BOOK BARN

#274: ON THE HAIKU: MATSUO BASHO, R.H. BLYTH, KOBAYASHI ISSA AND RICHARD WRIGHT.  My discovery, made recently reading Judi Dench’s book on Shakespeare, that the “golden lads” and “chimney sweeps” in his elegy “Fear no more” (from Pericles ) were Warwickshire slang for dandelions, in bloom and in seeding, was a lovely reminder that the great poems can be inexhaustible wells, to be read for new discoveries as well as repeated pleasure.  Undoubtedly the most famous of all the gr

#273: DUST.  In 1995, Philip Pullman published Northern Lights , the book known in America as The Golden Compass , the first volume in his now-acclaimed trilogy, His Dark   Materials .  The American title was a bloop: the original title for the trilogy was to be The Golden Compasses , a phrase from Paradise Lost , a reference in the poem to God’s creating a plotted, circular limit to the universe—a theme central to Pullman’s story.  Milton is all over Pullman’s books (Blake t

#272.  MORE ON SHAKESPEARE.  Shakespeare is a possession, in almost any sense you want to give the word.  For Brits, he is a national possession: a secondhand bookshop in Stratford I once visited had a large corner display of Shakespeare and a small sign that said proudly: “Local author.”  For theatre people especially, booksellers, professors of literature, he is a professional, a vocational possession.  Stephen Greenblatt has written of “the special delight that Shakespeare