Michael Johnston's Blog, page 16

Canada by Richard Ford: a Review

Richard Ford’s latest published novel, Canada, [London: Bloomsbury, 2012] is narrated in retrospect by the 66-year old Dell Parsons and Ford has developed the art of introductory appetite whetting to perfection as is evident in the very first paragraph.

First, I’ll tell you about the robbery our parents committed.  Then about the murders, which happened later.  The robbery is the more important part, since it served to set my and my sister’s lives on the course they eventually followed.  Nothing would make complete sense without that being told first.

Dell’s parents are mismatched.  He’s an all-American southern boy with a good war record in the USAAF and she is Jewish.  It’s a wartime romance that led to a pregnancy which the parents legitimised by marrying before the arrival of their twins, Dell and his sister Berner – yes, an odd name but that is just grist for Ford’s literary mill which grinds finely and bakes a near perfect cake.

            When, demobilised and drifting into Great Falls, Montana, father Bev Parsons gets into trouble selling cattle meat to the railroad on behalf of the Indian rustlers and butchers, he manages to persuade his otherwise intelligent wife that robbing a bank across the State Line in North Dakota is the easy way to solve all their problems, the troubles for the 15-year old twins, as well as their parents, are only just beginning.  Within days, the parents are arrested and the mother’s plans for the children go into action.  She wants both spirited away up north into Canada, out of harm’s way but Berner runs away and only Dell finishes up in very remote Fort Royal, Saskatchewan, nominally under the eye of, and in the care of, another American expatriate and fugitive, Arthur Remlinger.  How does he fell about this?  Read the first paragraph of chapter 45.

Loneliness, I’ve read, is like being in a long line, waiting to reach the front where it’s promised something good will happen.  Only the line never moves, and other people are always coming ahead of you, and the front, the place where you want to be, is always farther and farther away, until you no longer believe it has anything to offer you.

Like Ford’s other narrator in the Frank Bascombe trilogy, Dell Parsons has a combination of introspection, self-doubt and a love of language that makes the words flow smoothly off the page and, to me, it matters not a whit that the tension and the sense of predestination build and build right up to the turning point less than twenty-five pages from the end.  Part Three is a beautifully written coda, easing readers back down nearer the ground and into the present day, but the journey of the first two parts has taken the reader into the depths of his or her own soul.

            Over the last few months, I’ve read four of Ford’s novels and it delights me to see there are at least six others to read.  Verdict on Canada: 8.5 out of 10.

Book Reading Groups Recommendation: My Life as a Fake by Peter Carey

After reading a fair number of books on art forgery and faking (and even writing one: Rembrandt Sings) I have lately turned to a novel about literary fakery.  Peter Carey’s narrator is a lady rejoicing in the name(s) of Sarah Elizabeth Jane Wode-Douglass, labelling herself as a rebellious child with a brain, who, at the time of the events she retrospectively describes was the editor of a leading poetry magazine, The Modern Review.  There are two, or could it be three, male characters who have roles in the story she unfolds: John Slater, author of Dewsong whose “celebrated verses were nothing so much as bowers constructed by a male in order to procure sex”; Christopher Chubb, an unsuccessful Australian poet who pulls off a literary hoax that may have cost the life of the editor he deceives, and Bob McCorkle who ought to be no more than a figment of Chubb’s imagination but, like Frankenstein’s monster, becomes reality and sets off to pursue Chubb, seeking retribution.

There seems to be one shared characteristic among dedicated art fakers.  The art world has failed to appreciate the quality of their original work and, by way of sticking two fingers up at that world, they create work that could pass as, and be passed off as coming from another more famous artist and, for long enough, they manage to hoodwink the soi-disant experts who give the fakes their stamp of approval.  A more daring variation is to create not only the ‘work’ but the whole back story of the supposed artistic creator.  This is what Chubb does by inventing Bob McCorkle and claiming this talented yet unsung poet has died leaving his works with his sister who then brings them to Chubb’s attention.  Carey very successfully (re)produces the voices of the narrator and her protagonists to create a work of genuine wit and convincing realism that shows what a gifted writer he has been for so many years.

            To enjoy the book’s slow but sure unravelling of the plot, you must not be told much more than this.  The events take place principally in pre-independence Malaya where Sarah believes she is on the brink of laying hands on a poetic scoop that will be the making of The Modern Review and its editor; but events (being in the hands not of fate but of the talented author) have a way of not turning out as expected.  (And you will learn more Malay than you did when reading the Anthony Burgess Malayan Trilogy.)  However, what gives the book its curious and intriguing ring of apparent truth is the fact that there was a ‘genuine’ hoax in Australia in 1944 concerning the work of one Ern Malley which appeared in the literary magazine Angry Penguins.  Carey properly acknowledges this source as his inspiration but it is only the source from which springs a work of literary language and subtle complexity that is totally Carey.  Verdict 7.5 out of 10.

Book Review: My Life as a Fake by Peter Carey

After reading a fair number of books on art forgery and faking (and even writing one: Rembrandt Sings) I have lately turned to a novel about literary fakery.  Peter Carey’s narrator is a lady rejoicing in the name(s) of Sarah Elizabeth Jane Wode-Douglass, labelling herself as a rebellious child with a brain, who, at the time of the events she retrospectively describes was the editor of a leading poetry magazine, The Modern Review.  There are two, or could it be three, male characters who have roles in the story she unfolds: John Slater, author of Dewsong whose “celebrated verses were nothing so much as bowers constructed by a male in order to procure sex”; Christopher Chubb, an unsuccessful Australian poet who pulls off a literary hoax that may have cost the life of the editor he deceives, and Bob McCorkle who ought to be no more than a figment of Chubb’s imagination but, like Frankenstein’s monster, becomes reality and sets off to pursue Chubb, seeking retribution.

There seems to be one shared characteristic among dedicated art fakers.  The art world has failed to appreciate the quality of their original work and, by way of sticking two fingers up at that world, they create work that could pass as, and be passed off as coming from another more famous artist and, for long enough, they manage to hoodwink the soi-disant experts who give the fakes their stamp of approval.  A more daring variation is to create not only the ‘work’ but the whole back story of the supposed artistic creator.  This is what Chubb does by inventing Bob McCorkle and claiming this talented yet unsung poet has died leaving his works with his sister who then brings them to Chubb’s attention.  Carey very successfully (re)produces the voices of the narrator and her protagonists to create a work of genuine wit and convincing realism that shows what a gifted writer he has been for so many years.

            To enjoy the book’s slow but sure unravelling of the plot, you must not be told much more than this.  The events take place principally in pre-independence Malaya where Sarah believes she is on the brink of laying hands on a poetic scoop that will be the making of The Modern Review and its editor; but events (being in the hands not of fate but of the talented author) have a way of not turning out as expected.  (And you will learn more Malay than you did when reading the Anthony Burgess Malayan Trilogy.)  However, what gives the book its curious and intriguing ring of apparent truth is the fact that there was a ‘genuine’ hoax in Australia in 1944 concerning the work of one Ern Malley which appeared in the literary magazine Angry Penguins.  Carey properly acknowledges this source as his inspiration but it is only the source from which springs a work of literary language and subtle complexity that is totally Carey.  Verdict 7.5 out of 10.

My Life as a Fake: Peter Carey

After reading a fair number of books on art forgery and faking (and even writing one: Rembrandt Sings) I have lately turned to a novel about literary fakery.  Peter Carey’s narrator is a lady rejoicing in the name(s) of Sarah Elizabeth Jane Wode-Douglass, labelling herself as a rebellious child with a brain, who, at the time of the events she retrospectively describes was the editor of a leading poetry magazine, The Modern Review.  There are two, or could it be three, male characters who have roles in the story she unfolds: John Slater, author of Dewsong whose “celebrated verses were nothing so much as bowers constructed by a male in order to procure sex”; Christopher Chubb, an unsuccessful Australian poet who pulls off a literary hoax that may have cost the life of the editor he deceives, and Bob McCorkle who ought to be no more than a figment of Chubb’s imagination but, like Frankenstein’s monster, becomes reality and sets off to pursue Chubb, seeking retribution.

There seems to be one shared characteristic among dedicated art fakers.  The art world has failed to appreciate the quality of their original work and, by way of sticking two fingers up at that world, they create work that could pass as, and be passed off as coming from another more famous artist and, for long enough, they manage to hoodwink the soi-disant experts who give the fakes their stamp of approval.  A more daring variation is to create not only the ‘work’ but the whole back story of the supposed artistic creator.  This is what Chubb does by inventing Bob McCorkle and claiming this talented yet unsung poet has died leaving his works with his sister who then brings them to Chubb’s attention.  Carey very successfully (re)produces the voices of the narrator and her protagonists to create a work of genuine wit and convincing realism that shows what a gifted writer he has been for so many years.

            To enjoy the book’s slow but sure unravelling of the plot, you must not be told much more than this.  The events take place principally in pre-independence Malaya where Sarah believes she is on the brink of laying hands on a poetic scoop that will be the making of The Modern Review and its editor; but events (being in the hands not of fate but of the talented author) have a way of not turning out as expected.  (And you will learn more Malay than you did when reading the Anthony Burgess Malayan Trilogy.)  However, what gives the book its curious and intriguing ring of apparent truth is the fact that there was a ‘genuine’ hoax in Australia in 1944 concerning the work of one Ern Malley which appeared in the literary magazine Angry Penguins.  Carey properly acknowledges this source as his inspiration but it is only the source from which springs a work of literary language and subtle complexity that is totally Carey.  Verdict 7.5 out of 10.

Book Reading Groups Recommendation: The Woman who Walked into the Sea by Mark Douglas-Home

The sea exercises a pull on everyone involved in the story of The Woman who Walked into the Sea, the second Sea Detective mystery from Mark Douglas-Home [Dingwall: Sandstone Press, 2013; p/b and e-bk], and rejection, a form of scorn, is another characteristic of the story.  It opens in a church near the imaginary north-west Highland village of Poltown, at a memorial service for Diana, wife of the lawyer for whom Mary Anderson had been housekeeper for 35 years.  Finding the front four rows of pews reserved, she nonetheless presumes she is family enough to sit there only to find herself moved back, not forwards, by the late Diana’s son-in-law.  Humiliated in front of the congregation, she flees the church and falls on the gravel outside.  The opening chapter sets out the stall of scorn and rejections heaped on Mrs Anderson, Diana Ritchie, William Ritchie QC and possibly others.  As one might say, “many women scorned: much fury”. The chapter is loaded with the several hints and nudges that hint at a great deal of trouble to come.  As Mrs Anderson says to herself, “How they’d pay.  Oh, how they’d pay.”  And we still haven’t met Cal McGill, central character in Douglas-Home’s excellent debut novel The Sea Detective.

            The village is divided over the proposal to build a large offshore wind farm and, as is often the case, those who stand to benefit most are most in favour, bar one, for his own private and very personal reasons.  Then there’s the young woman who, 26 years before, had been scorned and abandoned as a new-born baby on the steps of Raigmore Hospital in Inverness arriving to follow up an anonymous message passed on to her.  And Cal McGill, oceanographer and mystery solver, wanting to get away from Edinburgh, feeling the pull of the sea in his head, his heart and his blood, turns up on the beach of South Bay.  “Would he always be alone and in a storm walking some remote coast?”  Well, no.  The young woman is standing on the beach and, with McGill’s help, she is going to unravel the mystery.

            Mark Douglas-Home successfully inhabits all the characters he creates, breathing life into them and individuality, even those who are already dead and buried.  He spins a tale with well-crafted skill, knowing just where and when to place new information.  He is a master of the slow reveal and, for that matter, of the open ending with its unspoken and unanswered question.  Maybe, only maybe, it will be answered when the third Sea Detective mystery is published in the autumn of 2014: a date to ring on your calendar.  Since the second in this series is even better than the first, I for one will get my order in early.  Verdict 9 out of 10.

Book Review: The Woman who Walked into the Sea by Mark Douglas-Home

The sea exercises a pull on everyone involved in the story of The Woman who Walked into the Sea, the second Sea Detective mystery from Mark Douglas-Home [Dingwall: Sandstone Press, 2013; p/b and e-bk], and rejection, a form of scorn, is another characteristic of the story.  It opens in a church near the imaginary north-west Highland village of Poltown, at a memorial service for Diana, wife of the lawyer for whom Mary Anderson had been housekeeper for 35 years.  Finding the front four rows of pews reserved, she nonetheless presumes she is family enough to sit there only to find herself moved back, not forwards, by the late Diana’s son-in-law.  Humiliated in front of the congregation, she flees the church and falls on the gravel outside.  The opening chapter sets out the stall of scorn and rejections heaped on Mrs Anderson, Diana Ritchie, William Ritchie QC and possibly others.  The chapter is loaded with the several hints and nudges that hint at a great deal of trouble to come.  As Mrs Anderson says to herself, “How they’d pay.  Oh, how they’d pay.”  And we still haven’t met Cal McGill, central character in Douglas-Home’s excellent debut novel The Sea Detective.

            The village is divided over the proposal to build a large offshore wind farm and, as is often the case, those who stand to benefit most are most in favour, bar one, for his own private and very personal reasons.  Then there’s the young woman who, 26 years before, had been scorned and abandoned as a new-born baby on the steps of Raigmore Hospital in Inverness arriving to follow up an anonymous message passed on to her.  And Cal McGill, oceanographer and mystery solver, wanting to get away from Edinburgh, feeling the pull of the sea in his head, his heart and his blood, turns up on the beach of South Bay.  “Would he always be alone and in a storm walking some remote coast?”  Well, no.  The young woman is standing on the beach and, with McGill’s help, she is going to unravel the mystery.

            Mark Douglas-Home successfully inhabits all the characters he creates, breathing life into them and individuality, even those who are already dead and buried.  He spins a tale with well-crafted skill, knowing just where and when to place new information.  He is a master of the slow reveal and, for that matter, of the open ending with its unspoken and unanswered question.  Maybe, only maybe, it will be answered when the third Sea Detective mystery is published in the autumn of 2014: a date to ring on your calendar.  Since the second in this series is even better than the first, I for one will get my order in early.  Verdict 9 out of 10.

Many women scorned: much fury

The sea exercises a pull on everyone involved in the story of The Woman who Walked into the Sea, the second Sea Detective mystery from Mark Douglas-Home [Dingwall: Sandstone Press, 2013; p/b and e-bk], and rejection, a form of scorn, is another characteristic of the story.  It opens in a church near the imaginary north-west Highland village of Poltown, at a memorial service for Diana, wife of the lawyer for whom Mary Anderson had been housekeeper for 35 years.  Finding the front four rows of pews reserved, she nonetheless presumes she is family enough to sit there only to find herself moved back, not forwards, by the late Diana’s son-in-law.  Humiliated in front of the congregation, she flees the church and falls on the gravel outside.  The opening chapter sets out the stall of scorn and rejections heaped on Mrs Anderson, Diana Ritchie, William Ritchie QC and possibly others.  The chapter is loaded with the several hints and nudges that hint at a great deal of trouble to come.  As Mrs Anderson says to herself, “How they’d pay.  Oh, how they’d pay.”  And we still haven’t met Cal McGill, central character in Douglas-Home’s excellent debut novel The Sea Detective.

            The village is divided over the proposal to build a large offshore wind farm and, as is often the case, those who stand to benefit most are most in favour, bar one, for his own private and very personal reasons.  Then there’s the young woman who, 26 years before, had been scorned and abandoned as a new-born baby on the steps of Raigmore Hospital in Inverness arriving to follow up an anonymous message passed on to her.  And Cal McGill, oceanographer and mystery solver, wanting to get away from Edinburgh, feeling the pull of the sea in his head, his heart and his blood, turns up on the beach of South Bay.  “Would he always be alone and in a storm walking some remote coast?”  Well, no.  The young woman is standing on the beach and, with McGill’s help, she is going to unravel the mystery.

            Mark Douglas-Home successfully inhabits all the characters he creates, breathing life into them and individuality, even those who are already dead and buried.  He spins a tale with well-crafted skill, knowing just where and when to place new information.  He is a master of the slow reveal and, for that matter, of the open ending with its unspoken and unanswered question.  Maybe, only maybe, it will be answered when the third Sea Detective mystery is published in the autumn of 2014: a date to ring on your calendar.  Since the second in this series is even better than the first, I for one will get my order in early.  Verdict 9 out of 10.

Book Reading Groups Recommendation: Shakespeare’s Sonnets edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones

[Click on the blog title to open a comment box below.  I look forward to hearing from you.]

My thoughts ran recently to what books I would be glad to have with me, were I to be marooned on a lighthouse.  The limit had to be three, rather than the Desert Island Discs generous eight records.  Having selected already The Loom of Language by Frederick Bodmer and John Lennard’s The Poetry Handbook, I think the necessary complement would be the Katherine Duncan-Jones edited, complete Shakespeare’s Sonnets [London: The Arden Shakespeare, 1997] which contains much else besides the incomparable verses; (and my copy seems to have been printed in Illyria!)

The fascinating arguments over the centuries about the Dark Lady of the Sonnets, and quite certainly the dark man; whether they reflect straight or gay love and what each individual sonnets means will help to while away the time waiting for the tempest outside the lighthouse to subside.

As well as every one of the 154 carefully crafted, fourteen-line sonnets Duncan-Jones includes ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ written in 47 stanzas of seven lines.  There is an erudite yet highly readable introduction and then every poem is carefully introduced and annotated.  The Editor discusses the context and allusions to be found in Shakespeare’s work, with cross-references here and there to the plays, and the reception and criticism of his oeuvre over the centuries since they were penned.  Probably the one way to convince any doubters that this would be the perfect third book to turn to at intervals, while reading the other two, is simply to quote the first and last to represent the other hundred and fifty-two.  My own reading ‘tip’ is to let Shakespeare’s punctuation shape your reading (out loud if possible) without losing touch with the pulse of the pentameters and the richness of the internal and end-rhymes.

Regarding the first, Duncan-Jones says: “The sonnet sets out a eugenic proposition: the most excellent examples of natural beings are under an obligation to reproduce themselves.  But the addressee, to whom this rule applies, is narcissistically dedicated to self-love, allowing his beauty to go to waste by hoarding it up.”

 From fairest creatures we desire increase,

That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,

But as the riper should by time decease

His tender heir might bear his memory:

But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,

Feed’st thy life’s flame with self-substantial fuel,

Making a famine where abundance lies,

Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.

Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament,

And only herald to the gaudy spring,

Within thy own bud buriest thy content,

And, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding.

            Pity the world, or else this glutton be,

            To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.

 Sonnets 153 and 154 should really be read as a pair but the final poem is about Cupid lying asleep, what happens next and the paradoxical outcome.

 The little love-god lying once asleep,

Laid by his side his heart-inflaming brand,

Whilst many nymphs, that vowed chaste life to keep,

Came tripping by; but in her maiden hand

The fairest votary took up that fire

Which many legions of true hearts had warmed;

And so the general of hot desire

Was, sleeping, by a virgin hand disarmed.

This brand she quenched in a cool well by,

Which from love’s fire took heat perpetual,

Growing a bath and helpful remedy

For men diseased; but I, my mistress’ thrall,

            Came there for cure, and this by that I prove:

            Love’s fire heats water, water cools not love.

 Another trio for the lighthouse library soon but, meantime, what are your suggestions?

Marooned on a lighthouse: No 4 in a series

[Click on the blog title to open a comment box below.  I look forward to hearing from you.]

 My thoughts ran recently to what books I would be glad to have with me, were I to be marooned on a lighthouse.  The limit had to be three, rather than the Desert Island Discs generous eight records.  Having selected already The Loom of Language by Frederick Bodmer and John Lennard’s The Poetry Handbook, I think the necessary complement would be the Katherine Duncan-Jones edited, complete Shakespeare’s Sonnets [London: The Arden Shakespeare, 1997] which contains much else besides the incomparable verses; (and my copy seems to have been printed in Illyria!)

 The fascinating arguments over the centuries about the Dark Lady of the Sonnets, and quite certainly the dark man; whether they reflect straight or gay love and what each individual sonnets means will help to while away the time waiting for the tempest outside the lighthouse to subside.

 As well as every one of the 154 carefully crafted, fourteen-line sonnets Duncan-Jones includes ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ written in 47 stanzas of seven lines.  There is an erudite yet highly readable introduction and then every poem is carefully introduced and annotated.  The Editor discusses the context and allusions to be found in Shakespeare’s work, with cross-references here and there to the plays, and the reception and criticism of his oeuvre over the centuries since they were penned.  Probably the one way to convince any doubters that this would be the perfect third book to turn to at intervals, while reading the other two, is simply to quote the first and last to represent the other hundred and fifty-two.  My own reading ‘tip’ is to let Shakespeare’s punctuation shape your reading (out loud if possible) without losing touch with the pulse of the pentameters and the richness of the internal and end-rhymes.

 Regarding the first, Duncan-Jones says: “The sonnet sets out a eugenic proposition: the most excellent examples of natural beings are under an obligation to reproduce themselves.  But the addressee, to whom this rule applies, is narcissistically dedicated to self-love, allowing his beauty to go to waste by hoarding it up.”

 From fairest creatures we desire increase,

That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,

But as the riper should by time decease

His tender heir might bear his memory:

But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,

Feed’st thy life’s flame with self-substantial fuel,

Making a famine where abundance lies,

Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.

Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament,

And only herald to the gaudy spring,

Within thy own bud buriest thy content,

And, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding.

            Pity the world, or else this glutton be,

            To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.

 Sonnets 153 and 154 should really be read as a pair but the final poem is about Cupid lying asleep, what happens next and the paradoxical outcome.

 The little love-god lying once asleep,

Laid by his side his heart-inflaming brand,

Whilst many nymphs, that vowed chaste life to keep,

Came tripping by; but in her maiden hand

The fairest votary took up that fire

Which many legions of true hearts had warmed;

And so the general of hot desire

Was, sleeping, by a virgin hand disarmed.

This brand she quenched in a cool well by,

Which from love’s fire took heat perpetual,

Growing a bath and helpful remedy

For men diseased; but I, my mistress’ thrall,

            Came there for cure, and this by that I prove:

            Love’s fire heats water, water cools not love.

 Another trio for the lighthouse library soon but, meantime, what are your suggestions?

Book reading groups recommendations: The Poetry Handbook: A guide to reading poetry for pleasure and practical criticism by John Lennard

A long title like that deserves a serious book reading group reommendation, so here it is.

When, quite late in life, I was reading for a Masters in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck, my struggle each end of term was to find even one essay title from among the many offered.  It wasn’t just finding something that would allow me to show how well I had grasped the import of the set texts but, quite simply, I wasn’t even sure I understood the rubrics at all.  One desperate term, I could see nothing at all until I found this:

 How far do you think prosody and metrical analysis are useful for the study of post-war poetry in English?   Are better methods available? 

 Since I could see nothing else, I went for it and, first of all, found enormous satisfaction from all the poetry I had to read and, secondly, that I warmed so much to the subject that I gained the highest essay mark I ever attained.  One book was invaluable in giving me so many insights and explaining the rules and conventions, traditions and tradecraft of poetry that I went out and bought my own copy; not cheap even second-hand but priceless.  I’m talking about The Poetry Handbook: A Guide to Reading Poetry for Pleasure and Practical Criticism by John Lennard [Oxford: OUP, 1996].

Lennard wanted to write a book that gave anyone who wanted get more out of reading poetry a better understanding of its craft and technique and he achieved that without speaking down to the amateur but, at the same time, writing an undergraduate (and in my case a postgraduate) primer that makes clear that the basics of poetry are ‘an understanding of, and an ability to judge, the elements of the poet’s craft.  This gave me several pointers and much encouragement to think that one could use prosody and metrical analysis in the study of contemporary poetry.  As I went on to discover, even the most modern of poets love to test their ingenuity and verbal dexterity by writing in verse forms that were well-known anything from 500 to 1,000 years earlier.  Take the villanelle, nineteen lines of iambic pentameter (di-dum five times) with only two end-rhymes, lines 1, 6, 12, and 18 a refrain and lines 3, 9, 15, and 19 a second refrain.  Before you run a mile from seeming complexity, remember that the skilful poet will build something beautiful on this scaffolding such that you cannot see it, only feel it, through the wonder of the language.  One very well-known example is the Dylan Thomas loud lament for the death of his father, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’.

More of us know about sonnets, another ancient form of fourteen lines and various rhyme schemes and the ‘turn’ that after (generally) eight lines sends the poem off in another direction and to its conclusion.  It is still in wide use today.  Lennard’s cool and clear analysis allowed me to see that, in all probability, better methods are generally not available and not really required if what one is reading is real poetry.

So marooned on my mythical lighthouse, I will have the leisure to re-read Lennard and, when I am liberated, go back to reading (out loud if possible) even more poetry from across the ages.  Do remember, however, that one man’s metre is another man’s paeon, and we each need to find and enjoy our favourite verse forms.  Stuck on the lighthouse with the storm raging outside, I will turn to the third book I brought along, of which more tomorrow.