my earliest reading memory
My parents were country people who thought tending or chasing animals was more fun than reading: my father used to say he read half a book in his life (The Lonely Skier by Hammond Innes), and while my mother got three or four novels a year, she didn’t expect me to do anything equal to that. But I remember enjoying something my grandmother gave me – My Father’s Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannett. I must have been about seven years old and I thought it was amusing and simple.
The books that changed me as a teen
At my first school, somehow I got hold of Lawrence Durrell’s book White Eagles Over Serbia, which my parents considered inappropriately violent. I never finished it, but it was fun to carry around with me as proof of how much I’d grown. Then, at my secondary school, my history teacher read us Wilfred Owen (we were studying the First World War), and the poetry-light instantly flashed in my mind. Later when I bought Owen’s collected poems it became a kind of sacred text to me (it still is).
The book that inspired me to become a writer
I’m not sure I ever “wanted to be a writer” until I discovered I was a writer: at first it seemed a very strange prospect. But when I discovered his excellent A-level poetry anthology: Theme and Variations, edited by RB Heath (1965), I started tinkering with my own poems. Despite its extremely unsexy title, this book made me feel as if Carter had entered Tutankhamun’s tomb.
author i came back
Alexander Pope. The first poem of his I read was An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, which astonished me with its many references to things and people of which I had never heard, I could not help but notice what a man of genius of thought and technique he was. Fifty years later he is one of the poets I most admire.
books i reread
Wordsworth’s PrefaceIn its first two editions, and in John Berryman’s 77 dream song: Two poetic autobiographies that seem to me like the breath of life. Almost all the novels I have re-read are from this henry jamesThe fiction writer I prefer above all others, and whose later work becomes more important to me year by year.
The book I could never read again
JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The first time (in adolescence) I liked it so much that I even read it during breakfast. Now, no matter how warmly I respond to its warnings about tyrannical power, I guess I have no appetite for that kind of story. My loss, I dare say.
The book that came to me late in life
There are a lot of them – especially novels, because I always love reading poems. Among non-fiction books, I particularly enjoyed reading Galen Strawson’s books. things that bother me. It changed the way I think about how I live with time.
the book i’m reading now
I have more than one book on at once: This week I’m reading The Collected Poems of George Oppen and Dostoevsky’s Idiot. It’s a lot more fun than it sounds.
read my rest
I read often to have a certain experience districts-Relax rather than excite, because I prefer books that excite me. But everything Elizabeth Bishop does – prose, poems, and letters – has both in abundance. And much more besides.
