Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st;
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

William Shakespeare, 1564 – 1616

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I thought I’d continue my short break from the refeature series with a few of the classical poems—in this case Shakespeare’s famous Sonnet 18, arguably the most famous of his love poems. While that accolade remains a matter of opinion, Sonnet 18 certainly contains some famous lines, from the opening “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” and the scarcely less famous “…darling buds of May”, through to the concluding couplet:

“So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. “

How about you, do you have a favourite Shakespeare sonnet or a favourite love poem?

You’re very welcome to leave a comment if you do. 🙂

Meanwhile…

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To check out the featured poem on the Tuesday Poem Hub and other great poems from fellow Tuesday poets from around the world, click here or on the Quill icon in the sidebar.

Next to speculative fiction, the literary “genre” I like best is historical, although in my case I include both fiction and non fiction under that umbrella.

So at the moment I’m reading — and enjoying — Douglas Woodruff’s The Life and Times of Alfred the Great (Weidenfled & Nicolson, 1974) which is a non-fiction account of the life and times of the Anglo-Saxon monarch. This is very much a coffee table book, so the writing is accessible and accompanied by many beautiful plates of manuscripts, craft, art, and weapons of the period. I am enjoying it very much but would describe it as an entry level work for looking at the period rather than heavy-duty history.

The historical novel I’m currently reading is Robert Harris’s An Officer and A Spy (Arrow Books, 2014), which is based on the true story of the Dreyfus Affair. The novel begins with the conviction of a French army officer, Alfred Dreyfus, for spying and follows the gradual realization by military intelligence officer, Georges Picquart, that Dreyfus has been wrongfully convicted. Currently I’m about a third of the way through and am finding it really engaging reading. The book combines a deft portrayal of the historical period, including the anti-Semitism that drove Dreyfus’s conviction, together with a real spy thriller that is at least as riveting as anything Hollywood could devise — without the need for CGI or other special effects.

Whether Anglo-Saxon England, the conflict with the Danes, and the life of Alfred the Great are your thing, or a real historical whodunnit and the miscarriage of justice meted out to Alfred Dreyfus is more your style, I think either Douglas Woodruff’s The Life and Times of Alfred the Great or Robert Harris’s An Officer and A Spy will well repay your time.

The Wall of Night Series map; design by Peter Fitzpatrick

The A Geography of Haarth post series is exploring the full range of locales and places from The Wall of Night world of Haarth. Each entry is accompanied by a quote from the books in which the place appears, currently either The Heir Of Night or The Gathering Of The Lost, or both.

And yup, this week we’re still in places beginning with “T.” 😉

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The Sleeve:  an island in the northern part of the city of Ij, where the North Gate is located
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“The night was cool when they stepped outside, but there was a faint stir in the air that spoke of the coming dawn. They walked in silence, crossing the long bridge to The Sleeve without hearing any further disturbance or seeing other people. The revelers, it appeared, had seen wisdom and cleared the streets.

Although long, the island of The Sleeve was also narrow and the walk from the bridge to the North Gate was short. But when they reached the gate, they found it barricaded with wagons and manned by a heavily armed contingent of the city guard. Tarathan folded his arms and sighed, leaning against the wall of the alley that concealed them. “We are going to have to find a boat,” he said. “Or swim the river.”
.
~  from © The Gathering Of The Lost, The Wall of Night Book Two: Chapter 6 — Facestealer

Jackie French is one of the many wonderful writers scheduled to appear at the WORD Christchurch Writers & Readers’s Festival from 27-31 August.

Jackie French

Christchurch Libraries are currently featuring 3 questions — and their answers — from festival guests. This is part of what Ms French had to say in response to the question: “What do you think about libraries?”

“Have you ever wondered why we whisper in libraries? It’s because we know subconsciously that they lead to a million different universes. Use the power well – and borrow as many books as you can — and you will find joy and fulfilment and friendship and fascination. But libraries are places of true power, none the less …”

I am now more keen than ever to hear Ms French speak during her feature event:

Jackie French, Saturday 30, 10-11 am

To read her full answers to all three of the library’s questions, click on:

Jackie French: WORD Christchurch Writers & Readers’s Festival

You might like to check out what some of the other guest authors have to say as well, under:

Writers

~ by Rebecca Fisher

Introduction:

If we’re being really honest here, the concept of Green Arrow doesn’t sound all that promising. Though first appearing in DC comics back in 1941, he certainly doesn’t have the same recognisability as Batman, Superman or Wonder Woman. And whereas those three have become so iconic that they’re no longer in the shadow of the material that originally inspired them (Zorro for Batman, Greek/Roman mythology for Wonder Woman, Moses for Superman), Green Arrow’s assortment of origins are still very obvious.

A young billionaire (like Bruce Wayne) is cast ashore on a deserted island (like Robinson Crusoe) where he becomes a master archer, skills that are put to use once he returns to civilization and becomes a hooded, green-clad vigilante (like Robin Hood). Even his name – Oliver Queen – sounds a little silly.

But (you knew there was a but coming) in the past decade Green Arrow has enjoyed a boost in popularity after appearances not only in animated shows like Justice League Unlimited, Young Justice and The Batman, but also as a regular character on Smallville. It all accumulated in the creation of Arrow, first airing in 2012 and just now beginning the filming of its third season. Hearing a lot of buzz about it, and remembering that I really enjoyed the character on Justice League, I decided to put aside my reservations and check it out.

Premise:

Billionaire Oliver Queen is presumed dead after a shipwreck that also kills his father, only to be found five years later and reunited with his mother and sister in Starling City. Trying to reintegrate himself back into his family and modern civilization itself proves less of a challenge than what Oliver really has planned.

He spells it out himself in the opening voiceover to each episode: “I will fulfil my father’s dying wish: to use the list of names he left me and bring down those who are poisoning my city.” This hand-written list identifies a variety of corrupt businessmen, politicians and mobsters, and it soon becomes apparent to the audience that those five years Oliver spent on that island can’t have been spent alone. Having acquired a range of languages, martial arts and pin-point precision with a bow, Oliver takes to the streets of Starling City in a green hood and voice modifier to dispense justice.

Story:

As it happens, there are quite a few storylines at work here! Perhaps the strength (or ingenuity) of Arrow as a show is that it doesn’t slow down for a second. If there are any plot holes or character inconsistencies, you probably won’t notice them thanks to the rocketing pace of the proceedings.

Your average episode will include a standard villain of the week (usually a recognisable guest star from such cult shows as Fringe, Battlestar Galactica, Angel, Once Upon a Time or Farscape) who the vigilante known as “The Hood” tracks down and threatens, forcing them to return their ill-gotten gains to the population.

Moira Queen doing what she does best: brooding

Then there’s the running thread of the season’s overarching plot, which often encompasses only couple of scenes per episode. It’s soon apparent that Moira Queen has a dark secret, one that has to do with her husband’s death and a conspiracy known as The Undertaking. This mystery is metered out in small doses, finally reaching its climax in the season finale.

And on top of this, the show also contains flashbacks to Oliver’s time on the island (which may in turn give you flashbacks of LOST) that depict his fight for survival and his growing realization that he’s not alone.

Characters:

Amidst all this drama is a huge collection of characters, each one with their own background and story-arcs. With such a large ensemble cast, it’s difficult to know where to start!

Stephen Amell plays Oliver Queen, and though I initially thought he was a bit wooden, many of his acting choices become more apparent as the season goes on and we get a sense of the character’s many facets: the wastrel persona, the stoic vigilante, the spoiled whiner in the island flashbacks, and the rare glimpse of the “real” Oliver whenever his guard is down.

Then there’s his aforementioned secretive mother Moira (Susanna Thompson), struggling to cope with her youngest daughter Thea (Willa Holland) who turned to drugs to deal with the loss of her father and brother. Though they’re delighted to have their missing son/brother returned to them, they face a difficult adjustment period fraught with unanswered questions about what really happened to him while he was away.

Laurel Lance (very reluctantly) defends Oliver in court

Also happy to see Oliver is Tommy Merlyn (Colin Donnell), his best friend who now has to break the news that he’s been seeing Oliver’s girlfriend Laurel Lance (Katie Cassidy) while he was presumed dead. Yes, there’s an inevitable love triangle, but the most interesting thing about the dynamics here is that Laurel’s resentment and confusion over Oliver’s return is augmented by the fact her sister Sara was killed in the shipwreck – she and Ollie were having an affair behind her back.

Sara’s death destroyed the Lance family, and to add yet another complication, Laurel’s father Quentin Lance (Paul Blackthorne) is a police detective determined to hunt down the vigilante.

The dream-team: Diggle and Felicity

Finally we’ve got Oliver’s inner circle: his bodyguard John Diggle (David Ramsey) and IT girl Felicity Smoake (Emily Bett Rickards), who are let in on his secret fairly early in the show’s run and end up his most important allies. Within this extensive cast of characters are a range of rivalries, friendships, secrets and lies that make up the underlying tensions of the show, all of them gradually building as the season rushes along.

Conclusion:

Arrow is a show that knows how to make the most of its format, doling out portions of its story-arc across twenty-three episodes and filling the rest of its run-time with kidnappings, drug deals, shoot-outs, hostage situations, assassination attempts and Oliver’s interpersonal relationships. There’s always something going on, and it’s this high-octane style of storytelling that gives the show its undeniable energy.

The underlying conspiracy is what drives the action of this first season, with at least one twist or revelation present in each episode, whilst the “prequel” aspect of the island flashbacks marks out Ollie’s development from playboy to fighting machines. Needless to say, this is an extremely busy show, and its climatic final episode has already got me seeking out Season Two.

Next Time: Lost

It was confusing, it was fascinating, it was convoluted, it was frustrating – it was Lost. And so was I by the end of it.

About The Reviewer:

Rebecca Fisher is a graduate of the University of Canterbury with a Masters degree in English Literature, mainly, she claims, because she was able to get away with writing her thesis on C.S. Lewis and Philip Pullman. She is a reviewer for FantasyLiterature.com, a large website that specializes in fantasy and science-fiction novels, as well as posting reviews to Amazon.com and her They’re All Fictional blog.

To read Rebecca’s detailed introduction of both herself and the series, as well as preceding reviews, click on:

Big Worlds On Small Screens

With the recent commemoration of the centenary of World War 1 beginning, it seems fitting to look at some of the specifically World War 1 related poetry featured on the blog over recent years.

“Lijssenthoek” by Joanna Preston

Yesterday, I linked to Joanna Preston’s interview on Radio New Zealand’s “Sunday Morning” programme. One of the poems Joanna read at the conclusion of the interview was the haibun Lijssenthoek, which I featured as part of a war poetry series last year:

There. Red brick and white stone; an archway anything but triumphal. We wheeled our hired bicycles through the gate-building, blinking at the transition from light to shadow to light again as we stepped out into the garden. And garden it was. Rows of lilies, ranged in front of the crosses that marked the Canadian graves. The New Zealand graves. The South African graves…”

To read the haibun in full, click on:

Lijssenthoek

To hear Joanna read the poem click on:

“Sunday Morning” Interview: Joanna Preston

and go to approximately 22.50 minutes through the interview.

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“Ellen’s Vigil” by Lorna Staveley Anker

Ellen’s Vigil is inscribed in NZ’s national memorial to the Unknown Soldier. I also featured it as part of last year’s war poetry series:

“Benjamin……..Isaac…….Tom
Passchendaele…..Ypres…and Somme
…………….three ovals float
…………….on the cold wall
plastered whiter
………………………………..than their bones…”

To read the full poem, click on:

Ellen’s Vigil

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Wilfrid Owen:

I don’t think you can address Word War 1 poetry without looking at the work of Wilfrid Owen. I have featured two of his poems over the past four years:

Anthem For Doomed Youth on September 4 last year:

Anthem For Doomed Youth 

Dulce Et Decorum Est

NZEF Trooper 203453 by Leigh Vickridge

ANZAC Memorial (Inglewood)

And last, but not least, Leigh Vickridge’s NZEF Trooper 203453, featured for ANZAC Day in 2011:

NZEF Trooper 203453

To read the featured poem on the Tuesday Poem Hub and other great poems from fellow Tuesday poets around the world, click here or on the Quill icon in the sidebar.

Joanna Preston

Yesterday, Wallace Chapman of Radio New Zealand’s “Sunday Morning” show interviewed fellow poet and friend, Joanna Preston.

Joanna Preston won the inaugural Kathleen Grattan Award for Poetry, judged by Fleur Adcock, in 2008. Her winning — and first — collection, The Summer King, was then published by Otago University Press in 2009, and won the Mary Gilmore Award for the best first poetry collection by an Australian author in 2010.

The interview is an indepth look at Joanna and her poetry, as well as her new role as poetry editor for the literary journal, Takahe, which is currently celebrating its 25th year in production.

Here’s the interview—and very well worth your listening time, too:

Sunday Morning Interview With Joanna Preston (Podcast)

As those of you who saw my recent feature of Joanna’s Lucifer In Las Vegas on The Tuesday Poem Blog will know, I am a great admirer of Joanna’s poetry, and so was not at all surprised to hear Wallace Chapman describe The Summer King as “luminous”, “accessible” and “a page turner”—a rare accolade for poetry these days.

There is a great deal more equally worthwhile listening in the interview, not least Joanna’s thoughts on poetry (and all creative writing by inference) as “negotating boundaries” and her eloquently expressed view that “all art is a collaboration…in which the creator must leave as much space as possible for the reader to bring their own [creative] input to the work…” (I have paraphrased as closely as possible to my recollection of what was said in the interview; my apologies to Joanna if I have not gotten it quite right.)

I really recommend this interview—and not least for Joanna’s wonderful reading of Parable of the Drought, recently republished in Essential New Zealand Poems: Facing The Empty Page (ed. S. Harvey, H Ricketts, J Norcliffe, Randon House, 2014.)

The Wall of Night Series map; design by Peter Fitzpatrick

The A Geography of Haarth post series is exploring the full range of locales and places from The Wall of Night world of Haarth. Each entry is accompanied by a quote from the books in which the place appears, currently either The Heir Of Night or The Gathering Of The Lost, or both.

This week, we’re still deep in the terrain of “T.” 😉

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The Leas:  a meadow area on Emer’s nothern march and the site of a former village
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“The skylark was singing again when they left The Leas. Or perhaps, thought Carick, it was another bird pouring its song into the morning, unperturbed by battle and death. Mist still feathered the meadow and it was hard to believe that barely an hour had passed since the sun rose. And harder still to accept that young men who had been alive and eager in the gray predawn…were now corpses trussed across a horse’s back. They were leaving horses behind as well, some slain in the battle and others put down afterward.”

~  from © The Gathering Of The Lost, The Wall of Night Book Two: Chapter 21 — The Old Road

On March 3 of this year, I let you all into a  secret [Cue: Drum roll!]: I love writing.

On March 5 I went further, and shared that I Simply Adore Reading!

Since then I’ve begun sharing a gallery of the books and writers that I love.

One of those books is Joanne Harris’s Chocolat.

One of my brothers, who lives in Australia, was very ill with meningitis and I had flown over to be there, as you do. He recovered, which was the fabulous news, but in between hospital visits there was a lot of downtime, and in one of those down moments I wandered into a little local book store (yup, they still had such critters then) in Brisbane and bought the book on the strength of its title, Chocolat (aka foodie here!) and gorgeous cover (featured), both of which were not let-down by the backcover blurb.

From the very first page I was hooked. Here’s an example of why Joanne Harris’s gorgeous words about food, people, a community and more than a dash of everyday magic, drew me in:

“We came on the wind of the carnival, a warm wind for February, laden with hot greasy scents of frying pancakes and sausages and powdery-sweet waffles cooked on the hotplate right there by the roadside, with the confetti sleeting down collars and cuffs and rolling in the gutters like an idiot antidote to winter. There is a febrile excitement in the crowds which line the narrow main street, necks craning to catch sight of the crepe-covered char with its trailing ribbons and paper rosettes…The people of Lansquenet have learned the art of observation without eye contact. I feel their gaze like a breath on the nape of my neck, strangely without hostility but cold nonetheless. We are a curiosity to them, a part of the carnival, a whiff of the outlands. I feel their eyes upon us as I turn to buy a galette from the vendor. The paper is hot and greasy, the dark wheat pancake crispy at the edges but thick and good in the centre…”

Can’t you taste it? And already the whole feel of the book is set up in those swift opening sequences: the central motif of food, but just as importantly, the themes of self and other, the divine and the mundane, the stranger in an equally strange (if curiously without hostility) land.

And so much better than the film, Johnny Depp notwithstanding. So many more layers and subtlety, and a far greater depth of character.

Rebecca Fisher

I said on Monday that one of the things I’d done on my weekend (none of you ever did say what you’d done on yours… huh! ;-)) was catch up with Rebecca Fisher, who *of course* brings us Big Worlds On Small Screens every other Wednesday.

So what better to do this Wednesday, than remind you (in case it’s slipped by you in her bio) that Rebecca has recently started her very own “They’re All Fictional” blog, where she mainly focuses on reviews and the life fan-atique…

But why take my word for it? Hie thee over thar and check out “They’re all Fictional” for yourself. If you enjoy Big Worlds On Small Screens, you won’t be disappointed.

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Hayao Miyazaki

And on another note… Rebecca’s latest feature-focus was on Miyazaki films from Studio Ghibli. So I was interested to see a post on TOR.com that discussed recent rumours that with the final-final retirement of Hayao Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli might be closing its doors. Interestingly, Vox picked it up as well. You can check out both posts via the following links:

Vox: The studio Hayao Miyazaki co-founded might be shutting down. Here’s why it’s important.

TOR.com: Is Studio Ghibli Actually Closing or Just Restructuring?