Saturday, 15 February 2020

My Sour-Sweet Days by Mark Oakley



I used this collection as daily readings between Christmas Day and Candlemas, although I know that it is currently being pushed as a Lent book (the choice of 40 George Herbert poems will have had that use in mind).

For each poem Mark Oakley offers a couple of pages of reflection, much of this is to assist unlocking the changes in language – many terms Herbert uses have either changed meaning or simply fallen out of use in the intervening centuries – or a few biographical notes to contextualise the situations in which Herbert was writing. This allows Herbert’s poems to be the focus, and is to Oakley’s credit.

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