Well, I found this book on my stacks four years later; I said when I bought this book with a couple others:
At any rate, it should give me a couple of handy collections of poetry to read out back in the evening. If I can find them again easily once I move them off of my desk and into the stacks of the Nogglestead library, where books just disappear.
Well, one of the other two books was Milk and Honey, which I read later that year. The other was 100 Bill Harvey Poems which I held in my very hand a couple of days ago when trying to pick a collection of poems to read while watching a football game.
I’d brought this book down from my bedroom reading chair because I’d been working on it for a while, but it was not really good browsing material. For one, it’s a loving edition of poems published posthumously by the founder of the Christian Science movement. This book is a former library edition, but its stamps are illegible and its checkout pocket has been removed; one presumes it was in a Christian Science Reading Room (I think there’s still one in Springfield; I’ll have to look to see if it’s still there when I go down Glenstone again). But it’s got gilded pages and drop capitals on each poem, and they’re…. Well, they’re mid-18th century poems harkening back to older forms. She’s imitating older styles, and she uses “ye” incorrectly.
I mean, it’s a cut above most of the 20th century grandmother poetry that I read and surely above Milk and Honey because of its decent rhythm and poetic sensibility. But I won’t remember anything of it once I put this book on the shelf. I didn’t flag anything, and I don’t remember any lines making me think they were especially well done. I mean, Riley and Dunbar are almost contemporaneous, and their vernacular poems are fun and their serious poems are markedly better.
Ah, well. In 100 years, nobody will be reading my poetry from 1990, so who am I to judge?
