Sarah Holland-Batt

And I'm probably in that category.

But

I have found that when I've actually slowed down and turned to poetry, I have been able to sink into just the world of a poem.

I mean, poetry is so fantastic in that way that you can just pick it up and just absorb one poem and sit with it and then move away.

I've not been able, I've tried a couple of novels and I've just not been able to kind of sustain my attention over time and suspend my disbelief, I think, is the other part of it.

to really read fiction at the moment, but I have found myself turning to poetry, mostly old poetry, familiar poetry, poems that I know well.

And there's something quite consoling about returning to something that's really familiar.

That's where I've really turned to for solace.

I was in high school.

I did my high school in the United States, in Denver, in Colorado.

And I was very, very fortunate, extremely fortunate in my English teacher that I had there.

It was a strange kind of school in that rather than doing the usual kind of subjects that you would do where you just do English or something like that, it was more like a university kind of syllabus where there were semester-long courses.

There was one that really set me on fire on the wasteland.

So we read all of the texts that Elliot kind of draws on for the wasteland.

We read the wasteland.

reading Dante, reading the Upanishads and so forth.

And this was just this most mind-blowing experience for me at the age of, I don't know what, 15 or something, to see, A, the Wasteland is such a breathtakingly complex piece of poetry.

I'm so grateful that I was given it at high school.

I think often high school poetry, you know, the high school poetry syllabus is simple with this idea that the more approachable poetry is, the more interesting it is.

I actually find the opposite.