Green of Canterbury

I am green with envy. In fact I am so green with envy that it’s a wonder the Other Half hasn’t planted me in the new bits of garden we have clawed back by removing the two-foot-thick hedge between us and next door. (This has added something like 15% to the width of the garden) She has been having great fun moving things (all the shrubs are in the wrong place, now, stranded in mid-bed) and buying things with garden tokens carefully saved since Christmas.
But it’s not the garden I’m green with envy over, it’s a book. One of those books you wish you’d written yourself and are sick with envy that somebody else wrote instead.

I spent four years (sitting in an English classroom (not continuously, obviously, they did let me out to eat and go to the odd other lesson) looking at a quote from Coleridge about the difference between prose and poetry:

Prose – words in their best order
Poetry – the best words in the best order

Well, the author of the book I’m currently reading is both poet and novelist and it shows. His prose is most definitely the best words in the best order – you just wouldn’t want to change a single one.

What’s the book? I’m not telling you yet. I’m going to wait til I’ve finished it and do a proper paean of praise review then. But reading has slowed to bedtime only at the moment as I try and keep my mind on the WIP – no breakfast reading, no lunchtime reading as I forge on, so this lovely book is being read an hour at a time, which means about forty pages as I keep going back and re-reading beautiful paragraphs, or just a perfectly-turned sentence.

I’m halfway through, so expect a review a the weekend.

By the way, what do people think about the poetry/prose distinction made by S T Coleridge?