After last year’s gulp and gobble of new books, I have been tentative and restless. I touch my tongue to a book in my stacks, then move on, relishing the contrasting flavours but rarely sitting for a meal. Here, in Lorna Goodison’s Controlling the Silver (2005), I found this musing on blended heritage, where the “gods of England Africa worshipped cheek by jowl”, just in time for March 17th.

“On St. Patrick’s day it was great-grandfather
George O’Brian Wilson who crooned Irish
airs that fell and took root as casuarinas
beneath which he caused our great-grand
mother Leanna to fall, wanting as he did
then to ingest her Guinea essence as it rose
in a light ellipse from her griot throat. But
she swallowed hard and retained her story
which I was brought here to tell. Who was he?”

Her poems are beautiful and just formal enough to remind me that I had intended to study more poetry this year but, instead, I dabble.

The dabbling has created some satisfying interconnections (the kind of synchronicities that Rebecca loves too!), so that here, in her collection, I find a poem titled “Arctic, Antarctic, Atlantic, Pacific, Indian Ocean” and, in Kim Fahner’s Some Other Sky, I find a sequence of poems, one for each of the Great Lakes (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior).

But beyond this, I’ve been struck by how poems, too, invite us to change our perspective, to temporarily embody a different way of being in the world. In fewer words! In “Guernica”, for instance, Goodison writes “Imagine if you can, the entire population of Jamaica can be accommodated on Rhode Island; and my first white Christmas spent alone in a Queen’s apartment.”

These big ideas of belonging and identity, dislocation and loneliness, freedom and possibility: in a couple of lines. All these longer forms that I have spent time with (and Goodison has written both a memoir and stories that I’ve enjoyed too), and here these ideas lodge in very few words.

Of course, I likely could find haiku that express these ideas even more succinctly. Which sets me to wondering. Would I have finished knitting that sweater, for which I bought the yarn more than ten years ago now, if I had read more poems than novels? Maybe I would speak another language entirely—and be able to translate lines of poetry in it—if I hadn’t been so intimidated by verse?

But before I get too far down that road, in my stack with Goodison and Fahner is Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus (2022) too. For many, his book has been a revelation: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again. But it’s taken me weeks to read this book. In theory, his blend of personal and analytical information should broaden his style’s appeal, but I found that I enjoyed both (the story of how he set aside his smart phone for months alongside statistics pulled from studies about concentration, work habits, and stress) but not at the same time. It became an episodic read, whereas I expected it to be wholly compelling.

And, ironically, the notes I took were not about focus, but more general ideas about how we live, and words that others wrote, not Hari. For instance, the Spanish writer José Ortega y Gasset, who said: “We cannot put off living until we are ready…. Life is fired at us point-blank.”

And Neale Donald Walsch, who writes: “Life begins at the edge of our comfort zone.”

And, finally, James Williams who explains to Hari that “people say it’s too late to make certain changes to the web or platforms or digital technology” but the ax existed for 1.4 million years before anyone added a handle to it, whereas the web is “less than ten thousand years old.”

2022 is barely 100 days old and I haven’t been reading very much. Except for the books that I’ve read for work, like everything by Sarah Moss and Marlon James and, now, Pat McCabe.

Instead, I have been living at point-blank range, at the edge of my comfort zone, wondering if I should buy an axe.