Sarah Holland-Batt

I was, like, so excited to get to spend this $100.

And I sat down on a bench in this bookshop to kind of sift through the books that I'd picked, which was obviously more than $100 worth, and pick which ones.

And beside me on the bench was a book that someone had left, had decided not to buy, and that book was The Wild Iris by the poet Louise Glick.

And it had an intriguing kind of cover.

It had a little rosette on it that said it had won the Pulitzer Prize.

And I picked that up and I just loved it.

And so I sort of stuffed that in my pile.

And Louise Glick has ended up being an incredibly important poet to me in my life, in my writing life.

So it was a sort of serendipitous kind of discovery of her that I've been returning to her work in the last few months, especially that book, this book called The Wild Iris, which is this wonderful kind of book

written in three different voices, in the voice of a gardener, in the voice of the plants in the garden, and in the voice of a kind of deity.

And it's just this extraordinary... It's a little bit T.S.

Eliot-ish, actually, but this sort of extraordinary, consolatory kind of book about the cycle of life.

So that one I've returned to.

And then she has another book about the death of her father called Ararat, which I've been rereading as well.

So there is something...

timeless about a good poem.

And you read these poems with different inflections at different times in your life.

I read these poems with a depth of understanding, especially the poems about the death of her father that I don't think I brought to them when I first read them.

But it is really wonderful to return to your favourite poets and find something.

You always find some other nuance or something new in them.