I just read Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, which you must immediately go out and buy and read. It's a work of astounding beauty - delicate, tender, wry, tough, and incredibly beautiful. Just finished it and am still stunned. It's a novel in verse she says - she's picked out the bones of the story and limned them in poetry. That someone today is writing like this is very exciting; she makes language come alive. First thing I do when I get back to Singapore is get a camera.

On another note - I've been dipping into Carolyn Forche's The Country Between Us - though of course it has to be read all the way through at least once. I used to distrust political poetry but am beginning to change my mind; I still think that a poem is not the best vehicle for a sustained argument but a good political poem makes us remember that the political is personal. That people are involved. That's a simplistic and obvious thing to say; perhaps it's just that I have a tendency to lose the people in the arguments - the individual people, startling and painful and beautiful in their singleness, in who they are.