Episode 1367: A Day Of Poetry

So the latest development in my ongoing NatWest saga is that the PayPal transaction has been refunded, but the Ted Baker ones haven't. Not impressed. That aside, my third trip to London this month was great. I had more sushi at itsu, and then sat in Starbucks to wait for Naomi, reading Richard Meier's Misadventure. Seeing as this collection won the inaugural Picador Poetry Prize, I had fairly high expectations. Fortunately, I wasn't disappointed in the least. Meier's poems have some of the most consistently excellent final lines that I've encountered. The titular poem, in particular, genuinely shocked me when I finished it, definitely wasn't expecting how it ended. Naomi and I spotted Jeremy Treglown and John Fletcher in the audience at the Royal Society of Literature event, and it was really good to hear Archbishop Rowan Williams speak. Whatever you might think of his tenure as Archbishop of Canterbury or his moral/theological views, it is undeniable that the man is an incredibly intelligent and sensitive reader and writer. It was good to hear him speak about poetry and translation, although I would have liked him to more extensively compare and contrast poetic and religious language in his conversation with Fiona Sampson.