Book worm

Norman MacCaig is a new-found poet for me. Apparently his work is primarily known for its lucid, spare style. Curiously, he went so far later in his poetic career as to dismiss his earlier works (based on “the surrealist-inflected New Apocalypse movement” - what?) as obscure and meaningless. I admire this. It’s no secret that I like poetry, but it’s also no secret that there is much in modern poetry that is obscurantist flummery. MacCaig also apparently moved away from a metrical strictness characterizing his early work to a “throwaway-seeming free verse” style.  (Information from Poetry Foundation.)

So, here is a poem that is presumably from his later life (otherwise I'm missing the New Apocalypse and am oblivious to the metre). The last stanza could perhaps have been a little more subtle I say, but I like this thought. The ocean might begin to annoy me from here on because it has no paragraphs.

Picture from Fanpop.

Book worm

I open the second volume

of a rose

and find it says, word for word,

the same as the first one.

The waves of the sea

annoy me, they bore me;

why aren’t they divided

in paragraphs?

I look at the night

and make nothing of it -

those black pages

with no print.

But I love the gothic script

of pinetrees and

on the pond the light’s

fancy italics.

And the cherry tree’s petals -

they make

a sweet lyric, I appreciate

their dying fall.

But it’s strange, girl, how I come back

from the library of everything

to stare and stare at

the closed book of you.

When will you open to me

and show me the meaning of all

the hard words

in the lexicon of love?

Norman MacCaig