The Winter of Our Discontent

Rachel and I are off tonight to see a production of Richard III at Langara College. It's got pretty favourable reviews, so hopefully it'll be decent. I've seen a couple of film versions of it and read the play a couple of times, but I think this is the first staging of it I'll have seen. An interestingly flawed play, very much a transition from Shakespeare's slighter early work and the great plays he'd go on to write.

I've been reading Daryl Hine's Recollected Poems for review the last couple of days. I knew he was very damn good from having read a few poems here and there and his 20-sonnet sequence Arrondissements (which is reprinted in Recollected Poems), but I didn't realize just how brilliant he was. Besides the technical virtuosity I knew he possessed in spades, there's a penetrating intelligence in these poems, terrific wit and an astonishing emotional range; he's equally adept at biting satire and intimate lyric. I've said it before, but it bears repeating: it's damn near criminal that Hine was overlooked for this year's GG shortlist. I'm going to try to post some audio soon, but I have to decide which poem first. I read his poem "A Bewilderment at the Entrance of the Fat Boy into Eden" at the UNB Poetry Weekend, which you can hear here.