E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Eyewear is getting some shut eye for a fortnight, in order to take a much needed post-Olympic break.  See you end of August.  I wish you grass.  I wish you sun.  I wish you sand.  I wish you a hammock, and a cool breeze.  I wish you some poetry books, or a charity shop thriller, or both.  Maybe a G&T, or some lemonade.  In the meantime, feel free to enjoy our unrivalled back catalogue of posts stretching back to 2005.  Countless poems, reviews, and opinion pieces.  I wish you love and health.

Summer has arrived with today's solstice!  And, oddly, the sun is actually shining, the pale roses are wild and full on the trellis, and Wimbledon is soon to begin.  All seems well.  There is even a great new summer pop song, from Hot Chip , called 'Motion Sickness', which is a wonderful mix of Motown and OMD .  Eyewear wishes you all a great summer.

slow  The dog days of summer are coming.  Eyewear is taking a break, and will be back to regular duties whenever he sees fit.  In the meantime, don't expect many updates, but there may be a trickle, now and then.  Lazy ways, lazy days.  Have yourself a good 'ol time!

Is there anything better than sun?  Not the sun, mind, but sun, singular.  Sun.  As in getting, taking, catching.  Today was sunny in London.  Fully and completely sunny.  22 Celsius.  That is almost miraculous - a barbecue Spring moment of extreme grace.  I sat out in both the back and front of my flat, following sun.  I read some Hazlitt , on Familiar Style, the new Adrienne Rich , some Jessie L. Weston (she has a marvellous style!), and ended with some April poems from David Lehman 's delightful The Evening Sun .  I also read some newspapers, and other books, one on rhetoric, but leave that for another day.  I sometimes wore my UEA ballcap - but mostly I am red-faced for the seeking of the very highest good: sun.

Why is it that when newspapers like The Guardian ask famous writers to list their recommended summer books list, they tend to end up listing nada in the way of poetry, or barely any, anyway?  It tends to confirm my creeping dread, my suspicion, that poetry, like nothing, happens everywhere, to paraphrase.  Anyway, here are a few of the books, poetry or otherwise, battered and dogeared or brand spanking new, I hope to skim through this August, with suncream on (Factor 50): Flicker , by Theodore Roszak (thriller about film); Ludbrooke & Others (latest poetry collection) by  Alan Brownjohn ; Twenty-one Locks (debut novel by Guardian music journalist Laura Barton ); The Idea of a Christian Society by TS Eliot ; The Demon's Covenant by Sarah Rees Brennan ; A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood ; New Light for the Old Dark (poetry) by Sam Willetts ; Expressway (GG finalist) by poet Sina Queyras ; Patient Frame by Canadian novelist and poet Steven Heig...

As I was reading The Guardian today, I was struck by a strange sense of horror and nostalgia, as two key figures from my childhood - offbeat though they were - had died and had obituaries on opposite pages. So - sad news: Bob Bogle and Hans Holzer have died. Bogle was lead guitarist with The Ventures - that Sixties instrumental surf band whose delightful cool twangy Walk, Don't Run was my favourite song and album for a long time when I was a kid; in Japan, they were, literally, bigger than The Beatles . Holzer is the eerier guy. He is of course the famous ghost hunter, a writer on the In Search Of... series from the Seventies that used to scare the hell out of me and my brother, and part of that whole ESP-reincarnation-haunting vibe that - along with fear of nuclear war - really shaped the zeitgeist of the period. I can still see those books of his at my house in St. Lambert, newly-bought from a church book sale, dog-eared and full of weird yarns. That was over 30 years a...