I read books all the time. Any books. If there is nothing else available I will read a car manual. I just like to read. Any words will do I guess, but I love reading poetry. It satisfies my soul. Of course, some books become favourites. Alphabet by Inger Christensen (translated by Susanna Nied) is one of mine. I read it whenever I feel low. Something about the poems lifts my spirit despite it being about ecological disaster and outrage against that destruction. The part that stands out to me is the exact descriptions of the beauty of nature and the feeling created by the mathematical framework. The repetition and the growth of the sections has a meditative feel to it that soothes me as I read it. The sequence lists nature’s glory and the things that destroy it. It is a both stunning and startling. It is a systematic poem, in which each of the fourteen sections of the poem is tied to a letter of the alphabet and the number of lines found in each section is dictated by the Fibonacci sequence. (The first section, “A”, has one line. The last section, “N”, has 600).
Ruth Stacey 