Sunday Salon: Reading and Gardening Plans

Welcome to the Sunday Salon! Also visit The Sunday Post hosted by The Caffeinated Book Reviewer; It's Monday: What Are You Reading? at Book Journey. Also visit Mailbox Monday, hosted by Vicki, Leslie, and Serena.

We are considering putting in a raised garden bed for veggies, a bed that will have to be meshed in with wire to keep out the bunnies. I have already bought seeds for peppers, string beans, squash, and basil genovese, to plant as late as early May. The temps will dip below freezing this coming week! A customer at the store advised me to forego wood, which deteriorates over time, and to use concrete blocks to form the beds.

For the April National Poetry Month Blog Tour hosted by Savvy Verse and Wit, I blogged on Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem, "Spring and Fall: To a Young Child," It had been a while since I had read that poem but it came back to me easily.

I have finished three books for book tours/review:
Black Chalk by Christopher J. Yates, for tomorrow
When the Cypress Whispers by Yvette Manessis Corporon, for Wednesday
Murder on Bamboo Lane by Naomi Hirahari, for later this month
and am in the middle of reading
A Tiger's Tale by Laura Morrigan for a May 11 tour

Other books I've started include
The Year She Left Us by Katherine Ma
Death Money by Henry Chang

 A few interesting novel, mixed genres, came in this past week:

Jack of Spies

Dear Lucy

All Day and Night

North of Normal

Eyes on You

Mrs. Hemingway

Click on the title captions for details re the books.

I have my reading cut out for me. How about you?

National Poetry Month: "Spring and Fall: to a Young Child" by Gerard Manley Hopkins

The 2014 National Poetry Month Blog Tour is hosted by Serena at Savvy Verse and Wit to celebrate poets and poetry in April. Let me share one of my favorite poems.

Spring and Fall
  by Gerard Manley Hopkins

              to a young child

Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow's spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

- See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16074#sthash.GsA1Cneo.dpuf

My thoughts: I fell in love with this short poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins when our English teacher introduced it to us in our first year in college. A published poet herself, she read it with such clarity and conviction and feeling that I felt I was able to understand Margaret and feel just as she did!

Margaret the young child has seen the renewal of spring and is just now realizing what autumn means, when the leaves turn golden and fall - the end of spring and summer, a loss that to us symbolize the end of life or of innocence. Hopkins turns this into a moral or insight into human nature and predicts that Margaret, in her youth just now experiencing the sorrow of loss, will experience ever greater loss in the future, so that autumn and the changing of seasons will gradually cease to distress her.

What are your reactions to the poem and what do you take from it?
How do you respond to the rhythm and the rhyme of the lines?
Try reading it out loud for the full effect.

Born at Stratford, Essex, England, on July 28, 1844, Gerard Manley Hopkins is regarded as one the Victorian era's greatest poets. 

He was raised in a prosperous and artistic family. He attended Balliol College, Oxford, in 1863, where he studied Classics. In 1864, Hopkins first read John Henry Newman's Apologia pro via sua, which discussed the author's reasons for converting to Catholicism. Two years later, Newman himself received Hopkins into the Roman Catholic Church. Hopkins soon decided to become a priest himself, and in 1867 he entered a Jesuit novitiate near London. At that time, he vowed to "write no more...unless it were by the wish of my superiors." Hopkins burnt all of the poetry he had written to date and would not write poems again until 1875.

He spent nine years in training at various Jesuit houses throughout England. He was ordained in 1877 and for the next seven years carried his duties teaching and preaching in London, Oxford, Liverpool, Glasgow, and Stonyhurst. In 1875, Hopkins began to write again after a German ship, the Deutschland, was wrecked during a storm at the mouth of the Thames River. Many of the passengers, including five Franciscan nuns, died. Although conventional in theme, Hopkins poem "The Wreck of the Deutschland" introduced what Hopkins called "sprung rhythm." By not limiting the number of "slack" or unaccented syllables, Hopkins allowed for more flexibility in his lines and created new acoustic possibilities. In 1884, he became a professor of Greek at the Royal University College in Dublin. He died five years later from typhoid fever.

 Although his poems were never published during his lifetime, his friend poet Robert Bridges edited a volume of Hopkins' Poems that first appeared in 1918. In addition to developing new rhythmic effects, Hopkins was also very interested in ways of rejuvenating poetic language. He regularly placed familiar words into new and surprising contexts. He also often employed compound and unusual word combinations. As he wrote to in a letter to Bridges, "No doubt, my poetry errs on the side of oddness…" Twentieth century poets such as W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, and Charles Wright have enthusiastically turned to his work for its inventiveness and rich aural patterning. - See more at: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/284#sthash.JeZaYNwR.dpuf

Sunday Salon: Spring Has Not Sprung; Books and Poetry Blog Tour

Welcome to the Sunday Salon! Also visit The Sunday Post hosted by The Caffeinated Bookreviewer; It's Monday: What Are You Reading? at Book Journey.

A reluctant spring is here, sprinkled with snow and dropping below freezing at times. No bud or sprig dares show its head in this still frigid cold. Only more birds singing...a good sign. I'm more than ready to come out of hibernation. The temps are back in the 20s today after teasing us with 50s last week.

Fans of Mary Higgins Clark will be glad to know about her new thriller to be released April 1, 2014 by Simon & Schuster:

I've Got You Under My Skin

"When Laurie Moran’s husband was brutally murdered, only three-year-old Timmy saw the face of his father’s killer. Five years later his piercing blue eyes still haunt Timmy’s dreams. Laurie is haunted by more—the killer’s threat to her son as he fled the scene: “Tell your mother she’s next, then it’s your turn . . .”
Now Laurie is the producer of a true-crime, cold-case television series to launch with the twenty-year-old unsolved murder of Betsy Powell, a socialite found suffocated after a gala celebrating the graduation of her daughter and three friends. Reopening the case with the cooperation of the surviving guests that night, Laurie is sure to have a hit on her hands. But when the estranged friends begin filming, it becomes clear each is hiding secrets . . . small and large. And a pair of blue eyes is watching events unfold, too . ."(publisher)

I was one of five winners of a new e-book in a contest by the prolific Southern author, Peggy Webb:

Phantom of Riverside Park

"An unwed mother looking for a miracle… A wounded war hero living in the shadows… A grandfather praying for a silver lining… They never expected that miracles come in the most unlikely ways. Poignant and touching with lovely dashes of humor, this story will haunt you for a long time to come." (publisher)
Enjoying the descriptive writing.

Did you know that April is National Poetry Month?
The National Poetry Month Blog Tour hosted by Serena of Savvy Verse and Wit in April will feature bloggers posting on selected poets and their poems. On April 11 I will share thoughts on a favorite poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Spring and Fall: To a Young Child."  Contact Serena re signing up for the tour!

My next book tour will be March 26, a review of The Riot by Laura Wilson, a mystery novel set in racially charged 1950s London.

What books are you reading this week?