Productive weekend

I've been busy. Another chapter for the book and more poems. I've always been a bit baffled by sequences of poems, but I love Douglas Dunn's elegy. It was written around the time that his wife died and in the year afterwards. Quite apart from having had a similar experience when Steve died, the poems talk about a loss as a human experience. It was also interesting comparing the way a man - one particular man - dealt with his loss. It was strange, because I dreamed about Steve last night, and he's been dead for twenty years this year.

I'm hoping to write a group of poems about my sister and her death. I already have several randomly written over the last couple of years, and a few bits of fiction that reflect her. I'm playing with them, seeing if they make a poem. One is a description I wrote of cooking a curry, and it reminded me of Sarah when I wrote it, because she bought me the book (by Madhur Jaffrey) and we both used it a lot. We used to swap recipes, and ingredients. I often got packets of herbs and spices through the post, with aromatic letters full of jokes and laments and ideas, peppered with recipe ideas.

For light relief I have the book to work on and after the fantastic fiction session I had a revelation about the world in which Sadie and Jack live. So I'm writing with the anti-magic Nazis coming for Sadie...All very exciting to write. Also, how do you get a very large dog down a narrow tunnel? We managed it in the end...inspired by memories of my retriever wedging herself under the kids' beds when a bath was mentioned, or considered.