A Bit of Poetry

I just got the collected poems of Ted Hughes and I have to say it is a pretty amazing collection, for only USD 25. Both purchases I've made in the past month have been just as good (the other one being Kenneth Koch's Collected Poems) so I wanted to recommend it to anyone who likes these two writers.

This is a poem from Ted Hughes' book:

The City
----

Your poems are a dark city centre.
Your novels, your stories, your journals, are suburbs
Of this big city.
The hotels are lit like office blocks all night
With scholars, priests, pilgrims. It's at night
Sometimes I drive through. I just find
Myself driving through, going slow, simply
Roaming in my own darkness, pondering
What you did. Nearly always
I glimpse you -- at some crossing,
Staring upwards, lost, sixty year old.
The crowd piles around you. You stand rock still.
Your face, under the green or orange light,
a desert Indian's, wild, bewildered.
You want to ask something but you can't
You stare into every face
Trying to recognize somebody.
They ignore you. Then the light goes red
And they all surge past you.
Then you see me in my car, staring at you.
I see you thinking: ought I to know him?
I see you frown. I see you trying
To remember -- or suddenly not to remember.

Apart from the new poetry, I am single again and I've been doing alot of thinking this whole week about relationships and the way that even friendships can decay and rot with the passing of time--People just get tired of each other, isn't that sad? I've made it a resolution to not lose any more friends to the grind of life. In this city, where things are always overwhelming enough to get most people to quit, that is a hard thing to do but a necessary one for the survival of your person.

Over and Out,

UG'ster