Optimism

This week I have experienced the reignition of my love - nay passion - for books, literature, the word. My desire is to socialise in the worlds I find in pages, with the characters and ideas that dance across them. I am currently with Petina Gappah in 'An Elegy for Easterly', a collection of short stories set in contemporary Zimbabwe. The first two were delicious. I encountered Petina for the first time at the Free the Word Festival at The Globe theatre in March 2009. (At this year's festival I saw Nawal el Sadaawi who I have also been thinking about again - the word "resistance" in the poem below instantly brought her to mind). Petina was one of four upcoming writers at the session titled "International Futures". 'Easterly' as she often refers to it on her blog - and which is a good place to encounter her sparkling personality - was on the eve of being published that week. Six months later it won the Guardian First Book award.

Well so far I am impressed and it is the sort of book that makes me want to write - and read. The cover is beautiful, so I leave you with that; and also the epigraph to the novel. This is a poem called 'Optimism' by American poet Jane Hirshfield. I loved these words. Petina sets them before her unravelling world of resilience against Robert Mugabe's regime. But they are words that speak to us all, and of the world itself since the beginning of Time.

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the
. . . . . . sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked
. . . . . . on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs - all this resinous, unretractable
. . . . . . earth.

Jane Hirshfield, 'Optimism'