Reading prevents your life ever narrowing down to the humdrum, the routine or the boring. It sets the mind ablaze. It agitates the hearts. It is a good friend, whether the wind blows good or ill. There is not a single day it does not yield knowledge of interest, insights of value, moments of surprise, shocks of recognition and even visions or splendour. It graces, supplements, enhances and reinforces living.
Any place is exotic to someone who lives a few thousand, or even a few hundred, miles away. When you travel half way round the earth you enter the commonplace world of the people who live there. And what poetry does is try to capture the exotic and the commonplace and make them the same. I like how the Estonian Jaan Kaplinski’s poem “A Postcard” puts it: