February 2021 Recommended
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#posts #link round upAt the end of this month there was a burst of sunshine and the daffodils we buried in November erupted in their pots. This sudden explosion of sun and colour always reminds me of this E. E. Cummings poem and this one by Jack Underwood.[^1]
With the start of Spring and the vaccine rolling out I am allowing myself some tentative hope for the next few months. Brighter days are ahead, fingers crossed.
Here's a few other things I enjoyed this month.
Film
I turned 33 in February[^2] and celebrated by going for a walk and finally watching Parasite. You don't need me to tell you how good it is, but what I didn't realise was how tense it is. It's a wild ride, there's something that happens about halfway through the film that completely blindsided me. It's a spectacular dismantling of capitalism and inequality that makes its arguments through character and story.
Music
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvZpn322LxE
I got a copy of We Will Always Love You by The Avalanches. I'd heard the lead singles and wasn't too bothered but thought I'd check out the full album. What a difference it made. The whole album is a sonic journey of snippets of songs echoing out into the solar system. Considering how many guest stars and samples it has, it is amazing how cohesive it feels. More melancholy and wistful than Wildflower, this is a long bath of an album, music you sink into. It feels simultaneously nostalgic for a time that never existed whilst also looking forward to the future. So yeah, I really love this album. Go check it out.
Books
My reading slowed a bit as I ploughed through The Goldfinch, but I still read a couple of other great books:
Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie shows her mastery of the novel form. It's hard to read in places because of the subject matter, a strict domineering religious father, but she is sympathetic to all her characters, even the monsters. She shows them to be complex and multi-layered whilst never excusing the abhorrent violence. On a sentence level, it's beautifully written as well.
The Lithium Codex by Oz Hardwick is a collection of prose poems that fuse past and present, memory and song. The poems are precise and startling, with strange shifts in language that give a sense of altered reality.
Feverfew by Anna Saunders is a stunning collection of poetry that deals with myth and heartbreak. What I admire most about Anna's poems is her ability to provide vivid, strange images that linger in the mind for a long time, like a stolen butterfly or ghosts entwined over a bed. Really recommended.
That's it for now, have a good month.
[^1]: Poets love Spring.
[^2]: If I was a hobbit, I would now be officially of age.
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