Marmalade  of oranges  of blood
Jam made from tomatoes ,such good food
Braised  lambs’ tongues with onions and God

Strip the bones of all the pilgrims good
Make your bed and lie about on wood
Marmalade  of oranges  like blood

Martyr the old priest   and stew  the dude
Let the menstrual flow  be shown  to goad
Braised  lambs’ tongues with onions, he said?

Cannibals, we never understood
Yet we have warred sans pity when well fed
Oh,marmalade  ,oh oranges  of blood

In the trenches ,men died in the mud
Others drowned in grief as if they should
Braised  lambs’ tongues with onions,M’ lud?

Sheep may gaze,Hiroshima, the dead
Did you take brief notes of  all you read?
Marmalade  of oranges  and blood
The tongues of Babel made the world go mad

I  decided to make my manuscript in a darker bolder script and then republish it on kindle direct publishing.I added two poems at the front to make it less stark
Now it appears it need to be at least £26 for them as the printing is £16.I  am confused about  it especially as I will only get 10 pence instead of 27 pence
Does it seem they are doing it for their own profit? One would expect that but not to this extreme.So next week I think I will just delete it altogether.
Who  would pay more than £15 for  it.It is large and that is my mistake.I could have made 50 little books..

Still this blog is more important to me.I  couldn’t go out so I decided to learn how to do it but it’s not much use to authors who need to make money
10 pence  is worse than £0

“”My childhood – which I spent largely in London except during the Blitz – was full of soldiers, American, English, every other nationality. With National Service, we were all non-soldiers, we were just in for a couple of years. We weren’t going to kill people – we would have been terrified of killing people! – and the people in the regular army, our sergeants, did tend to despise us, and you could see why. So, yes, isn’t it interesting how many soldiers there are in my early poetry and how often I am the soldier and I’m not really sure what I’m doing? Not especially romanticised except when I think of Achilles or somebody. So it was a very ambiguous role, but it was a role that apparently I tended to see myself in, especially in that first book. And I don’t think it was that conscious or deliberate. I had to think about it afterwards to find out what could have been in my mind.”

He then spent six months in Paris, on a low-paying sinecure arranged by his father, before going up to Cambridge at 21. One of his friends there was Karl Miller. “Karl was my best friend for a while; I knew him very well: we were both rather difficult people, but he was very kind to me and he always had a very good mind. I’d show him my poems when I wrote them and he’d tack them up over his desk, which was very flattering.”

Miller recalls that Gunn “was a good student and critic, who enjoyed the degree. Leavis was sovereign at the time. Gunn was sympathetic to Leavis but not a Leavisite. We were both involved in the same discussions and clubs and so on. I wrote a lengthy profile of him for the student newspaper Varsity.” He adds, “He knew how to keep the ball in the air in terms of literary attention.”

At Cambridge, Gunn had begun publishing his poems, and wrote the bulk of his first collection, Fighting Terms (1954) in his last two years there. They are startlingly assured pieces, formally controlled, metaphysical, with a subtext that only seems obviously homoerotic in retrospect.”

 

 

Well,I’ve had a great time checking my kindle books.Imaginary Life has coloured images on my laptop but black and white on the kindle reader.I am removing the paperback option for Gravity and Loss.I know my eyes are a bit feeble but the print is too faint.Maybe I can eventually change that but even for 300 poems I doubt many people will pay £16.99 for a book by an unknown poet
Meantime I’ve spent hours trying to put a SIM card into a phone and eventually bought a cheaper phone in Argos which takes a nano card.Trying to put the micro-card into a Nokia Lumia was purgatory.The outer piece broke..I hate those three in one cards.But I had done it once before so….maybe it’s the antibiotics and UTI’s do affect the brain… poison in the blood [ a good story title?]
So I am going outside and looking at a tree.I have had to barricade myself in to stop those 5,6, or.7 dogs next door from coming in.But I can still eat outside.I didn’t mind the dogs so much…. it’s the owners who distress me.
How can an ordinary family cope with so many dogs?