Quite Well Versed

I may be limping along with the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance and the good Sancho Panza in Cervantes's epic, but my progress in reading poetic tomes is positively glacial. I moved on a while back from Don Paterson's Nil Nil to my first ever collection by the highly rated Charles Simic, whose essays in the NYRB I've often enjoyed. A Wedding in Hell turned out to be one of those mildly puzzling books that creates its own oddly askew world, of which the reader gradually learns some of the rules, chief amongst which seemed to be: expect the unexpected. Surreal, but gently so, engagingly so. Simic seems to saying important things - it's just that you can't be sure you hear him clearly. The best way to read the poems, I found, was steadily but unhurriedly moving forward, grasping the connections, taking time to reread each poem before leaving it.

And I'm finding something similar with Wislawa Szymborska's Poems New and Collected. I'd heard so many good things about the Nobel laureate and how good the translations were that it hasn't been surprising to find immediately ample evidence of her powers. But I was taken a little by surprise at just how tough to crack some of the early poems are. She's by no means transparent, and shares Simic's curious sense of disconnectedness in some poems - the feeling that very different thought worlds are being jammed together to create an entirely new kind of music. Lots to enjoy, but no point in rushing.

Both collections were among the items I bought last August or September, with the vouchers from the talk I gave for the Lit Seminar. I said then it would probably take me a year to get through the whole lot, and it doesn't look like I was wrong.