Knowing the country and its culture as well as they do, it must feel like a sort of home-coming. It certainly provokes such delightful situations as when one asked about the flowers on the secretary’s desk: “Are those daffodils? Like Wordsworth’s daffodils?”
Continue reading “clichés and home-comings”
When I was a teenager we had fairly regular bomb scares at school. I was too politically naïve to know if it was the IRA or the PLO who were intent on disrupting my education, but I do remember that we spent many happy hours out on the playing fields waiting while sniffer dogs and their handlers searched the building.
Continue reading “travelling”
Speeding bus
startles
a flock of leaves
into flight
It’s hard to disagree with anything Mackenzie says, particularly as the list is followed by the rider “good poets are always ready to break rules whenever a poem demands it.”
That said, the “rule” that caught my eye was:
15. Consider the poem’s “truth”. Not the literal facts (although those may be important at times) but the emotional resonance. Is the emotion genuine or just received wisdom?
Continue reading “iberianismos”
don't confuse the narrator 