You don't want too much poetry in novels in my opinion. You can't digest 600 pages of it. Dickens is sparing of the kind of thing he kicks off with in Bleak House. But in short stories...
Shena Mackay writes novels but I can't warm to them. But short stories. Try 'Dreams of Dead Women's Handbags'. What a title! This is the opening of 'Electric Blue Damsels'. The whole book is a masterpiece. I met her once. Very straightforward and unpoetic, thank God.
You see them in the Underground with their schoolbooks and across the counters of shops and waiting of tables in restaurants, slinging burgers and pushing brooms, girls and boys in whom an exotic cocktail of genes has been shaken into a startling and ephemeral beauty: birds of paradise nesting in garbage, or captive tropical fish shimmering in the gloomy backrooms of dank petshops.
And later in the same story:
His brain turned to coral: emperor and clown, harlequins, rainbows, unicorns, angels and devils, queens, jewels, damsels, glowlights, butterflies, cardinals, swordfish, surgeons, anemones, starfish, sea-horses, dancing shrimps, golden rams and silver sharks, flying foxes, albino tigers, lyretails, parrots and corals; freshwater and marine tropicals from the Indian Ocean and the Pacific swam through its branches. He took out a stack of library books.
She's terrific with lists. Why she is not a Dame of the British Empire or whatever it is these days (usually awarded to sportswomen) I cannot imagine.
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