Making the sale...

I've recently joined the Poetry Book Society. I'd intended to for a while, but hesitated because of their special offer. They were offering a free book on joining: the selected poems of Carol Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage or Roger McGough. Of these, I've got the first, have most of the second in the original collections and have no great eagerness to read more of the third (there's a story there too, for another time). As a result, although I'd have happily joined earlier, even without an incentive, I delayed because I didn't like the sound of the freebie. I didn't want a freebie I didn't want, if you see what I mean.

Fortunately, I found out they had another offer: a copy of Christopher Logue's War Music. That sounded suitably intriguing and something I'd felt I ought to read for a while. Coupled with the fact that it was something I wouldn't ordinarily have bought for myself, I was convinced.

As an aside on a rather neat bit of marketing: War Music contains the first three of five parts of Logue's version of Homer's Iliad. I read it, loved it and have duly shelled out for the other two. Somehow I feel less of a patsy for noticing what was happening, even as I fell in with the marketing trap. War Music was, in a sense, a Trojan horse...

[For more about the Poetry Book Society, see here].