Poetry Thursday: Jumping on the Bandwagon late, as usual

This week, at Poetry Thursday the prompt was to "get lost in the poetry section" of a bookshop or library. Being a total newcomer to poetry I had never even looked in the poetry section of a bookshop before. I didn't even know where to find it.

Thursday night, I had an hour to kill between a coffee appointment and dinner at a friend's house. I was in the city, so I went to visit Borders. I quickly found the small poetry section, between "black fiction" and "drama". It was interesting to be confronted by shelves of books about whose relative merit I had no idea. I don't know what makes poetry "good" or even what it is, really.

I picked up a few books at random, and read through some writing. I noticed that I was drawn to the smaller books. A little brown spine, with "The Learning Curve" in white letters caught my eye. I liked the picture on the front, and I opened to one of the first poems "The PE Teacher on the Day Before School Begins". Then I read another, and another. I walked out of Borders $22 poorer. That was the first book of poetry I had ever bought: John Foulcher's "The Learning Curve".

One of my favourite poems from this book is "The Art Teacher".