Dampened spirits

I've been playing senior club cricket since 1983, since the day me and my mate Colin got hauled in from the juniors to make up the numbers in a 2nd XI game at Shipley Hall (lovely ground - sadly, I've never played there since). In all that time, though, I don't ever remember having had four successive Saturdays washed out (or, in the case of last Saturday, gloriously sunny, but so wet underfoot that water polo would have been easier than cricket). In fact, I don't think I ever remember having had even TWO Saturdays on the trot ruined. This is, then, the bad summer to end all bad summers.
One silver lining is that I'm doing more reading; usually, it tends to go on the back burner until September. On Saturday, a parcel arrived from Sphinx, with the latest batch of review copies. I've only flicked through them so far, but I like what I've seen. There's Helen Mort's The Shape Of Every Box, Peter Brennan's Torch Of Venus, and The Stones, by American poet Celia Lisset Alvarez. There's also a CD of poems by a poet whose name I can't remember just now, and the CD's down in the car so I can't check.
But anyway, reviewing's always more fun when you actually enjoy reading the poems, whatever some poets think about reviewers sitting there just dying to tear them apart, so this bodes well. If the rain returns by the weekend (when, rather than if, let's face it), at least I've got plenty to get stuck into.