1914 to write poetry, including "March" and "The Other", thought to draw on In Pursuit of Spring. The poet Ted Hughes later declared Thomas to be the "Father of us all".

Strangely, as part of his military training Edward Thomas was stationed on the fields around Bradford-on-Avon in 1915 and revisited the route taken a few years earlier when writing In Pursuit of Spring. This travel account becomes a fitting journey of a writer, naturalist and poet who died in action on the battlefields of Arras in the Spring of 1917, on Easter Monday.

• In Pursuit of Spring was reissued in May 2013 by Laurel Books

Summer readingTravel writingPoetryEdward ThomasRobert FrostFlora MacQueen
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

       

Edward Snowden's reading list: Crime and Punishment as a primer on Russian life

The NSA whistleblower's lawyer says Crime and Punishment is a good way to learn about the country's way of life. Really?

As if it wasn't already bad enough for Edward Snowden, stuck in a Moscow transit lounge while his application for temporary asylum grinds its way through the purgatory of Russian bureaucracy, the guy's got to read Crime and Punishment.

His lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, has told the world's media he'd bought his client a copy so he could get to know something of the Russian mindset and "our reality of life", adding that "he needs to read about Raskolnikov killing the old woman pawnbroker".

Really? I'd have thought something a little lighter – a crime novel or some popular non-fiction perhaps – might ease the anguish of Sheremetyevo airport. I remember reading Crime and Punishment as I inter-railed through Italy, a choice made out of pure practicality to reduce the weight of my luggage: it seemed a good bet that Crime and Punishment would last a week or two at least. The sun-soaked Italian hills were the perfect counterpart to the novel's haunting moral conflict. Raskolnikov accompanied me through every de-coupling and re-coupling of post-war rolling stock from the Gare du Nord to Naples.

I don't think I'd have felt the same trapped in transit with only Fyodor Dostoevsky's tale of anomie and repentance for company. Kucherena said that he'd also brought along some Chekhov "for dessert", but how about the wild energy of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita? Snowden's already started learning the language – but what would you recommend to give him a feel for the Russian soul?

Fyodor DostoevskyFictionMikhail BulgakovAnton ChekhovEdward SnowdenThe NSA filesData protectionNSALiz Bury
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

       

The poet laureate's on holiday – can you write a poem fit for a prince?

In the absence of an official poem from Carol Ann Duffy, please mark the new royal arrival with a poem of your own

Cheering crowds, waving flags, commemorative crockery – all that's missing to mark the appearance of a royal baby is a poem. So far there's no sign of an ode from the poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy. Apparently she's on holiday. So why don't we have a go instead? Add your poems in the comments below to mark the birth of His Royal Highness Prince George of Cambridge.

Some people have already started. Here's a taste of Michael Rosen's response, Mind:

I don't mind waiting
I do mind being told I'm waiting
I don't mind good news
I do mind being told which news is good

And TheBluePelican, a reader of our live blog coverage, posted his/her poem:

Britain is secure.
By his service, his paternity,
and her maternity. English
men and women are served.
Your ancestors could not be prouder.

Now, it's over to you.

Poet laureatePoetryThe Duchess of CambridgeHannah Freeman
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

       

To Kill a Mockingbird: shadows on film

The terrific movie version has all the novel's virtues, as well as the same sense of something missing in its race politics

Often at this stage in the Reading Group cycle, when there is a film adaptation of the novel we're discussing, it's interesting to compare the two different art forms. You can learn a lot about what makes novels so special and interesting just from thinking about the compromises that have to be made to get all those words onto the screen. Likewise, a good film adaptation can also make you think about a book in a new way, just as a good actor can become the character who before was only a vague sketch in your head.

So I'd assumed that the hugely successful Academy Award-winning adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, starring the great Gregory Peck would provide plenty of good material. But now I've watched it, I have little to say. It's almost too obvious to point out that Gregory Peck is a good Atticus. He has just the right combination of gravitas and human warmth, just the right level of floppy-haired handsomeness to appear every bit as lovable and admirable as the man on the page. It doesn't hurt either to know that Peck was about the closest thing to Atticus Finch Hollywood has ever produced in real life too: the outspoken opponent of McCarthy, the critic of Vietnam, the enemy of Nixon. It's a cliche to say that this was the role he was born to play, but it doesn't make it any less true.

Otherwise, the film is such a faithful, and more importantly, effective rendition of the book that I didn't feel that there was much point watching it so soon after reading it. It's largely a compliment to the film that it all seemed to chime so well with Harper Lee's vision – except that it just felt like a rerun. If I wasn't so familiar with the text, I'm sure I'd have taken more from it. As it was, I found myself fixating on tiny variations. Like the fact that you see Boo Radley's father concreting in the hole in the tree where Boo had been leaving gifts for the children. This presumably happens "live" because it's very hard to do the visuals for a concreted-over hole in a black-and-white film. I know. In the greater scheme of things, or even the lesser, that isn't very interesting.

Talking of black and white, however, one thing did strike me. Much as I love watching actors like Gregory Peck in action, there was definitely an imbalance in the amount of screen time he got compared to Brock Peters. Who is Brock Peters, I hear you ask? He's the actor who plays Tom Robinson, the accused in the climactic court case. The fact that you've probably never heard of Peters, even though he too gives a fine performance, speaks volumes. (Although I would temper that slightly with the information that he's appeared in 125 titles,
Tom Ewell is the rabid dog – there's no improving him, he does nothing constructive in the world. He was born in hatred, is hatred, and destroys. I believe Lee is placing this alongside the wider discussion of law, order, and extra-judicial responsibility, not as a socially legitimate alternative, but as a horrific shadow.

Because the men and women around us are not dogs we can simply shoot down (if we wanted to; we are not monsters) before they ravage us with their hatred, we must try to battle using the relentless imperfections of law and civil society. And because we have to use these flawed systems, we will never be rid of the darkness in these people's souls.
To me – and I should say I'm American, and know the South pretty well – that's harrowing."

Harrowing is the word. If you doubt this interpretation, just look at the language that is applied to Ewell in the book. He is "trash", a "stinking carcass". He also dies in pretty much the same place as the dog mentioned by Eric Wojcik. Following that, Sheriff Tate gives him the following eulogy: "Mr Finch. there's just some kind of men you have to shoot before you can say hidy to 'em. Even then, they ain't worth the bullet it takes to shoot 'em. Ewell 'as one of 'em."

OK, it's possibly still an extreme view of the book. But it can't be ruled out entirely. If I've learned anything about To Kill a Mockingbird this month it is that it is open to all sorts of interpretations. It's full of ambiguity and, in spite of the adorable Scout, the noble Atticus and all that demonstration of human decency, it's full of darkness, danger and difficulty. It's a book you underestimate at your peril. And all the better for that.

Harper LeeSam Jordison
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

       

Summer voyages: Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry

In Lowry's 20th-century masterpiece, a disgraced English consul finds and loses himself on Mexico's day of the dead

Malcolm Lowry's masterpiece opens a year after the novel's central figure, defrocked British consul Geoffrey Firmin, has died, as an erstwhile friend finds a letter that has fallen from a book of Elizabethan plays the consul had once loaned him.

In this letter, with its signature "Greek e's, flying buttresses of d's, the t's like lonely wayside crosses save where they crucified an entire word", the alcoholic consul writes to his estranged American wife, Yvonne: "And this is how I sometimes think of myself, as a great explorer who has discovered some extraordinary land from which he can never return to give his knowledge to the world: but the name of this land is hell. It is not Mexico of course but in the heart."

I discovered what remains for me the greatest English novel of the 20th century as an undergraduate, shortly after I had relocated to the States where, 40 years earlier in 1947, the book had become an immediate bestseller. Ten years in the making, it received scant notice in England and was out of print in both countries by the time Lowry died in 1957. From the very first page, I was enraptured by the novel's poetic prose, lush setting and depth. I recognised immediately a kindred spirit: English, literary, eccentric, yet driven by a poetic dæmon to seek out new lands, both internal and external.

Mexico, in the novel, is a land of extremes, mirroring the extreme states of mind through which Firmin plunges on his last day on Earth, Mexico's Day of the Dead, 1938. On the one hand, there are the seemingly ubiquitous pariah dogs that follow the consul on his meanderings through Quauhnahuac, the name Lowry gives to the city of Cuernavaca, accompanied by murderous Fascist thugs who prove his ultimate undoing. On the other, there are the small acts of kindness the consul experiences, as when Mexican children gather up and return all his belongings, fallen from his pockets during an ill-advised ride on a Ferris Wheel.

The book has become one I turn to time and again in my own extreme states of mind, opening it at random to inevitably find in its dense, rich prose a contemplation similar to my own. I turned recently to a passage about a bullfight, and Yvonne's – contra Hemingway – description of it:

Yes, it struck her now that this whole business of the bull was like a life; the important birth, the fair chance, the tentative, then assured, then half-despairing circulations of the ring, an obstacle negotiated - a feat improperly recognised - boredom, resignation, collapse: then another, more convulsive birth...the circumspect endeavours to obtain one's bearings in a world now frankly hostile...followed by disaster, capitulation, disintegration ...

No, it is none too cheery. But how often does life seem just so, to those of us past a certain age! It is indeed a book for "deep readers", as Lowry described it in a letter to his editor. But it seems to me that the reason it has never quite caught on with the English literati is, quite simply, that they see too much of themselves in it.

As Lowry's Firmin contemplates: "Accept it; one is a sentimentalist, a muddler, a realist, a dreamer, coward, hero, an Englishman in short, unable to follow out his own metaphors."

• Daniel Myers contributes to Guardian books as Bysshe22

Malcolm Lowry
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

       

Summer voyages: The Hounds of the Morrigan

This extravagant journey into reinvented Irish legend is a believable fantasy – and retains its magic through endless rereadings

"Rising up into the air, they took to the sky and flew. From west and beyond west, into the wind and through it, they came past countless moons and suns. One laughed and briefly wore a scarf of raindrops in her hair, and then with wicked feet she kicked a cloud and caused rain to swamp a boat … They had been silent for so long.

"Silent, while man followed man as tiny blushes of life."

Pat O'Shea's 1985 fantasy The Hounds of the Morrigan, richly layered with Irish legend and 10 years in the writing, is a story of innumerable journeys. This is the first. "From west and beyond west," the Morrigan, tripartite goddess of war and human suffering, is returning to the world of men. 

Her sister aspects Macha and Bodbh, witches of bright hair, dark powers and black humour, take up residence in an old glasshouse, where their pack of long, lean, shape-changing hounds wait to be set at prey. The goddesses gather because, in Galway, a 10-year-old boy called Pidge has found an old manuscript in a secondhand bookshop. Now Pidge and his indomitable little sister Brigit must fight for the good god Dagda and guard the manuscript from the covetous Morrigan. They must also find a pebble, stained with a drop of her old, strong blood, with which to destroy it. Crossing deep waters, storm-lashed earth, stony valleys and cornfields blighted by sudden snow, Pidge and Brigit are tracked by the long lean hounds who may not kill them – unless the children run in their sight.

Throughout the book, the children travel widely in an Ireland at once contemporary and ageless. O'Shea drew on her idyllic childhood memories, especially of summers spent roving in east Galway, to create a landscape on the soft border between the here-and-now and the never-was, between Ireland and Tír na nÓg. There are moments of saturated beauty throughout, when the reader's entire attention focuses on the drowse of deep summer, the cool splashing joy of a waterspout, or the sweetness of ripe fruit eaten with "natural greed".

Into this landscape, which feels entirely believable, even at its most humorous and surreal, elements of the Ulster Cycle and the Mythological Cycle are woven with astonishing assurance. The great warrior Cúchulainn, Maeve and Aillil and their sons the Seven Maines, Angus Og the god of love and the hearth-goddess Brigit, protect the children alongside more homely figures – a brave dogfox, a farmer aunt, and a dwarf who serves one of the best meals (broth, bread, field mushrooms and fresh trout) in children's fiction.

The book is a bravura feat of writing. The earth's quiet beauty and the horror of ancient battles, malevolent pot-bellied giants and castles tenanted by grey-clad husks of malice are conveyed in mellifluous, ornate prose, never overwhelming for all its richness. Its characterisation also stands the test of time. Gentle, observant Pidge is a perpetually anxious older brother, trying in vain to restrain his little sister's wildness; five-year-old Brigit is full of hilarity, seizing the opportunity to "look for that bloody pebble" with a glint of mischief at uttering a forbidden word.

It's unlikely that such a fat, meaty book, full of abstruse sayings and riotous absurdity, would be published for young readers today. But I was encouraged, not daunted, by its size as a child – it's the sort of book you hope will never come to an end - and as an adult, I realise that I have reread it so regularly that it has become indelibly part of me. My mind unconsciously patters out its joyous, nonsensical, splendidly Irish phrases whenever an opportunity arises. "People who pedester here do so on pain of measles," I mutter. "My fubsy one! You shall have Red Cap Pasty, Peggy's Leg, Kiss Pie and Walking Stick, Hafner's Pie and Soup of the Day." Its impossibly delicate balance of surreal humour and evoked beauty, knowledge, fearfulness, joy, and courage have never been bettered – I hope to read it again and again, summer after summer.

Summer readingFantasyFictionImogen Russell Williams
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

       

Tips, links and suggestions: What are you reading, today?

The space to talk about the books you are reading, and find out which ones we are reviewing

Hannah FreemanGuardian readers

       

Summer voyages: Shikasta Re: Colonised Planet 5 by Doris Lessing

A journey through six 'zones' on the way to a threatened planet, this novel challenges SF's usual aversion to spiritual speculation

Shikasta, the first in what would become five science fiction novels by Doris Lessing, begins with a journey in to the pre-history of the planet Rohanda. Johor is an emissary of the empire of Canopus, sent to help the development of Rohanda. Johor's journey is made through six "zones", levels of spiritual existence each becoming more solidly material, until he arrives at Rohanda itself, which we come to suspect is in fact our own Earth.

Rohanda is the proudest achievement of the Canopean empire, a paradise world where humankind's early ancestors have been nurtured into a utopian civilisation, with some gentle interference from the massively more advanced Canopeans. But soon after Johar's first journey to our world, Rohanda will become Shikasta, "the broken", a fallen world, sheared from the "galactic Lock" that has brought it peace and development, and exploited by the evil empire of Shammat.

Doris Lessing is widely recognised as one of the great literary novelists of the 20th century. The Golden Notebook and The Grass Is Singing underpin a reputation that won their author the Nobel prize for literature in 2007. But it was the Canopus in Argus sequence, identified by Lessing as her most important work, that the Nobel committee recognised when describing their author as "the epicist of the female experience".

Lessing's departure into science fiction in the late 1970s raised some predictably snobbish responses from literary critics, one writing that she "propagandises on behalf of our insignificance in the cosmic razzmatazz". But more serious thinkers like Gore Vidal recognised the epic scope of Shikasta, placing it in context with John Milton's Paradise Lost as an allegorical work on themes of religion and the divine.

Shikasta's allegorical meaning also makes it an awkward fit within science fiction, a genre that tends to take its spaceships and alien visitations literally. But Lessing achieves in Shikasta exactly the thing that is so often missing from SF, and in so doing demonstrates what a strong literary imagination can achieve in a genre that, for all its big ideas, rarely manages to touch real human experience.

In no literature is the faith in technological progress more solid than in science fiction. So it's a mark of Lessing's genius that she encapsualted the genre's most basic philosophical tenets and turned them, almost effortlessly, back on themselves. Shikasta reinvents SF as a literature of mystical speculation, exactly the philosophy the genre itself so often rejects.

Lessing does take care to emphasise the scientific basis of her speculation throughout the novel. Johor's missions to Rohanda are a matter of guided evolution, not divine intervention. The first human cities established by Canopus are products of pure mathematics, taking base geometrical shapes like the Square, Circle and Oval as their pattern. Beyond these cities, nature exists in a state much like the Garden of Eden.

Nonetheless, Lessing's novel is shot through with mystical and religious ideas. Johor journeys to Rohanda through zone 6, a metaphysical realm crowded with the souls of the dead awaiting rebirth, much religions various versions of purgatory. Later, Johor himself reincarnates as an infant human and grows to full adulthood as one George Sherban, a messiah figure who will help humanity through the coming apocalypse.

The sweep of Lessing's vision in Shikasta is staggering, beginning at the prehistory of Earth, taking in galaxy-spanning vistas, and homing in on details of modern society. Lessing's portrait of a divided world, forever at war with itself, is as relevant in our post-911 world of mass digital surveillance as ever. We are, as Lessing describes the basic sickness of Shikasta, a world with "too little Spirit of We Feeling".

Shikasta charts the fall of mankind, from a state of utopian paradise to the hellish conflicts of the modern world. For many readers the portrait of the modern world as a place fallen from a much higher ideal is a difficult one to accept. Our modern technological narrative is one of progress. In the words of another great SF writer, Terry Pratchett, who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? In Shikasta, Lessing challenges us to consider that we may be both.

Doris LessingScience fictionFictionSummer reading
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

       

Poem of the week: Actaeon by George Szirtes

A version of the Greek myth, refocused through the eyes of an ageing 21st-century man, retells the story suggestively slant

From Victorian times at least, women writers have been retelling classical myths and folktales from a woman-centred or feminist perspective. In this week's poem, "Actaeon" by George Szirtes, the myth is experienced intimately from the male perspective. The larger parables that emerge concern bodily limits and mortality. The hounds that run Actaeon into the ground may be those of time as well as desire.

The epigraph draws attention to Donne's enthralled and enthralling "Elegy XX", (sometimes numbered XIX), "To His Mistress Going to Bed". After a slow, perhaps imaginary, feminine disrobing, "O, my America, my Newfoundland", expresses the lover's delight in the vision of his mistress's newly undressed body, and in the forthcoming conquest. Actaeon's untouchable "America" is, of course, Diana, the "chaste and fair" goddess of the hunt and the moon. Any conquest is all hers.

In Ovid's account in Metamorphoses, Book III, Actaeon breaks the taboo unintentionally. He doesn't deliberately set out to spy on Diana, any more than Oedipus set out to kill his father and marry his mother. Actaeon merely wants to find a quiet resting-place after the morning's hunt, when he comes upon the grotto with its secret pool, and the astonishing presence of Diana and her nymphs, bathing. Retribution is almost immediate. The outraged goddess splashes his head with water and curses him, transforming him into the stag who, now without human language, will be chased across the forest and torn apart by his own hounds.

Numerous painters have depicted the crucial scenes. In the poem, that reference to "a washing line/ I shoved aside without thinking" seems to allude to Titian's Diana and Actaeon. Complete with "strange red shirt", Titian's scene is much as the Szirtes narrator describes, and the irreverent approach to a great painting, as with Paul Durcan's "National Gallery of Ireland" poems, spices our appreciation. But the function of that throwaway domestic description, I think, is to deliver Actaeon solidly into the back-garden of the 21st century.

The point of view throughout the poem is Actaeon's. The question "does desire have thoughts or define/ its object, consuming all in a glance?" seems like a disguised plea of Not Guilty. The logical answer is no: desire itself is not violation. The poem's answer, as it evolves, seems to be that Actaeon's metaphysical theft and the literal destruction Diana unleashes are equally necessary "fatal flaws" in the moral scheme.

Actaeon rephrases his question. He seems angry and combative. "You, with your several flesh" evokes a disturbing, almost grotesque image, with the nymphs like lumpy outgrowths of Diana, flesh of her flesh, and multiplying the threat she represents. In a collection which, as the title Bad Machine implies, considers the faults and limits of the body, there are more interpretative possibilities to "several flesh". You might think of bodies gone slack and adipose, or, at worst, developing tumours. The moon-goddess herself, "drinking night water", seems to be slaking some private and unhealthy thirst – perhaps enhancing her powers, perhaps swallowing medication. The speaker sharpens his earlier challenge with the crucial, negative-riddled question, "What can't we let go/without protest?" This implicates Diana and her prized virginity but then turns back on the speaker, Actaeon, now forced to let go of himself.

The "dangerously toothed" nocturnal pursuers of Actaeon seem to assault him from within. "And so the body burns/as if torn by sheer profusion of skin/and cry." Burning and tearing, in everyday speech, often describe physical pain, and, in poetry, they're traditional tropes associated with love. The tormenting packs come together in "Skin/ and cry", a vivid coupling that recalls "hue and cry", giving us the belling of the hounds as they close in, the confusion of so many bodies, and the impossibility of separating the hunted from the hunters. The more skin we have, as lovers, as ageing bodies, the more, perhaps, it will make us cry.

Actaeon's body "grows contrary" and no longer seems a comfortable fit. This adheres to the Ovidian narrative, while evoking a metamorphosis of ageing in terms of increasingly ragged and un-flesh-like flesh, a loss which has psychological ramifications: "So flesh falls away, ever less/human, like desire itself…"

The poem's structure helps reveal the paradoxes. The stanzas, though uniform in length, have an odd number of lines, the five quintets making a pattern which complicates symmetry. Rhythmically, there's often an impatient forwards-rush, while the "sheer profusion" of rhyme checks it and creates a back-and-forth movement, as the rhyme-word of one stanza's third line is picked up in the first and last lines of the next. It's an innovative and intricate form, and one that seems organic to its subject. Between the stases of desire and death, the hunting dogs rush and circle.

In the fifth stanza, Actaeon, it will be revealed, is finally looking straight at himself. The last word of the poem, rhyming pointedly with "dress" and "less", is "nakedness" (his). The "O, my America" quotation, now with a lower-case "o", has become grimly ironical and, more importantly, part of an address not to a lover's body, but to his own. In discovering his own, isolated male nakedness, Actaeon breaks another taboo. He has no alternative, as before, and no further story, except, perhaps, that he will be forced (by loneliness or ill-health) to get to know this nakedness more intimately. His body may be a Newfoundland, but it's one which can be greeted only with irony. He's not even a stag any more.

Actaeon

O, my America, my Newfoundland
John Donne, "Elegy 20"

O, my America, discovered by slim chance,
behind, as it seemed, a washing line
I shoved aside without thinking –
does desire have thoughts or define
its object, consuming all in a glance?

You, with your several flesh sinking
upon itself in attitudes of hurt,
while the dogs at my heels
growl at the strange red shirt
under a horned moon, you, drinking

night water – tell me what the eye steals
or borrows. What can't we let go
without protest? My own body turns
against me as I sense it grow
contrary. Whatever night reveals

is dangerously toothed. And so the body burns
as if torn by sheer profusion of skin
and cry. It wears its ragged dress
like something it once found comfort in,
the kind of comfort even a dog learns

by scent. So flesh falls away, ever less
human, like desire itself, though pain
still registers in the terrible balance
the mind seems so reluctant to retain,
o, my America, my nakedness!

PoetryCarol Rumens
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

       

Not the Booker prize: it's back, and you're a judge

Our pioneering attempt to create a truly democratic, reader-judged books prize, is returning for another year of high-toned brawling. Seconds out!

The Not the Booker prize is back. Yes it is. Last year there were some quality novels on the shortlist, not to mention two hilarious duds. There was excellent discussion and debate and some engrossing, enjoyable controversy. And then even more controversy. Ewan Morrison's victorious campaign even left us questioning whether the award had run its course. In the proud democratic style of the Not the Booker, we put the continued survival of the prize to a vote and happily, it was spared.

And so here we are, once again on the verge of reading some fantastic new books, of discovering exciting new talent and of having a fantastic debate about what we value in literature and why we value it. Just like we do every year. I'm excited already.

As usual we're introducing a couple of tweaks to the basic format. After struggling to take account of votes being cast on other sites last year, we're going back to basics and only counting votes posted right here on the Guardian books site. We'll be diverting the course of shortlist log-rolling by asking for voters to pick two books – by two different publishers – instead of just one. And we're taking on board your suggestions for a readers' panel to help with the selection of the winner.

But more of that soon. For now we need to focus on putting together a longlist and, ideally, placing some of publishing's big hitters alongside new voices that would never have a chance of featuring in that other prize. As always, we're looking for the best, without any restrictions on theme or genre. We just want the most vibrant, the most compelling, the most surprising full-length novels written by Commonwealth citizens and scheduled for publication between 1 October 2012 and 30 September 2013 – so no Americans, no poets and no arguing. The same eligibility criteria as the vanilla Booker. Easy! If you're confused, you can find a full list of eligibility criteria on the Man Booker website.

All you have to do at this stage is name one book – and only one book – you'd like to see considered for the prize in the comments section below. On 5 August, I'll post our annual longer-list of all the books put forward for selection, and we'll start whittling that down to a shortlist of six.

Once we have that shortlist, I'll read each book in turn, at the rate of roughly one a week, and post reviews inviting further discussion, argument, and ideally a bit of praise and a lot of love. Then all that remains is a final vote …

The prize is a Guardian mug. And glory. Let's hit it!

FictionBooker prizeAwards and prizesSam Jordison
guardian.co.uk © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds