Andrew > Recent Status Updates

The trouble really starts when a bloke named Jason becomes high priest and sets up a gymnasium near the temple where the gym bunnies wear hats and the priests end up playing discus more than attending to their duties. 2 Maccabees isn't a sequel to 1 Maccabees, but a different, more narratively adroit and dramatically compelling telling of the intrigues and exploits of Judas Maccabeus against the powers of the Greeks.

First book of Maccabees read, the exploits of Judas and his brothers in resisting the Greek Seleucid Empire. Machinations, intrigues, deceptions, thousands of horsemen and foot soldiers moving back and forth, and people getting burnt in strongholds. Violence times for the Jewish Hasmonean dynasty and their campaigns for independence and religious purity. One book to go.

Have just read the short exilic texts - extra bits of the Book of Daniel plus one - Song of the Three Holy Children (the song purportedly sung in the fiery furnace), History of Susanna (in which Daniel first receives public notoriety by bringing two old pervy lechers to justice) and Bel and the Dragon (when Daniel brings down a couple of Persian gods). Also, the Prayer of Manasses, King of Judah, captive in Babylon.

Have just read Baruch. Baruch being Jeremiah's scribe, the book deals with the new context of exile under Nebuchadnezzar. I think of all the books I've read so far from the Septugent Apocrypha, this is the one that sounds most like the canonical books, in terms of content and quality.

Highly regarded and award-winning poet John Ashbery gets a lot of space. Loquacious wasn't he? Verbose...? Too many words by far. You'd never get away with it these days.

Ecclesiasticus (aka Sirach) complete. A huge collection of 2nd Century BC 'common sense'. How to be a respected patriarch (including liberal dose of misogyny and repressive parenting) etc. With the exception of a few beautiful passages that break out of the pattern, it's essentially way too much advice. A proverb of my own: "A man of too much advice loseth his hearers; and a surfeit of proverbs wearies the soul."

Two of my favourites: Kerouac and Levertov. It continues to be good stuff.

Coming to this after all the historical poems of the World Poetry anthology feels a bit like coming home. The vernacular of these poems (and the vernacular of modern poetry) was the place I inhabited at university that sparked my own desire to try to be a poet.

I've just read a bit of 20th century poetry from Africa... And now at last after many years of reading I come to the final section of the book - the one amorphously called 'modern poetry in English'. Geographic locations oddly fall away (for the first time in the book - why?) and now we are simply in the global English-speaking world.