Two or so years after letting my subscription to The New Yorker lapse – and enduring the paper campaign that ensued, pleading for my return – I recently re-subscribed: thanks, in part, to the prompting by Twitter pals Anna Spargo-Ryan and Mamabook, but mostly because I plain missed it. The picture above is the first copy I received and it only took – oh – about three minutes before I asked myself why I had ever, ever let it go in the first place.
It is truly wonderful publication – plus, whatever stock they use makes an issue perfectly foldable, easy to roll up and tuck into my handbag.
Killing the Black Dog was one of those random library pick-ups, although I’ve been long familiar with the title. Growing up, I think I had an interest in Les Murray as a writer long before I actually read any of his work: we lived in a similar-ish region, and so perhaps I claimed him in my mind as a semi-local. It is an enjoyable essay; more so than the accompanying poems, however essential they are to the overall effect of the book. A nice segue into The Best Australian Poems 2012, which I won a couple of weeks ago at the Kill Your Darlings trivia night (our table came second place and we democratically split up the pile of book prizes among ourselves).
I’ll say straight up that I enjoyed this edition more than the last two, maybe even three, year’s. One of the charges laid against such collections is that they try to be too appealing, too appeasing to the everyday reader, who only bothers to buy a poetry book once a year (and this is probably the one). It’s an odd argument, because I feel like shrugging my shoulders and saying, ‘Yeah, duh‘. The implication that its accessibility somehow taints the quality or ‘worth’ is baffling to me. What I particularly like about this collection are the storytelling aspects of a great many poems: evocative and distilled, yet, even in only a few lines, they impart the sense of something ‘greater’, celebrating a snared tangibility of life or life events, maybe.
What are you reading at the moment?
