Bookworm returns

Dear Reader,

Let's call the abysmal absence of posts a hiatus. Life got a little bit in the way bringing reading (and blogging) to a screeching halt. But just in time for the holidays ... did some say gift suggestions?! I'm back.

I'm hoping to post gift suggestions, tackle why is the movie/ tv show NEVER as a good as the book and resume my usual rambling, er, pontificating.

So welcome back!
Bookworm

Bookworm is hitting the beach

Dear reader,

There will be lull in posts because Bookworm is going on vacation. The wireless connection/ ability to go online is very spotty so I don't know if I'll be able to post much. I'm hoping to figure out my wireless router thingy (thats the technical term!) before I leave.

I hopefully will have much to write about it when I get back. The combination of the fact that the television set remains off for my entire vacation and my family members' early bed times means I usually end up reading a lot. I set aside six books to bring, but think that might have been overly ambitious.

(The above picture is the view of Lake Ontario we have at night.)

Happy reading! I'll be back on August 11.

Morsels - Poetry

This week’s Short Stack looks at Five Poets with Staying Power, http://blog.washingtonpost.com/shortstack/2008/04/five_poets_with_staying_power.html.

The list includes Robert Frost and ee cummings and some poets I’ve never heard of like Billy Collins.

This poem by Collins caught my attention – as soon as I saw the title, it felt like kismet.

Dear Reader -Billy Collins

Baudelaire considers you his brother,
and Fielding calls out to you every few paragraphs
as if to make sure you have not closed the book,
and now I am summoning you up again,
attentive ghost, dark silent figure standing
in the doorway of these words.

Pope welcomes you into the glow of his study,
takes down a leather-bound Ovid to show you.
Tennyson lifts the latch to a moated garden,
and with Yeats you lean against a broken pear tree,
the day hooded by low clouds.

But now you are here with me,
composed in the open field of this page,
no room or manicured garden to enclose us,
no Zeitgeist marching in the background,
no heavy ethos thrown over us like a cloak.

Instead, our meeting is so brief and accidental,
unnoticed by the monocled eye of History,
you could be the man I held the door for
this morning at the bank or post office
or the one who wrapped my speckled fish.

You could be someone I passed on the street
or the face behind the wheel of an oncoming car.
The sunlight flashes off your windshield,
and when I look up into the small, posted mirror,
I watch you diminish—my echo, my twin—
and vanish around a curve in this whip
of a road we can't help traveling together.