Lobster tonight - thanks once again to Bob's Seafood on the harbour front at Folkestone.

A pleasure tempered, however, by witnessing - as in slow motion - a van reverse into the side of my car, parked in front of the Captain's Table cafe, as I sat enjoying my post M25 early morning coffee. A strange dream-like sensation as the two vehicles come into contact while you look on powerless to intervene.

While, as such, it has left only a dent a few inches away from the petrol tank cover the design of the Clio will probably entail replacing the entire right flank panel.

Tomorrow will be a day of phone calls.

& as if it had been waiting for me ... the Bloodaxe Denise Levertov Selected sitting on a shelf in the Reading Oxfam bookshop (£3:49). A quotation from Arthur Schnitzler on the fly leaf & a few biro markings against certain poems. Otherwise clean.

That'll do nicely.

While the others splashed about in the lake I made an Anthony Gormley rip-off.

I picked up the New Directions edition of Denise Levertov's 'The Poet In The World' when I was last over in the UK. It was one of several volumes inscribed 'David Holloway' in a modest careful hand. Given two of the others were by Zukofsky, I wonder whether this is the same David Holloway who figures in one or two lists of correspondence relating to the Charles Olson Society?

Whatever ... it's been a day of unrelieved rain here in post-Brexit Brussels. What better way to spend such a day than reading one after another of Levertov's essays? Sipping them might be a better phrase. For they are rich & subtle & deserve to be turned around in the mind.

I will admit to having seen DL as very much in the shadow of Robert Duncan - in fact, I realised today that I have not a single volume of her actual poems. (This will be remedied). However these essays are some of the most clearly articulated & perceptive writings upon the real nitty gritty stuff of poetic making that I have read.

It's been a very well spent day.

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Back from our trip down to Burgundy. 

Here's a section of a wall from Noyers.