Monday 21 May 2007

Recent reading

I had the last week off work, and the wet weather meant I caught up on an awful lot of reading. All sorts too - poetry, novels, biography, history and, inevitably, cricket. I'm thoroughly enjoying Jon McGregor's If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things, and loved Ron Powers' Mark Twain: A Life.
I also read the latest issue of Acumen pretty much cover to cover, and very good it was too. Different poetry mags offer different things, and its strength is the breadth of material (poems, prose, reviews, discussion and a good letters section), plus an openness to all 'schools' and styles of poetry. It means there's stuff there you'll probably hate, but stuff you'll love too, and that's no doubt what gets the discussion going.
I don't tend to subscribe to mags so much now, preferring to buy single issues of a wider range of mags, but I'll certainly be going back to Acumen.

2 comments:

James Midgley said...

I seem to have oodles of spare time for reading at the moment, but none of the attention span. I've been trying to sit down and review several chapbooks, but have found myself wandering off upstairs to the dreaded internet after just a few pages.

Computers ruined my life!

I'll have to check out Acumen at some point. I seem to be very behind on reading the smaller Brit lit mags.

Matt Merritt said...

Yes, it had been ages since I'd done any serious reading. I don't make enough train journeys - that's when I get my best reading done.