Samuel Tongue

Yeah, so we kind of got stuck on that bit.

Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.

And we didn't really kind of come to any lasting conclusions on that, but it kind of fit with the tone of,

Unexpectedness, that kind of that.

How can you tell that a marriage is failing or a relationship is collapsing or whether something worth doing is worth doing well, according to other people's judgments?

Maybe it's worth doing badly, but it's worth doing.

And so, as I say, we circled around that for quite some time.

The imagery that follows from there, though, looking over this Greek island, we assumed it was a Greek island because of some of the biography of Jack Gilbert.

He spent a lot of time in Europe, in France and in Greece.

And that kind of American poet in Europe register comes across quite regularly in his work.

And here it allows him to have those big images.

There's almost kind of antique images of hot stony field, sea light behind the character, behind her, and the huge sky on the other side of that.

So there's a kind of painterly aspect to it, a kind of exploration of the vista and that kind of not necessarily an inhabitant of it, but a visitor to it.

And you get another sense of that with this other kind of audience, the people who come back from Provence when it was Provence and said it was pretty, but the food was greasy.

Is that a kind of reverse judgment on these people, these tourists who came back from Provence when it was Provence and said it was pretty but the food was greasy?

They couldn't cope with the otherness of it or the actual reality of it?

So yeah, as a group, we kind of thought about these different ways in which perspective is interrogated and who gets to say what is happening and gets to cast judgment on it and cast aspersions of value on things.

Yeah, when we were thinking through, and we'll look at this in the second poem in a minute, but how Gilbert's poetic manages to

foreground and instill sentiment um it can it can it veers on the sentimental but within the flow of the poem and the images that kind of a part of that flow manages to have a narrative continuum so just as you feel that it might be

Some a bit heavy on the sentiment side.