Just Finished Reading: Woman Much Missed by Thomas Hardy [56pp] 

...and Poetry..... AGAIN. I guess that its easier to have short booklets of poems than just about anything else plus not every author produced short stories to fit in this format. To be honest I knew (indeed KNOW) so little about Hardy that I wasn't previously even aware that he wrote poetry! But here we are...  

An impressive 35 poems are crammed into less than 60 pages which is some going. Mostly, as you might imagine from the title, revolve around the loss of his first wife Emma Gifford, whom he married on 17 September 1874. When Emma died in 1912 Hardy travelled to Cornwall to re-visit places associated with their courtship and the area repeatedly comes up in his poems of that period including the mythical location of Lyonnesse which was interesting to research further. 

Not being a poetry fan, nor to be honest particularly romantic, most of the contents fell rather flat for me. A few were quite affecting (or maybe effective) in getting across a mixture of loss and fond reminiscence but generally I can't say that I enjoyed them much. In fact I did find myself skimming the last quarter of the booklet. Maybe I'll like his novels better if I ever get around to reading them?