Portland Public Library book sale yesterday! Here's my haul:

The Complete Poems of Cavafy, translated by Rae Dalven, introduced by Auden 

Eavan Boland's Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time 

Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems (which I already own but it's in that adorable City Lights edition, a 1968 printing, and in perfect condition, so I couldn't resist) 

John LeCarre's The Little Drummer Girl 

plus a birthday present for my son which I'm not going to reveal here because sometimes he reads this blog

And I picked up my new compost bin and assembled it, and I did a lot of work in the flowerbeds, and I made an apple pie and chicken-and-rice soup with fresh salsa, and then Tom went out to see a band and I stayed home happily on the couch.

Today is housework day, though we're also planning to go out for lunch and take a walk beside the water. The weather is dry and weirdly warm. I'm struggling to keep the garden alive in this drought, and the backyard is downright crispy. The light is autumnal, yet I'm back to wearing summer clothes.

Here's a bit from the Boland book, which I've just opened. I don't entirely buy into this reading, but I'm intrigued.

In an odd and poignant way these two lives, of a poet and a woman, have proved to be formidable historical editors of each other. In previous centuries, when a poet's life was an emblem for the grace and power of a society, a woman's life was often the object of his expression: in pastoral, sonnet, elegy. As the mute object of his eloquence her life could be at once addressed and silenced. By an ironic reversal, now that a woman's life is that emblem of grace and power, the democratization of our communities, of which her emergence is one aspect, makes a poet's life look suspect, can make it appear, to a wider society, elite and and irrelevant all at once. Therefore, for anyone who is drawn into either of these lives, the pressure is there to betray the other, to disown or simplify, to resolve an inherent tension by making a false design from the ethical capabilities of one life or the visionary possibilities of the other.