Our choice for the July meeting was ‘The Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson’. She was an American poet, the daughter of a lawyer from Massachusetts, and was born in 1830. She died in her 50’s relatively unknown, in fact only seven of her poems were published prior to her death in 1886. She was initially a vivacious teenager, but gradually over the years withdrew into a reclusive existence. This was apparently a very deliberate choice ‘to live is so startling, it leaves but little room for other occupations’. Ted Hughes describes her poetry ‘she has an ability to see a vision of timeless, vast Nothingness, whose only resolution is Death’. This sounds very stark, but reading some of her poems she seems to me to have a had a very vivid imagination especially describing her physical and mental struggles. Most of us had chosen one of the poems to read to the rest of the group, and they provoked an interesting discussion. Few of us read poetry regularly, and probably most of us heaved a sigh when we knew the choice, but having a read a little of her poetry recognise that she was an immense talent and her poems worth dipping into occasionally.
Chris Fisher