Tag Archives: books

Breakfast

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Here in The Netherlands Kookboekenweek (Cookery Books Week) has just ended. A recent annual event, it’s designed to promote cookery books. Bookshops and libraries organise workshops, lectures, and tasting events. Of course, it’s all to encourage people to buy books as presents for December: St Nicolaas and Kerstmis.


Professionals shortlisted six books (Vietnamese, Japanese, Indian, Italian (2), and baking skills). They’ve chosen Bloem Suiker Boter, by Nicola Lamb, translated into Dutch. I’m going with Breakfast, a poem celebrating poetry and friendship.

Breakfast

Bridie would be in the kitchen,
barking with Finn and Tara
in a metal cage under the table.
I’m in your backroom, sheepskin
on the seat of the wooden chair,
just gone 9 o’clock this Tuesday.

You’ve made the scrambled eggs
exactly as I like them, with enough
mustard and fresh chives.
Now you’re coming in with yours,
followed by your small dogs
who settle on the settee, by the fire.

We catch up over this monthly meal.
Soon we’ll sit silently behind our laptops,
typing up poems from old notebooks.
Now eating toast with ginger preserve,
I look out of the window; the smiling
Buddha is lit up by the sun.

The unread book

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Earlier this year, a group of artists in The Netherlands set up the Ongelezen Boeken Club (Unread Books Club). It is a sad fact that many library books are never borrowed. Currently, there is an exhibition in a public library in Amsterdam featuring some of their unread books.

Upstairs, around 200.000 books are on loan. If a book is not taken out during a period of two to three years, it moves onto the ‘null list’ and disappears downstairs. Here a good 400.000 books are stored along 24 km of shelving. At the exhibition, there is an old-fashioned telephone on which visitors can ring and reserve one of the unread books on the ‘nul lijst’.

The artists have declared Thursday 19 September as the first Nationale Ongelezen Boekendag (National Unread Books Day).

There is the concept of the anti-library: a collection of unread books as a research tool, as an ode to everything one wants to explore. Related to that is Tsundoku, acquiring reading materials and letting them pile up. Many poets I know feel somewhat guilty about new poetry books piling up.

This is the cover of a historical novel, Gewassen Vlees, by Thomas Rosenboom. It won the dutch Libris prize (worth 50,000 Euros) in 1995. It’s over 700 pages long. I am never going to read it. A friend gave it to me. He died in 2000 and that’s the reason it’s still taking up shelf space.

Mothering Sunday – a poem

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Credit: Silviarita via Pixabay

Today It’s Mothering Sunday in the UK and Ireland, and Summer Time begins. I want to thank Hilary Robinson for letting me share her poem, a gentle homeward journey with rich detail. It also shows how a strong title pulls the reader in. Hilary is the guest poet next month with more poems from her poetry debut Revelation.

Things I Say to my Mum in the Nursing Home

Let’s go to Verdon’s for a quarter of sweets—
American Cream Soda, Rainbow Crystals.
Let me taste the Sarsaparilla Drops,
Fruit Salads, Flying saucers, Cherry Lips.

Walk me up to Marsden’s — I’ll sink
my fingers into dried peas, watch
as butter’s cut and patted into shape;
sugar’s wrapped in rough blue bags.

Take me to the monkey-nut shop
after an hour in Northmoor Library,
breathing in the leather, old-book smell,
where the men scour papers for good news.

Hold my hand, take me to the park
so I can swing high, standing up,
or roly-poly down the slopes,
risk roundabouts, the Wedding Cake.

Take me back to our backyard,
to the tin bath hung on an outside wall,
to my stiff, hard dolls, my teddy bear.
Pass me my square of pink flannelette.

Table 64 – writing prompt

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Credit: Pexels on Pixabay

This week my friend Valerie celebrated her birthday. We met 30 years ago on a residential week in Spain. To celebrate our friendship, here is a short poem in which we’re together. Bowler’s is a very large indoor and outdoor carboot sale location in Manchester.


That Generation Game is a tv game show in which teams of two family members, but from a different generation compete. The winners see a conveyor belt with goodies wobble past. No worries: if they can’t remember them all, the studio audience will shout to help …

Table 64

We carried the plastic crates and cardboard
boxes into Bowlers at bloody six o’clock.
The locusts, proper traders, picked items
from the piles we carried, threw us
pound coins and a few fivers.

The early flurry was good and then it was
like the Generation Game in reverse:
suitcases went, a pile of books, glasses,
a wok, costume jewellery, some cuddly toys.
We sat back in our folding chairs like regulars,
holding off sleep.

Writing Prompt: Did you do a car boot sale with a friend? Were you a market trader (for real or in your dreams)? Did you go to an auction of lost property? What is the object that you lost or found?