What are words worth?

What I love about poetry is the possibility it allows you to capture the little moments in life, in short bursts of expression, and gives you a way to put completely random observations into the verbal equivalent of little perfume bottles to be brought out and opened at will, to give one a whiff of a mood, a moment, an idea, an event. For me, poetry provides an escape from the humdrum. Or perhaps it is more correct to say it allows me to see what exists in the folds of linear time. For instance, when I was sitting watching my students labour over their examination, my mind wandered and wondered about other kinds of writing.... Advice to authors If you want to write books about people unlike yourself, you must bare your eyes and look closely so that the middle-class crust that shields you from offense of the sensory kind, doesn't keep you from seeing/smelling/touching/tasting the entirety of life, including that which is behind the garbage heap and buried under mo...

I’ve just finished my second Ian McEwan book in a row, and my fifth overall. I’m sure this happens with many of us, that we find ourselves caught up with a writer we enjoy and whose work engages us in a deep, intimate way, and we are loath to leave. We immerse ourselves in book after book and just do not want to part company. The book I just finished is “Black Dogs” and the one just before was “Enduring Love”. For anyone who has read Ian McEwan, you would sense a certain comforting sameness across his writing—not a boring, tedious sameness, but a common thread of deeply felt humanity (and perhaps many writers have this) that is at once despairing and hopeful. There’s a recognition of a core of evil and ugliness that runs through all individuals, and it is in overcoming this or confronting it with the goodness that also runs through us that a story emerges. It’s also the specificity with which large-scale events affect each one of us, and changes our lives, forever. Take, for instan...