April is the cruellest month and this is the cruellest poem, and I mean that with love and a great deal of confusion.

Right, I am going to be honest about this, because there is enough dishonesty about this poem already.

I read it four times in a fortnight and I understood perhaps a third of it. Possibly less. Once cold, once with the notes, once with a library book about the notes, and once out loud in the shed, which was easily the best of the four, because you stop trying to solve it and start hearing it instead. That is when the hair goes up on your arms. The typist and the young man carbuncular. The chess game. Those bones. Hurry up please its time.

The notes at the back are, I am sorry, a bit of a swizz. He has put in a shopping list of other people's books and then told you that you need all of them, and I do not think that is a fair way to treat a reader; it is a locked door with the key described but not provided.

But there is something in it that got past my defences. That last movement, the thunder, the dry rock, shantih shantih shantih. I do not know what it means. I have felt it, though, which may be the same thing or may be nothing at all.

Seven. I will be coming back to it. I have a feeling it will still be here.