Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Dance the Black-Eyed Girl

Dance the Black-eyed Girl

Last week I got Sherry Chandler's poetry book, Dance the Black-Eyed Girl. I'd been enjoying her poems for free on the Internet for some time, and ordered it with a trace of guilt for freeloading. It's a beautiful book, and a pleasure to look at. The poems are wonderful, and you can have a virtual sip of Sherry from the links below.

The thing that startled me was how much more I got out of her poems on the page. I have some trouble reading text on the computer screen--I insert words that aren't there, transpose words and letters, and read backwards. I'm left-handed, and my perception is a bit "non-standard." When I was about 12, I read about Leonardo da Vinci's journals of mirror writing , and decided I would do that too. I kept my personal journal in mirror writing until college, and gave it up because I was having trouble remembering how to read and write the "normal way."

My reading anomaly on the backlit screen is most troublesome with poetry, where words matter most. Clearly, I need to read poetry as "hard copy."

1 comment:

Sherry said...

Rebecca! Thank you!

And, though I do have a lot of poems out on the web, I agree that poetry is better on the printed page.

Not, of course, trying to sell books ;).