The Guardian's Poem of the Week, from Imagined Sons, with a splendid review

I'm delighted that one of my birthmother's catechisms is The Guardian's "Poem of the Week," selected by Carol Rumens, yet perhaps more moved by Rumens' overall account of the book, wonderfully appreciative and astute. Describing the Imagined Sons prose poems, she writes, "Funny at times, fast-moving and psychologically astute, these tiny monologues are held together by a narrative voice as seemingly self-possessed as it is candid." Of the catechisms, she says, "Etter reinterprets the form as both a psychological and a melodic device. The intense, same-question repetition pushes the speaker into a corner, where poetic self-defence may be disarmed, the creative play of the prose poems distilled to a barer essence." Concluding with her analysis of the catechism that asks, "Who do you think you are?," Rumens comments on the last line, "It's a cadence of renunciation, singular and resonant, in a text otherwise charged with restless energy and novelistic powers of invention."
  
Heartening and gratifying....

 

Carol Rumens' "Daylight Spending"

Having returned from the States on Tuesday and thinking last night about how much the earlier dark affected me, I was reading Carol Rumens' new book, De Chirico's Threads, and came across this poem. I appreciate its density, how much it suggests about the nuances of living with changing light and time, and the straightforward, but not every line, rhyme. I love the opening phrase, "Atrophied days"--that's exactly right, it seems to me.

Daylight Spending

Atrophied days begin with too much light,

Cut teeth too soon, develop, and start dying

Too young. They leave us to negotiate

The road that steepens after clocks start lying

Perhaps, though, they were lying earlier?

We've put them back for synchronicity

With our sweet flaws: the legless sleeps, the dither,

The touching faith in electricity.

Carol Rumens

De Chirico's Threads

(Seren Books, 2010)

You can buy De Chirico's Threads at a 20% discount directly from the publisher.