THE PLETHORA …

It’s almost 5 days exactly since I arrived in Hobart, but I feel as if I’ve packed twice as many days into that time—though writing in this blog clearly hasn’t been part of the teeming activity. The teeming everything! New streets, new skies (the moon waning backwards!—it’s enough to make you dizzy!), new trees, new birds, even the light seems new, falling brilliant on the brightly-coloured shingles of the houses I look down on from various windows.

Going for walks I’m stunned by what grows, the textures and greens creating density, even as the crowns of the trees are often not dense at all but clumps of green interspersed with spaces, reminiscent perhaps of certain cedars or so-called cedars which I seem to remember seeing somewhere … That’s about as precise as I’m able to get. I’m struck dumb, at a loss for words to either name or describe what I’m seeing, don’t even want to reach for words but just gaze about me. My field notebook lies forgotten in my bag till I get back to the house. Only then do I manage to note, from faulty memory in all likelihood, what I’ve seen—the look of birds, the sounds of frogs, a certain indescribable scent in the air.

In the house it’s the other extreme, books everywhere, the plethora words themselves, too many to take in, far more books than I could read if I did nothing but read for the rest of my natural life. But what a lascivious and dangerous pleasure it is to wander past the various shelves with the perpetual small stack of books in my hand. If I pause for an instant I discover yet another one I’m dying to read—Louise Bogan’s prose, for instance—or Gary Nabhan’s Cross-Pollinations: the marriage of science and poetry—the most recent titles that compelled my hand to reach out.

But I’m trying to rein myself in, for fear I end by starting to read wildly and widely and not finishing a single book—I’m about to start a regimen: each night and each morning I will read one or two or perhaps more letters from A Steady Stream of Correspondence: Selected Letters of Gwen Harwood, 1943-1995. Harwood was born in 1920, and in fact lived not far from here. On Sunday I had a peek down a long narrow driveway to the house she lived in. She’s a great letter-writer, open, thoughtful, with a sharp eye (and vocabulary) for detail and a wicked sense of humour. The letters are full of anecdotes that make me laugh out loud. Like this one:

“Just after your card had been put in the box by my trembling eager fingers a letter came from A.D. Hope; I said to myself, I’m not a bit excited, really, but I’ll write & tell Tony—AND FOUND MYSELF TRYING TO INSERT A SHEET OF PAPER IN THE SEWING MACHINE.”

I’ve reached page 80 in this book, with only 400 more pages to go, so I expect I’ll finally finish the letters within the month. That’s not based on any calculation at all—just my sense that they're so irresistably entertaining I’ll keep reading them till I’m done. Of course there's also the volume of her collected poems waiting on the shelf in my bedroom …