Between book club books, I generally grab something off the shelves to tide me over while waiting for the new one to arrive – a PJ O’ Rourke or an old Granta…something I can read a bit or two of, then put aside. For no particular reason, I found myself this month grabbing an old collection of Alice Munro short stories. Inside, I found a scrap of lined paper serving as a bookmark; a relic of long ago, on which I found, in my own handwriting:

“So, gently, and subtly, he showed how to write poetry that does the job that good poetry should do: to describe an ordinary moment in such a way that moral worlds lie exposed.”

No idea who said it, or of whom, and I’ve no idea when or where I took it down, but it pleased me.