TO SHIPS THAT SINK AND OTHER INCOMPREHENSIBLE HORRORS, WE BEAR WITNESS

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Every Man For Himself

      Beryl Bainbridge

           Europa Editions, 2012 (originally published 1996)

Only after I finished reading this book this morning did I remember that it was 101 years ago today that the Titanic sank. 

And I know it's not a poetry book and this is poetry month, but Bainbridge's writing is very poetic, I find, in that she gets every word to work overtime and ends up with slim books that are positively loaded with meaning. Something a good poem aspires to do, too. And she uses repetition effectively. For example, the prologue ends with:

      Then the water, first slithering, then tumbling, gushed us apart . . .

and then, less than two hundred pages later, three pages from the end, she revisits the scene she set at the beginning:

      I raised my hand in greeting—then the water, first slithering, then tumbling, gushed us apart.

Poetry. It's everywhere. You just have to find it.

I got caught up in the news today...oh boy. The Boston Marathon visited by demons. It is a strange and sometimes terrible world in which we live. In many parts of the planet what happened today in Boston happens on a regular basis. At times like this it's difficult to know what to say or think or do. So we bear witness. 

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