The World as a Room

2012-01-11T06:00:00.004+11:00

Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that dreaming and wakefulness are the pages of a single book, and that to read them in order is to live, and to leaf through them at random, to dream. Paintings within paintings and books that branch into other books help us sense this oneness.

-- Colm Tóibín (from Flann O'Brien's Lies)

A room of one's own

2012-01-08T20:30:00.003+11:00

I am writing this post on my last day at the Abbotsford Convent. For the past month I have been fortunate enough to be able to use one of the writing studios here while a fellow writer was visiting family in Russia.

It's been an interesting experience to work in a place so steeped in history, and also to witness how successful the Abbotsford Convent Foundation (and the Abbotsford Convent Campaign) has been in creating a thriving community space that is forever busy with events and other happenings in the short space of time since it took over the property. It's a hive of creativity in all arts disciplines, as well as a centre for well being and culinary experiences. Music, particularly tunes coming from The House of Refreshment, have been an experience. I'm not sure if I'll ever view George Jones the same way again.

It's been a wonderfully enriching month. To have had a designated room where nothing needs to be moved aside or packed away each night has allowed me to gain the focus I so needed for all those projects swimming inside my mind. Now I have a clearer sense of what I need to do and how I need to do it.

Also, having access to the writer's studio at the end of one year and the beginning of another has been very helpful -- or at least it feels helpful and important. Hopefully all this means that the work will now follow at a steady pace. Slow and steady ... and thoughtful. There's no point rushing ahead and making an arse of it all.

2012-01-05T06:00:00.003+11:00

The older I get
the more I envy
the miracle: a mind on fire,
a heart boiling, an equator and arctic entwined.

-- Angus Peter Campbell (from Saint Paul)

Image: How am I not myself? (detail) by Kate Pugsley

A poem for the New Year

2012-01-01T11:55:00.001+11:00

Two years ago I spent a white Christmas in Ireland, and around midday on a crisp, sun-filled New Year’s Day I went for a long walk to essentially say 'goodbye' to the area in Corca Dhuibhne where we’d been staying. When I came back to the house I found a beautiful robin redbreast inside the living room, sitting on the sofa as comfortably as any guest might, because a trinity of windows had been left wide open to air the place after a week of ice, sleet and floods.

The following memory-poem is about how I had tried my best to move the robin out of the house for his own safety. There was a moment there when he stopped struggling in my hands and understood that I was trying to help him. I am grateful for him for that. He was beautiful and it was an absolute honour to meet him. The poem 'takes off' just before he is let loose into the world again...

Robin

Small apparition,
a perfect shape of fire.

Once I held your warmth
in both hands.

I murmured safe passage,
ripe crimson words

then swift grace followed.
Wonder soared inside the New Year.

-- Libby Hart

To the parting year

2011-12-31T11:55:00.016+11:00

So you are leaving everything
the way it is
taking only your day with you

already you are out of reach
you do not know us or hear us
you scarcely remember us
already we cannot imagine
where you are

what we remember of love is starlight

-- WS Merwin, To the Parting Year

Image: I like the way you say my name by Alicia Bock

Poetry

2011-12-29T15:57:00.003+11:00

Writer and comic artist, Adam Ford, recently asked me why I wrote poetry. Yesterday he included my answer on his website (also see below for those who might be interested).

"I often say that I didn’t choose poetry, it chose me. I’m not really sure why it decided to tap me on the shoulder. There have been moments in my life when I really wish I knew the answer to that question, but each time I ask it I come up empty-handed.

I came to writing poetry later than most poets I know. Yes, I wrote the obligatory angst-ridden poems in my teens yet I didn’t take up writing poems again until I was in my mid-twenties and I did not take it as seriously as I do now until I was in my early to mid-thirties.

All I know about poetry is that it hovered around me like a longing before I began writing it. I couldn’t label it then but I know it was just there in the shadows waiting until I was ready. At the time I was an avid reader of poetry (and still am of course, any writer is an avid reader). But I suppose it was my own insecurities that blocked me from allowing myself to say: Yes, I could do that too.

In so many ways poetry is an apprenticeship that perhaps you never graduate from. I always love reading and re-reading that story by Annie Dillard about French workers. When an apprentice gets hurt or is exhausted, the experienced workers say to him or her: It is the trade entering your body. Poetry enters the body everyday. A non-poet will call this hooey, but every poet will know what I mean. It enters you and you enter it. There is mystery and joy and heartbreak and exhaustion. Sometimes all at the same time.

I write poetry because I don’t have a choice. I write poetry because it is sanctuary. I write poetry because it gives me a voice. I write poetry because it allows me to unravel a situation, an event or a subject and make sense of it. Poetry is mystical and mysterious, and I honour it as best as I can."

2011-12-25T06:00:00.005+11:00

Best wishes for the silly season. Nollaig Shona Daoibh.

Of memorials and mutability

2011-12-23T19:23:00.000+11:00

I have been trudging through a fair amount of books lately. Mostly to do with current writing projects and research, but also for pleasure. Simone Weil. Edward Said. Jorge Luis Borges. Louise Erdrich. Milan Kundera. Angus Peter Campbell. All memorable (of course) in their own way, but I have been compelled to write here about Alice Oswald's Memorial because it has stirred up so many things for me.

This post is not a review as such, but rather a way of articulating a few of the various points rising and falling in my mind while I mull over the work.

Oswald's Memorial is a retelling of Homer's Iliad. The book-length poem concentrates on the two hundred plus fallen soldiers of the Trojan War, hence the fitting title of the book. There has been much made of Oswald's sixth collection, not only through the recent controversy over the TS Eliot Prize, but critics have described this work as remarkable and majestic.

One thing that came to mind so fully for me as I read Memorial is the personal reminder of how I have known for some years now that I had misinterpreted Oswald's aesthetics. In her early career I read her work with much interest and translated various nuances as an indication of a fellow traveller. I have known for some time that this is not the case at all and perhaps such a thing is a very good example of what Michael Hofmann, in his introduction to a selection of Robert Lowell poems, defines in Rilkean fashion as the problem faced with reading poetry: 'One reads novels, stories, plays -- but one reads a poet.'

But do we really? Honestly? Because I spent the bulk of my time reading Memorial wishing for the life of me that Oswald would remove herself from the book. I could go on here about ego, of creative ego, of how Oswald is steadfastly becoming a colossal figure in British poetry, and of how there is an increasing inclination by critics to treat her with reverence. But I won't. There is no room for such things. What I will say, however, is that I found Memorial too full of gimmicks. So much so that it left me heartsore.

My biggest concern for the work rests in Oswald and her increasing need to be clever. Many times this cleverness dilutes what could have been a brilliant work. I truly admire how she chose to include all of the fallen men's names at the beginning of the book. I feel this thoughtfulness is needed in the overall poem. Although on the surface a reader could interpret thoughtfulness and heartfelt lament through the work, I grew more and more unconvinced that this was Oswald's primary objective in reworking Homer. What her objective is remains unclear to me.

Oswald's use of repeating stanzas in Greek chorus fashion also dilutes and numbs the work. Such a mechanism begins on the second page and I was initially excited to see this and glad to read a respectful representation of lamentation, but the work falls flat very quickly because of it. This modern interpretation of The Iliad should also have a modern outlook towards keening. I was continually reminded when reading Memorial of Vona Groarke's excellent retelling of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill's, Lament for Art O'Leary. Groarke's is a wonderful example of how something so iconic and fully laden with literary baggage can be written anew, and shiningly new to boot. The heart and the mind, and the poet's letting go of their own ego, is needed for such things.

Memorial has an array of excellent lines, but they are scattered through the book like the last of autumn leaves in midwinter. I am being harsh, of course. I know that. But I am concerned that you need momentum with a work such as this and there are too many times that this poetic warrior-world gets lost in flab. But we do get the telling Oswald descriptors, such as 'wind-dictionary', 'ungreen ungrowing ground' and 'rain-wind', as well as such wonders as 'death kicked him and he kicked it back'. I do like that line very much.

Perhaps what is clear here is that I read poetry (not poets!) with the heart and the head, and when a lament is more head than heart I get a little twitchy. Scholarly wise, Memorial is a fine work but I needed much more from it. Thankfully I was delving into Jo Shapcott's, Of Mutability alongside Memorial and it provided the relief I needed to attain heart-mind equilibrium. The title poem is so breathtaking that every time I read it I have to put the book down for a while. And yes, most of the poems that make up Of Mutability are highly personal, so of course a reader needs to think about the poet as well as the poems themselves. But the balance will always been on poem, not poet for me.

One of my favourite poems in this collection is, 'I Go Inside the Tree'. It's a magical imagining whereby a reader can work their way through an ash tree until they hit that glorious last line. The following link allows you to hear the poet read it: 'I Go Inside the Tree' (www.guardian.co.uk/books/video/2011/dec/15/jo-shapcott-poem-inside-tree-video). Enjoy!

2011-11-27T12:23:00.003+11:00

2011-11-20T15:58:00.000+11:00

2011-11-13T15:55:00.000+11:00

A room is, after all, a place where you hide from the wolves. That’s all any room is.

-- Jean Rhys

2011-11-06T16:26:00.004+11:00

I'll bet it felt good
in the hand -- the o

of the ocean, and
the and and the and

of the land.

-- Todd Boss (from The World Is in Pencil)

Image: SeascapeW3 by Abigail Edwards

Pushcart Prize XXXVI

2011-11-05T11:28:00.001+11:00

Yesterday I was told that my poem, North Wind has been nominated for the 2012 Pushcart Prize. Since being told this news I have been mulling over the process of a poem and how it evolves. Particularly for this very personal poem it feels as if it has travelled to the moon and back (and perhaps I have travelled with it as companion).

North Wind concentrates on one of my visits to Sligo when I was staying with a dear friend. It also concentrates on a time when I was preparing to leave Ireland and make the long journey back to Australia after my residency at Annaghmakerrig. On my last night in Sligo (and in fact Ireland) I listened to my friend read at a Poetry Ireland event in town with two other poets then we all made the journey back to Maugherow to have a late dinner of Indian takeaway as the north wind pressed against the living room windows.

Its presence was alive and strong, and as much of a dinner guest as I was. It had been trying to arrive all day as we drove around the coast from place to place to make sure I got a good view of my beloved Atlantic. (Thank you, Mary) And in retrospect I came to see its arrival as a harbinger of some sort. Something you would find in a fairytale, perhaps. Its symbolism was potent for my active imagination. What did it all mean? Perhaps not what I thought at the time, but I am still adamant of the poem's last lines:

                  And in my mind’s eye
                  I travelled with velocity and turbulence.

                  I travelled with the north wind
                  because it’s where I gather strength.
                  It’s where I exist in full fathom,

                  even when I’m shaken and shaking.

                  (from North Wind)

Five Poetry Journal (and Samhain)

2011-10-31T14:10:00.000+11:00

Since May I have been editing a small word-of-mouth online magazine called Five Poetry Journal. Issue 4 was released today (see: http://fivepoetryjournal.tumblr.com).

The aim of Five Poetry Journal is to showcase five poets five times a year. I wanted the journal to remain free of ‘bells and whistles’ so that the poems could speak for themselves. Another objective was to include poetry from poets of diverse backgrounds and experience. Ideally this meant sharing poetry from both hemispheres and in the first four issues work from Australia, Ireland, England, Scotland and the US have been included. I aim to cover more ground as each issue unfolds.

For those interested in submitting work for consideration please check the Submission Guidelines at http://fivepoetryjournal.tumblr.com/guidelines.

Issue 4 includes the work of Michael H Brownstein (USA), Mick Corrigan (Ireland and Crete), Adam Crothers (Northern Ireland and England), Judith R Robinson (USA) and Jessica Raschke (Australia), and is loosely framed around the notion of Oíche Samhna and Día de los Muertos, of commemoration and keeping an open dialogue with (and about) the mysteries.

Some people enjoy this time of year and have a lot of fun with Halloween while others consider it a bit of a con. Needless to say we live with the knowledge of the past and present every day of our lives. Because of this I will leave you with a quote from one of Scotland's finest poets:

          A guest is as good as a ghost at this time,
          at the hinge of the year when the gap
          between the shades and the shadowed is just
          slow air.

          -- Robin Robertson (from Samhain)

2011-10-26T06:42:00.000+11:00

I laid myself down and slept on the map of Europe,
It creaked and pulled all night and when I rose
In a wide hall to the light of a thundery afternoon
The dreams had bent my body and fused my bones
And a note buzzed over and again and tuned for the night.

-- Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (from Curtain)

Image: Madonna and Child (detail) by Bernardino Luini

2011-10-24T06:00:00.018+11:00

There are no forensic tests for poetry, in the sense that there are for musicians. It's obvious that if I can't pass Grade Five there's no point in booking the Wigmore Hall. But who can prescribe the skills I must achieve before I publish a poem? Who is to devise the exercises, the examinations? No doubt it is depressing enough to be dedicated to an art such as music or dance, which puts you through a long, rigorous training and then at a certain point may say: Sorry, this is as far as you get -- this is your level. But at least within a certain broad band of knowing, you know where you are. A poet like Auden, on the other hand -- a poet so abundantly stocked with ideas -- claimed never to finish a poem without the dreadful sense that he would never write again. My own experience is quite the opposite: when I am lucky enough to complete a poem, I imagine that I shall now be able to repeat the trick two or three times over. It is only later, as the wake of the excited passion recedes, that I realise I'm in for another long wait.

-- James Fenton (from Mistakes people make about poetry)

Best wishes for the weekend ahead...

2011-10-21T06:00:00.003+11:00

My God, my God, I am exhausted,
I am exhausted.

No wonder,
no wonder,
sang the bird.

-- Catriona Montgomery (from Seeking)

2011-10-18T06:00:00.004+11:00

2011-10-17T06:00:00.003+11:00

2011-10-13T06:00:00.002+11:00

They know so much more now about
the heart we are told but the world
still seems to come one at a time
one day one year one season

-- WS Merwin (from To This May)

Image: Heart poster by Ork Posters

2011-10-12T06:00:00.003+11:00

Only humans believe
there is a word for goodbye
we have one in every language

-- WS Merwin (from Going)

2011-10-11T06:00:00.002+11:00

2011-10-10T06:00:00.001+11:00

‘I like Simone Weil’s idea that writing is actually the translation of a text we already carry within us.’

–– Anna Kamieńska

Image: Lucy waits for Spring by Amanda Blake

Thirty Australian Poets

2011-10-09T10:23:00.000+11:00

Felicity Plunkett’s Thirty Australian Poets is now available at all good bookstores. This anthology includes a selection of poets born in 1968 and beyond – me being one of them. It’s a lovely thing to have Lisa Gorton to the left of me and Sarah Holland-Batt to the right. I am in very good company with Bronwyn Lea, Samuel Wagan Watson and Judith Bishop (to name but a few) among these pages. For more details please see www.readings.com.au/product/9780702239144/felicity-plunkett-ed-thirty-australian-poets.

Time and space

2011-09-05T22:24:00.006+10:00

Two months have passed since I last posted on The World as a Room. This hiatus was intentional but the length was indeterminate. I felt that I needed a certain amount of space in order to stand back and take stock of various things in my life. In many ways I am still doing this but it feels right to resume this unassuming blog, which I happen to describe as an 'electronic notebook'.

During the last two months I have been reading a lot and exploring ideas/projects that were on the back burner for a time. It's very early days but I feel like some of these threads are coming together in a patient, let-be fashion. And I feel comfortable with this 'no rush' affair because I know that the mind and the heart require time and space to work together on all of this. What will be will be. Perhaps for the very first time in my life I am practicing this philosophy as best as I can. Only time will tell.

So, I've had an opportunity to breathe and to experience wonderful things over these past weeks. I went to see The Tree of Life in July after waiting years for it to arrive on screen. I've long admired Terrence Malick and his vision, and although The Tree of Life is not a perfect film I walked away with its remnance still on my skin. Or perhaps it was under my skin. I thought about the film for days and enjoyed the probing and the second-guessing. I do love how Malick's narratives rely on voice over. I see him very much as a kindred spirit. We may approach our work (and life) very differently, but somewhere in the somehow we belong to the same tribe of people who are perhaps a little too transcendental for most people's liking. But I do love this clan very much and am thankful to belong to it.

Last weekend I went to see Circle Mirror Transformation by Annie Baker (Melbourne Theatre Company) and was overjoyed by it. And I was also thrilled to recognise a modern day Chekhov in our midst. What a wonder it is to watch a soft, gentle and sweet play unfolding. I enjoyed laughing all the way through it, but be warned this play is bittersweet (read: pure magic for my Chekhovian soul). I am looking forward to seeing Baker's other, more recent play, The Aliens very soon.

In terms of the printed page I began with Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (translated by ASL Farquharson). All I will say on the matter is this: 'With your whole will surrender yourself to Clotho to spin your fate into whatever web of things she will' (Book IV, Part 34). Okay, Marcus I will surrender.

These past weeks I have been reacquainting myself also with Russia's most beautiful (and challenging) poets. Osip Mandelstam, Joseph Brodsky, Anna Akhmatova, Maria Tsvetayeva, Boris Pasternak and so on. Rereading their work has been a reawakening. So... all good things.

In addition I've had the privilege to read John Burnside's brand new collection, Black Cat Bone (Jonathan Cape) and I am still making my way through an anthology of Scottish islands poetry, These Islands, We Sing (edited by Kevin MacNeil), which is also brand new (Polygon). Both books are wondrous in themselves and I am thankful for such experiences. What can I say, I'm a huge admirer of Burnside. I love his vision very much. For those uninitiated it is at times a quietly contemplative, otherworldly, mystical and heartfelt vision. Something that is truly original and masterly in its giant intelligence (and eloquence).

I've decided that John Burnside must write most of his poetry in winter because so much of it is contained in snow or near snow. The naked tree or snow-pure field are regular symbols in his work. Burnside's descriptions are marvellous. Here is just some examples: 'plucking at shadows', 'the rainwashed bones', 'a spill of lights' (The Fair Chase) and 'a huddle of wool' (Hearsay). For his poem, Hyena he describes the animal as, 'a giggle in the bushes, / then a shudder'. Just brilliant.

The standout poems of the collection are The Fair Chase, Neoclassical and Pieter Brueghel: Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap, 1565.

From The Fair Chase:

One year, the reservoir froze.
I walked out to the centre of the ice
and gazed down through a maze of gills and weed

to where a god I'd read about in books
-- sweeter than pine, but stone-hard in his tomb --
lay waiting for a gaze to curse with knowledge.

And from Neoclassical:

...and this is the grief
our stories prepared us for,
a ghost in the undergrowth,
hungry for nectar and blood,
and something we ought to have known,
without being told,
slinking towards us
out of the afternoon,
tender and wild
and blind to our fondest desires.

Equally impressive are the island poets of Scotland. I am fond of Edwin Muir, George Mackay Brown, Iain Crichton Smith and Somhairle MacGill-Eain (Sorley MacLean). In regards to the latter it's a very fine thing for the anthology to include his Scottish Gaelic poems with English translations. Who better than MacGill-Eain to talk of the 'island of my heart and wound' (eilean mo chridhe is mo leòin). These Islands, We Sing is rich in Scots and Scottish Gaelic, which is a gift in itself. I'm enjoying my slow ramble through this rich and attractive anthology (I don't know what it is about Polygon, they always produce books that feel lovely to hold and flick through. An eBook could never come close to such grace).

I'll leave you with excerpts of the poem, Peat Cutting from George Mackay Brown:

...And we tore dark squares, thick pages
From the Book of Fire
And we spread them wet on the heather

...And the lord of the bog, the kestrel
Paced round the sun
And at noon we leaned on our tuskars
-- The cold unburied jar
Touched, like a girl, a circle of burning mouths
And the boy found a wild bees' comb
And his mouth was a sudden brightness
And the kestrel fell
And a lark flashed a needle across the west
And we spread a thousand peats
Between one summer star
And the black chaos of fire at the earth's centre.

Taking the journey

2011-07-05T23:42:00.004+10:00

I think every book is a journey the author/poet takes. It starts at that most embryonic stage where a few words begin to form and continues on until these and many other words are polished, printed and then bound so it officially becomes “a book”. Interwoven in all of this are the many footsteps, forward marches, U-turns, compass readings and standing still moments taken to produce the work. Then a “reading” journey begins when the book becomes independent and exposed in the world. But my second volume of poetry, This Floating World is also a journey in itself because the songline of the same name, which makes up most of the book, is an oral map of the island of Ireland.

This Floating World is presented in two parts. The first is a selection of four ‘overture’ poems that steady the reader and set the scene for the book’s title poem. The reader is guided through the songline by an omnipotent force who listens in on the intimate soliloquies of people, ghosts, birds and animals. Even the landscape and ocean have the opportunity to speak from time to time.

I decided very early in the writing process not to discuss the Troubles or provide commentary on Ireland’s unsettled history. Instead This Floating World is a treatise to, as Lisa Bellear has put it, ‘maintaining the capacity to love’. It is about being prepared to listen to the soft-hard insistence of keeping hearts open and capable of loving. And how, through this underlying anti-war theme, we honour our own connection with the world and others. Therefore This Floating World is essentially a celebration of how, in some small way, we are connected to all things.

This Floating World is also a portrait of Ireland that is faithful to the elements and the ethereal. Water holds a strong presence in Ireland, whether it is through rain, mist, bogs, loughs, waterfalls, holy wells, seas and ocean. Wind also, particularly in the west of Ireland, is a force to be reckoned with. Because of this I shaped a poetic narrative that is dictated by the direction of the wind or rain. Fluid and transient in nature, This Floating World is full of rushed thoughts, forgotten histories and quiet contemplations that reiterate transience and mutability.

This Floating World was born from an extensive road trip I embarked on when I first visited Ireland in 2005. The journey the songline takes is largely influenced by the route undertaken at that time. I was then fortunate to receive an international residency from the Australia Council for the Arts to spend time at The Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig in Newbliss (Co Monaghan) in 2008 in order to write the first draft of this book.

I thought long and hard about publically describing This Floating World as a songline because of the associations the term holds within Australia, however after much deliberation I decided to proceed for two reasons. This work travels through the landscape identifying spirit of place through the voices that speak therefore readers are able to interpret and trace locations accordingly. The other and more personal reason is that I take great spiritual solace from the Irish landscape. It is a very special place for me.

This Floating World is a work that not only explores the essence of the island of Ireland, but also the universal scope of the human condition. And it is about the workings of the heart, in all its multiplicity. After all, life is a journey through the heart.

This Floating World is now available to order from Five Islands Press (www.fiveislandspress.com/newbooks.html) and at all good bookshops.

A quote to close the month

2011-06-27T21:18:00.000+10:00

...consider the Fates are with us,
or rather, how they look out from our eyes,
or better still, are nothing but the light
that lives inside our looking.

-- Rachael Boast (from The Canal at Claverton)

Image: Ezza Rose by Parker Fitzgerald

2011-06-23T20:00:00.002+10:00

2011-05-31T23:12:00.000+10:00

Moving forward, turning back

Roof of cloud,
feathered hum.

This is the longest loop,
the loosening,
a stretch of road before me.

The sky, an open secret –
a long, gifted song.

-- Libby Hart

Measured days

2011-05-30T22:47:00.000+10:00

What flows in her now
is rainwater, woodsmoke, silence reflected
on the lake surface; leaves turned,
hair snagged on briars. Stones. The small
white feathers that line nests.
She is sung with fox bark and pheasant call.
Creatures roost in her thoughts, her days
are measured by the slink, the leap, the pounce,
the pitched balance of wings breaking into flight.
She too moves in feral ways.

-- Grace Wells (from Pioneer)

Image: Charlotte wore wings made of the forest by Amanda Blake

2011-05-17T08:18:00.001+10:00

'A world with a hundred kinds of home
will accommodate a thousand kinds of homesickness.'

-- Pico Iyer (from The Golden Soul)

The passing

2011-05-03T22:23:00.000+10:00

Don Paterson is wonderful at the best of times, but what a delight it was to hear this recording of his poem, The Passing this evening. I thoroughly recommend you listen to it.

Need I say more...

2011-04-30T21:45:00.001+10:00

Good tidings

2011-04-20T19:24:00.007+10:00

"Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn."

-- John Muir

It's evening and it is raining as I type this post. Autumn has well and truly sunk its teeth into the neighbourhood. Fallen oak leaves blanket every street where I have walked home tonight. There may not be sunshine, but it is time for renewal. For shedding leaves. For letting go. And I shall take John Muir's wisdom along for the journey because those mountains -- both metaphorical and physical -- are always impressive company. And in many ways I've been climbing them all of my life. But it's the soulful, silent-types that resonate most for me: Mount Buffalo almost a year after a horrific fire season, and that most deeply mysterious and masculine of mountains, Cnoc Bréanainn, with his tough shoulders draped by snow. I watched for the slightest sign of a shiver as a large full moon anchored above him. I will pack these memories too, along with the notion of good tidings, of the wind at my heels and a glimpse of sun at my back. And there will be an energy of storm tucked up inside my heart. I shall take the long route because it is always the right road to take. In fact, I think I have already begun the journey.

Image: Portrait of John Muir

Falling through our lives

2011-04-12T19:50:00.001+10:00

Someone explained once how the pieces of what we are
fall downwards at the same rate
as the Universe.
The atoms of us, falling towards the centre

of whatever everything is. And we don't see it.
We only sense their slight drag in the lifting hand.
That's what weight is, that communal process of falling...

Only the atoms of the soul are perfect spheres
with no means of holding on to the world
or perhaps no need for holding on,
and so they fall through our lives catching
against nothing, like perfect rain.

-- John Glenday (from Concerning the Atoms of the Soul)

Image: Speed demon star creates a shock by NASA

Lá Fhéile Pádraig Sona Daoibh

2011-03-17T06:34:00.000+11:00

Beannachtaí na Féile Pádraig oraibh! Sláinte is táinte!
(St Patrick's Day blessings upon you! Health and wealth!)

A plenteous place is Ireland for hospitable cheer,
        Uileacan dubh O!
Where the wholesome fruit is bursting from the yellow barley ear;
        Uileacan dubh O!
There is honey in the trees where her misty vales expand,
And her forest paths, in summer, are by falling waters fann'd,
There is dew at high noontide there, and springs i'the yellow sand,
     On the fair hills of holy Ireland...

(from the old Irish song, The Fair Hills of Ireland -- translated by Samuel Ferguson)

* Lá Fhéile Pádraig Sona Daoibh = Happy St Patrick's Day

Image: Shamrock pin by Cheryl Andrews

For the love of portents

2011-03-08T23:46:00.000+11:00

Thanks to the wonderful generosity of Irish poet Geraldine Mitchell I have been listening intently to Meadbh: The Crimson Path, an extraordinary collaboration between poet Ann Joyce and traditional musician and composer John Carty.

Recently released Meadbh: The Crimson Path is a retelling of warrior queen Meadbh who lived in First Century Celtic Ireland. And with the story of Meadbh comes Táin Bó Cúailgne or the infamous cattle raid of Cooley. For those unfamiliar with this most wonderful epic, the Táin chiefly concerns Meadbh's lust to be the wealthiest person in the land. In trying to achieve this she sets her sights on a prized brown bull owned by Daire of Cooley. Meadbh does so because the bull in Celtic Ireland was a significant symbol of sovereignty and wealth. And as the story goes there was nothing on earth quite like that brown bull. In Ann Joyce's words 'his back [was] wide as a plain' (from Thoughts of Plunder). Needless to say Meadbh's desire to possess such an impressive creature by any means necessary brought war and destruction to the land and its people after she 'scooped [Connacht, Munster and Leinster] armies into her fist [and] marched on' to Ulster (from Omens).

But the recording begins with the birth of Meadbh, Joyce explaining:

It was a day of bees,
the humming boozy voice of a lullaby,
the beginning of honey.

She named the child Meadbh --
the intoxicating one.

(from The Birth of Meadbh)

Portents, symbols and supernatural encounters follow Meadbh's life journey and Joyce's retelling of this is fresh and wild with imagery:

She called the wind and it came,
a black raven in its mouth.
The squirrel on her shoulder
nibbled her neck,
all the signs were with her,
every will in harmony...

(from Omens)

and

The raw coal reddened
ash blown into the woman's hair,
her mind white-fired.

Smoke lifted her
to the top of the hill...
a raven pecked her head,
a flame licked her toe.

Out of the shadows
then came thoughts
of cattle raids and plunder.

(from Thoughts of Plunder)

Joyce and Carty have evoked a rich and intoxicating landscape alive to mystery and wonder, as well as calculation and loss. Joyce's words are a joy to listen to and her reading of each work is impeccable. And there are lines to die for, such as 'the child opened her ears so that every nuance could enter her completely' (from Reading the Signs) and 'the moon blew in her heart' (from Heart Warrior).

I marvel each time I listen to this recording. Ann Joyce has written a portrait of Meadbh that is charged with intelligence, eroticism and pitch perfect words. Listeners also delight their ears with fabulous tunes and compositions by John Carty that evoke place and time so effortlessly through violin, flute, guitar, bouzouki and bodhran, as well as vocals from Mary Staunton and Maggie Carty. This collaboration is impressive and very special, and I can't recommend it highly enough.

(And thank you Geraldine for sending this to me over the waves. I feel very blessed that you have shared this with me.)

Image: Road sculpture, Táin Bó Cúailgne, Co Louth by Paz

Parker Fitzgerald

2011-03-02T07:08:00.000+11:00

The above are three examples of Parker Fitzgerald's series of photography and quotes. Fitzgerald released one polaroid each day in 2010 for this 365 photography/design project. These examples are my favourites, most likely because they resonate on a personal level.

Shiver

2011-02-21T21:34:00.000+11:00

Discovering the work of Hamid Sardar-Afkhami made me revisit my suite of nine poems, Fresh News from the Arctic. Although Sardar-Afkhami's work concentrates on Mongolia's nomadic traditions, it is the reindeer herds that keep me returning again and again to his portfolio:

from Fresh News from the Arctic

VII.

Sometimes I can take the beauty in
and hold it there –

The tapestry of aurora borealis,
the boom-crash of pack ice,
in arctic fox deep in mischief-making.

I’m in love
with the awkward feet of reindeer.

I’m perpetually suited to the idea of this land –
only my mind has other plans.
In every sense, I see this as my failing.

I dream of boat-building.
I’m left with a clear blueprint,

A misshapen vessel
constructed by somnambulism –
buoyant and eager for departure.

An umiak,
it slips away as I wake.

And I am still in love with the awkward feet of reindeer. Although reindeer are so tightly woven into the notion of a white Christmas and that most elusive creature, Father Christmas, I do not associate them directly with such things but rather the connection to land and perhaps mostly to the role they play in Oimyakon in north-eastern Siberia.

Oimyakon is located 200 miles south of the Arctic circle and is nestled in a shallow valley inside the Verkhoyansk mountains. Reindeer breeding is the only source of income and the local diet consists almost entirely of reindeer meat. Many live in simple tents and follow the roaming reindeer as temperatures fall to as much as minus 71 degrees Celsius in winter. Oimyakon is the coldest permanently inhabited settlement on earth. The only place colder than Oimyakon is Antarctica.

So why do I shiver with excitement when I read such grizzly things? To be honest I do not know, perhaps it comes close to something like this:

from Fresh News from the Arctic

I.

Inside a dusky breath
I watched the edge of light,
radiant and graceful in its retreat.

I whispered: Arctos
and felt the ground beneath me fall.
I observed the swelling of the earth.

I was leaving the known, the traceable.
Heading out to climb the goal,
to swing and hitch the rope.

There is more to this than the surface.
I took a fancy
to your hills of little secrets

To the quilted ice, your lace of snow.
Seducer in blue
I repeated your name. Arctos.

Twisted the notion
of true north around my tongue.
I desired the taste of you.

At that distance
the earth looked like a changeling, a phantom spirit.
I conjured and I beckoned.

Image: Hamid Sardar-Afkhami

Perchance to dream

2011-02-19T13:18:00.000+11:00

As the bird is to the air
and the whale is to the sea
so man is to his dream.

-- Don Paterson (from The Error)

Image: by Vivian Maier

Something for Valentine's Day

2011-02-14T14:31:00.000+11:00

This: a poem by Ralph Angel

This is a beautiful poem by Ralph Angel. It seems very fitting to share it on Valentine's Day (click on link courtesy of the Poetry Foundation).

2011-02-01T22:23:00.000+11:00

Colm Mac Con Iomaire and the hare

2011-01-30T17:14:00.001+11:00

Last Friday evening I went to see Colm Mac Con Iomaire and his band perform at the Melbourne Recital Centre. It was a wonderful evening with a great array of tradition and fusion, including tunes from Mayo, Eastern Europe and compositions from his solo album, Cúinne an Ghiorria (The Hare's Corner). Everything came together in an unrushed and delightful way inside the Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, which Mac Con Iomaire described as being like 'the womb of tree'. And he is absolutely right.

Cúinne an Ghiorria is a phrase taken from the ancient Irish custom of leaving a corner of a field uncut at harvest time to act as refuge for the hare. Unlike rabbits hares do not burrow but rather nest in the tall grasses. This honour bestowed on the hare is linked to the belief that these animals are shapeshifters and beings from the Otherworld.

Colm Mac Con Iomaire also references Máirtin Ó Cadhain who identified the Gaeltachtai or Irish speaking regions 'as being like the Hare's Corner of the island of Ireland'. Ó Cadhain goes on to describe them as being 'a temporary reprieve from the reaper's blade'. Needless to say Mac Con Iomaire is vigilant in keeping Irish alive and well and this was thoughtfully conveyed throughout the evening, most notably by a deeply-felt reading of Michael Hartnett's poem, A Farewell to English. For me this was a superb and moving surprise. Other highlights included The Cuckoo of Glen Nephin, Emer's Dream and Though Shalt Not Carry Timber to name but a few because the entire evening held an aching beauty that was personally much needed at this time.

What struck me most of all was a whimsical and ever-present thought that a hare was perhaps nesting somewhere behind the musical instruments. She was hidden from view, but very much a presence in her own right. In the words of Michael Hartnett, the evening was álainn, mánla, séimh agus caoin.

álainn = beautiful // mánla, séimh, caoin = words whose meaning approximates to the English adjectives graceful, gentle.

Unsung

2011-01-06T18:48:00.003+11:00

Sometimes, in the night,
a bird sings without making itself heard.
At that moment,
thought obeys, that is to say it
abstains. Then it becomes thought once more. It
reinstates the distraction of understanding
and of listening. It
abandons us to the oblivion of time
where we found ourselves
in that bird song unsung by the bird.

-- François Jacqmin (from The Book of the Snow -- translated by Philip Mosley)

Image: Full moon night bird by Artemis

Something to close the year

2010-12-31T09:00:00.003+11:00

We all choose,
because we all have somewhere to go
and we get there sooner if we learn
to watch where we've been. Nostalgia is a light to look forward to.
The head turns back and reads. The heart walks on.

-- John Glenday (from Last Night it Rained)

Image: Three by rjrphoto

A lost thing returning

2010-12-21T16:35:00.000+11:00

The world revealed itself again in silence, coming to him. Gently it breathed around him its atmosphere: vulnerable, benign, full of secrets, his. A lost thing returning. How it waited for him in eternity and almost knew him. He'd known and sung it all his life.

-- Adam Foulds (from The Quickening Maze)

Image: Dreamfield by Olli Kekäläinen

Dark side of the lens

2010-12-14T13:43:00.001+11:00

"This is where my heart beats hardest..."
-- Allan Wilson

I think the above quote from Dark Side of the Lens says everything about this wonderful short film.

Speaking of summer and winter

2010-12-08T15:33:00.001+11:00

For me, summer is a foreign country. Something to be endured rather than enjoyed. It's a little like waiting in Heathrow for a connecting flight. It's hot and uncomfortable and seconds turn into minutes and hours turn into days. So you can see that I do not have the right attitude to travel well in summer. And when I say travel, I mean this journey we take each day as we walk our lives through.

Around the same time last year I realised with sheer delight that my ideal temperature was 2 degrees Celsius. This, and much cooler temperatures, makes me feel truly alive. I had always suspected as much, but the thrill of this knowledge (or the confirmation of it) on the skin was exhilarating for me. It's no surprise then that I have been (day)dreaming of another white Christmas. My body is grounded in hot and humid Melbourne, but a part of me walks a snow-covered field in the shadow of night as I type this post. I am guided by the luminosity of ground, of the sound of my feet crunching with each step I take. And I am listening to the world around me creak and turn. My restlessness is sated. I am at one with myself and the world.

Image: A moment by Olli Kekäläinen

Speaking with the winter's mouth

2010-12-08T15:22:00.005+11:00

I dwell around my bones
and breathing heart

in a high wind from the sea,
in a crush of cloud up above.

This is what I find here --
I speak with the winter's mouth.

-- Eleanor Rees (from The Winter's Mouth)

Image: Moving south in front of the snowstorm by Ben Visbeek

To have and to hold

2010-11-16T23:34:00.001+11:00

I’ve had an interesting week of reading. I’ve spent time in Sligo with Dermot Healy’s A Fool’s Errand and delved into the metaphysical and physical of Elizabeth Burns’ Held. Both books are fourth collections and what gems they are.

A Fool’s Errand is a book-length poem in nine parts that seeks to map out the annual migration of barnacle geese from Greenland to their winter home of Innishmurray, a small deserted island off the coast of Sligo in the west of Ireland. Often I found myself mesmerised by Healy’s pitch-perfect lines as I read. This is a soulfully and often sorrowful poem that explores music, the musicality of memory, mortality, the passing of friends, and the comings and goings of those magnificent birds.

My copy of A Fool’s Errand is full to the brim with dog-ears, so it’s actually very hard to pinpoint a favourite slice of the poem. However the following are two examples from the last section:

A deserted island
is the right place

for such birds
to spend their nights:

they waited years for the humans
to pack up and go. Out on Innishmurray
they nestle under St Molaise’s stiff skirt, move the letters

of an old alphabet on foot towards the monk’s beehive hut.
The church of the Men and the church of the Women
are filled with evening song.

The quarrel before sleep
is heard by few.

There’s silence
around the Cursing Stones.

And here too:

Today
they’ve grown tidy,

the wave of the line is perfect,
the cries

are not fearful, they know
where they are going:
the weather is right.

What more could you ask for?
And when they hit the sea
the chorus stops.

We do not hear them.
They take their song with them.

[both fragments are from 9. The Ebbing Song]

I am new to the work of Elizabeth Burns and what I have read these past few days has been nothing less than revelation. I have Kris Hemensley of Collected Works Bookshop to thank for this because of his astute way of positioning books on each shelf in order to draw attention.

Burns covers many topics, but often they are close to home. A series of poems about her father are moving elegies. She also writes often about motherhood and children. But this collection is also about what it means to be held by moments in time and how people and objects are vessels – how the world holds us as we ourselves hold it. I was most struck by ‘The Brightest Star’, ‘The Coevals’ and the magnificent, ‘Moon over Catterline’. In these particular poems Burns’ vision is glorious and unique. What a pleasure it is to read a poem that makes your head spin. I had such a reaction to ‘The Coevals’, which explores the chronological similarities of the lives of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf:

There’s something strange about the stars
this week of 1882, late winter easing into spring:
something lighting on two babies being born
across the sea from one another…

Burns goes on to write:

She, the nightingale whose song’s as sweet
and pure as the sounds of ancient Greek;
he, the yellow blackbird of his favourite Irish air.

Wartime. Her London home is blitzed,
she lives in terror of air raids, invasion.
He, half blind, in exile, will never go home.

It’s 1941, late winter easing into spring.
Death eyes them both. He’s first to go.
She follows, lets the river take her there.

[from ‘The Coevals’]

I just love that last line. It’s pure magic and it hits the heart with a great wallop. It left me breathless, actually. And then there is ‘Moon over Catterline’, a glorious tale of artist Joan Eardley’s encounter with the ghost of John Clare. This is a magical and very special poem best read in its entirety, however I do love how Burns has captured Clare kindly nodding to Eardley and smiling. How he says in the artist’s studio, ‘We are comfortable here, are we not?’ It’s good to know there is contentment in the afterlife!

Both A Fool’s Errand and Held are beautiful books – not only to read, but also to hold and to allow their words to sink into you. So Burns is very right about vessels, we hold the words of these poems and they hold us too.

Image: Barnacle geese via BirdWatch Sligo

3 poems by Jackie Kay

2010-11-03T19:08:00.000+11:00

You can't beat Jackie Kay. These are wonderful poems read just as wonderfully.

Happy Halloween!

2010-10-31T11:27:00.000+11:00

Shadows of a thousand years rise again unseen,
Voices whisper in the trees, "Tonight is Halloween!"
-- Dexter Kozen

Image: Witch Watercolour by Eric Orchard

On being porcupines

2010-10-23T19:23:00.000+11:00

(No such thing as) coincidence

2010-10-17T16:17:00.000+11:00

Last month I wrote briefly about Anne Carson’s Nox, a facsimile of a scrapbook she’d created after the death of her estranged brother, Michael. On Friday I had the great fortune of reading/having a look at June Leaf: Record 1974/1975, a facsimile of a sketchbook Leaf made in the winter of 1974/75 in Mabou Coal Mines in Cape Breton. It’s a wonderful sketchbook, so full of the artist and her spirit. The 1974/75 winter was a pivotal time for both Leaf and her husband, Robert Frank, and as such there’s adversity, grief and the exploration of the creative process on almost every page.

Ever since I first saw Richard Avedon’s iconic photograph I have been drawn to June Leaf. So as I walk through a period of creative inactivity I was rather taken by her own dilemmas, best illustrated in the December 21 entry: ‘At night I think of all the ideas which I do not fulfill [sic]. I wish to tie them all together into a single theme and I seem to search for that theme. Above all, I should be joyous, am joyous but the enthusiasm stumbles over itself and I lose my way...’

I know exactly what she means, but then most people who create something from nothing will feel this time and time again throughout their lives. I just happen to be having one of those moments now and feel blessed to have read a passage like this at this time. But I also know there’s no such thing as coincidence, rather this book in all of its tumblings to get to the end of the world (i.e. Melbourne, Australia) somehow was meant to land on my lap for a reason. For me, this simple message whispers of perseverance.

There are many times a book has arrived in my life for a reason. I think the best example (for me, anyway) was when I was resident at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig in 2008. I was there writing the first draft of This Floating World, which will be published next year by Five Islands Press. I’d experienced an intense few weeks of writing and then all of a sudden it just stopped without very little warning. I then walked around for a couple of days not knowing what to do. Because I was writing the book as a journey through Ireland from start to finish I found myself marooned on Slieve Mish (Sliabh Mis) in utter silence. And I say silence because This Floating World is a cycle of voices. I’d climbed Slieve Mish in my mind’s eye and found no one home and no one to speak to, not even that dark-figured ghost Lady Wilde wrote of.

Each day of silence became harder for me. I tried to combat this by using Annaghmakerrig’s wonderful poetry library. For days I read volume after volume. Then I moved into the general library where I came across Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s Selected Essays in a cupboard. Soon after I went up to my room and sat down and opened the book randomly. I found myself at the first page of her wonderful essay, ‘Mis and Dubh Ruis: A parable of psychic transformation’. The rest, as they say, was history because this essay tells the most wonderful story of Mis (or Mish), who the mountain range is named after, and Dubh Ruis the harper.

Basically their story goes a little something like this...
Mis loses her senses and flees to Slieve Mish after the death of her father at the hands of Fionn Mac Cumhail and the Fianna during the Battle of Ventry. In her wild grief she grows fur and claws, and kills any man that approaches her. After years of this the king allows Dubh to go up into the mountain to try and woo her. It was agreed that if he succeeded Dubh would receive half of the kingdom for his efforts. Dubh had several seductive tricks up his sleeve, but what he did not count on was the love that developed over the weeks he stayed with Mis on the mountain as he ‘tamed her’ in preparation for her return to civilisation.

In her essay, Ní Dhomhnaill explains that Mis asks Dubh not to leave her. I was immediately struck by this and decided to frame their dialogue around such sentiments. My original draft, which has since changed, is below:

58/ Mis whispering to Dubh the harper (Sliabh Mis)

Don’t leave me.

59 / Dubh responds

I won’t leave you.

60 / Mis

Even though you seek to change me,
a wildness finds a new shape inside my heart.

Even in my furs,
even with these sharp nails,
I belong to you.

I am growing still.

And inside my bed of moss I long for your touch,
I am eager for you between my thighs.
I belong to you.

Don’t leave me.

61 / Dubh, whispering

I won’t leave you.

62 / Mis

And even though I still have my moments
you are able to see my softer side.

I watch your shape as you bathe me,
observe how your eyes travel my curves
until the past falls away.

And I’m beginning to consider a future,
and inside this future is you.

I belong to you.

I am growing still.

63 / Dubh

Don’t leave me.

64 / Mis, whispering

I won’t leave you.

(If you are interested in reading the final version you will have to buy the book next year!) Needless to say I acknowledge my gratitude to Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and June Leaf and to those small moments where a book can change your life or perspective. And I must say it was a pure joy to write these lines for Mis and Dubh. The rest of the book etched its way down and around Ireland with renewed energy, so in many ways I needed to be stuck on the mountain for a while. It helped me to be reminded of how the world works in mysterious ways.

Below is a short film produced as part of a series of six short Irish language poetry films for TG4 in 2008 called Nead an Dreoilín (The Wren's Nest). This particular poetry film is Athair (Father) by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. It is a beautiful film of a moving poem.

Image: Untitled by Lennon McCuen

Metaphors

2010-10-12T19:29:00.004+11:00

Our metaphors go on ahead of us; they know before we do. And thank goodness for that, for if I were dependent on other ways of coming to knowledge I think I'd be a very slow study. I need something to serve as a container for emotion and idea, a vessel that can hold what's too slippery or charged or difficult to touch... But I've learned to trust that part of my imagination that gropes forward, feeling its way toward what it needs... Sometimes it seems to me as if metaphor were the advance of the mind; something in us reaches out, into the landscape in front of us, looking for the right vessel, the right vehicle, for whatever will serve.
-- Mark Doty

Image: Yellow by Erin Tyne

A restless spirit

2010-10-04T18:30:00.001+11:00

Click on image to see...

A quote to close the month

2010-09-30T06:53:00.000+10:00

Everything interesting begins with one person in one place, though the places can become many, and many persons in the form of influences will have gone into the making of that single woman or man. No one comes out of nowhere; one room or town or locality can be made into an everywhere. The universe is local, but with the walls taken away.
-- John McGahern

Image: Annette Pehrsson

Nox by Anne Carson

2010-09-20T17:55:00.005+10:00

I have long admired Anne Carson. I think her aesthetic is without equal. Again and again she creates books that are utterly unique, that can't and will not exist in a quagmire of all too familiar themes. Her work refuses to repeat itself. It is something I aspire to in my own small way, but it's actually much harder to do in practice.

Anne Carson's recently released book, Nox is her first book of original work in five years. Nox is a facsimile of a scrapbook Carson created as a way of processing her grief after the death of her estranged brother, Michael. The book is an arrangement of fragments, photographs, letters and sketches presented in an accordion-folded length of paper that fits snugly inside an attractive box.

Nox has two heartbeats pulsing through the work. On each right hand page Carson writes of her brother, whom she describes as 'a windswept spirit', in a contained and plainspoken way. The left hand pages patiently dissect Catullus's poem '101' word for word. '101' is an elegy for Catullus’s own dead brother. Definitions of each Latin word are at times superimposed with Carson's elegiac thoughts. Carson also takes time in describing her dilemmas in attempting to translate Catullus:

7.1
Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate.

She also mentions that 'history and elegy are akin' and as such Nox weaves through tales of childhood and family, of the deaths of hers and Catullus's brother, as well as her parents. Nox is a complex and moving lamentation that becomes a unique and physical experience because of its accordion-like configuration. The reader can stretch the pages across the floor of a room or do as I did and hold it in both hands in one sitting. The longer you read the more burdensome to juggle the pages. But this is not a negative remark, quite the opposite in fact. The physical act fuses with the emotional. One of the most touching pieces in the book is '6.1':

6.1
When my brother died (unexpectedly) his widow couldn't find a phone number for me among his papers until two weeks later. While I swept my porch and bought apples and sat by the window in the evening with the radio on, his death came wandering slowly towards me across the sea.

You ride the journey with Carson, including carrying the mystification of estrangement and why people behave the way they do. In many unsettling ways Carson's story reminded me of my own experiences of when my father died in 2002, something that I wrote about in my essay, 'The Dead'. I too wrote to help myself process what had happened.

Carson searches for 'a history, an account that makes sense.' She goes on to write, 'We want to be able to say This is what he did and Here's why. It forms a lock against oblivion.' But oblivion does not leave the narrative and neither does the urgent need for resolution that unfortunately never arrives. It's incredibly hard to live this way, but you do so by perseverance and resilience. Carson best describes this in, '1.1':

1.1
It is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself.

And Carson has fashioned it into something powerful and beautiful. And it carries itself handsomely with great dignity. Nox is a work that stays with you long after you have packed it all away. And I keep going back to it to find something new or see it in another light. The act is an excavation of layers. This is a body of work that explores what it means to be human, even in the messiest kinds of ways. All of which becomes poetry of the very best kind.

A quote to close the month

2010-08-31T08:00:00.002+10:00

I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had.
-- Jeanette Winterson

The waves keep asking me

2010-08-26T13:00:00.005+10:00

I have been reading Pablo Neruda's Book of Questions (translated by William O'Daly). O'Daly writes in the book's introduction that 'these poems integrate the wonder of a child with the experience of an adult'. There are 316 questions inside 74 poems with not one answer among them. Here are my favourites:

Is there anything in the world sadder
than a train standing in the rain?
(from III)

Does smoke talk with the clouds?
(from IV)

How many weeks are in a day
and how many years in a month?
(from XXIII)

Whom can I ask what I came
to make happen in this world?

Why do I move without wanting to,
why am I not able to sit still?

Why do I go rolling without wheels,
flying without wings or feathers?
(from XXXI)

What did the tree learn from the earth
to be able to talk with the sky?
(from XLI)

Where does the rainbow end,
in your soul or on the horizon?
(from XLII)

And what is the name of the month
that falls between December and January?
(from XLVI)

Why do the waves ask me
the same question I ask them?
(from XLIX)

Is what I see from afar
what I have not yet lived?
(from LXVII)

Image: hideyo

My daydream project

2010-08-24T20:38:00.004+10:00

I have this reoccurring daydream that one day I will be able to edit an anthology of poetry on the theme of longing and loss. And because I am a dreamer I have invariably collected poems for this "pie in the sky" anthology off and on for the past 18 months. So far I have some really beautiful work by Robert Adamson, Anne Micheals, Robin Robertson, Michael Hartnett, Cavafy, Eugenio Montejo, Michael Symmons Roberts, Zi Ye, Carol Ann Duffy, Robert Wrigley, Michael Longley, Lady Ki and Ian Crichton Smith to name but a few. But because I am quite swamped with other bits and pieces at the moment it took me until Michael McKimm's Still This Need (The Heaventree Press) and Christopher Reid's A Scattering (Areté Books) for me to remember I have such a daydream project.

McKimm's 'Fledgling' as he longs for sleep is irresistible:

I want to conjure up a bird,
for you...
Without a word
I'll bring it to the bed,
this quiet living thing, this gift
of air, and set it by your head.
(Michael McKimm, 'Fledgling')

Reid's collection is more sombre, but no less beautiful. A Scattering is an elegy to Reid's wife who died in 2005. There is great life and energy here, despite the aching grief the poet is experiencing. I especially admired 'The Widower's Dozen', thirteen poems that make up the third part of the collection. The title poem, which is part of this section, is poignant. Here Reid contemplates elephants who visibly mourn the bones of their dead.

Elephants puzzling out
the anagram of their own anatomy,
elephants at their abstracted lamentations --
may their spirit guide me as I place
my own sad thoughts in new, hopeful arrangements
(Christopher Reid, 'A Scattering')

Longing and loss cover so many layers of human existence. Each is as complex as we are and as full of energy and light. They are journeys we take and sometimes they are endless. Sometimes we take them only as a day trip and are refilled by love and loved ones. It would be so great to feel this project one day in my hands as the form of a beautiful book. And yes, this is a longing clear and true that I am travelling. One of far too many longings, I might add. But one day I might arrive at its final destination. Only time will tell, I guess. In the meantime I will keep collecting poems I love and keep collecting my thoughts.

Like a closed book

2010-08-11T19:57:00.000+10:00

Art does not need to make sense or to function or to demonstrate any particular idea. It testifies to the beauty of imperfect human thought and action muddled up with feeling.
-- Sean Scully

I have been mulling over the work and writings of visual artist, Sean Scully. I think Scully is very interesting and rare, as contemporary artists go. He has a habit of effortlessly bringing humanity into the work of abstraction. I say effortlessly when perhaps I mean masterly. What looks simple is complex and mysterious. This is a man who found his vocation early and keeps striding along on the journey.

Often looking at these works I wonder about the man who painted them. I become thoughtful about the mind of the artist. Thankfully I found a wonderful and handsome book called Sean Scully: Resistance and persistence: Selected writings (Merrill, London, 2006) that helps me to piece all the fragments together in order to create a clear and present portrait. And what a portrait! Thoughtful. Inspiring. Honest. Simply, a breath of fresh and creative air. This is a wonderful thing to see (and read).

Scully’s central preoccupation is human spirit translated through grids of horizontal and vertical colour. He writes, ‘paint strokes are very crucial to an understanding of my work. The paint strokes do a number of things... they affirm the human spirit, the involvement of the human spirit... a paint stroke that describes a form also describes a gesture.’

Brian P Kennedy in his essay from another publication, The Art of Sean Scully: A human spirituality describes Scully's works as ‘wonderful colour poems’ and Scully backs this up by declaring, ‘up close, I would like [a] painting to be felt poetically and intimately.’

Here are a couple of other gems from the man himself:

‘I'm not interested in the idea of change. I am very interested in the notion of personal evolution, which is a different thing.’

‘When you see a book on a shelf, it’s a sculpture, because you see the spine facing out to you carrying the title. But when you open it, it is like holding wings. The object is opened up and you can decode it. Painting is like this. Like a closed book that becomes an open book. It always needs to be decoded and opened up. Then it shows itself, though it doesn’t explain itself.’

Quotes for the month ahead

2010-08-01T18:24:00.003+10:00

Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.
-- WB Yeats

A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
-- René Char

The Chinese character for poetry is made up of two parts, 'word' and 'temple'.
-- Copper Canyon Press

A treat of a retreat

2010-07-08T17:58:00.002+10:00

I have just finished a writer's residency at Rosebank Retreat for Artists (see above). Rosebank is owned by Mary Delahunty, who has generously given up the property for most of this year to allow a large handful of writers to come and stay three weeks at a time to undertake a writing project. Writing residencies are coordinated by the Victorian Writers' Centre.

As you can see from these images Rosebank is a rambling farm property. It rests in a pocket of rural Victoria that still has a large population of kangaroos in the wild. In fact Rosebank is visited by a faithful mob every day. And I saw a beautiful mother and joey wallaby team most dawns when I rose to put the heater on. The property is also home to a large array of birds and other wildlife, as well as three retired racehorses and a inimitable cat.

Rosebank is a secluded place that allowed me to find clarity in my project. Being provided such precious time to create is a beautiful gift. Thank you Mary, Rob, the Rosebank menagerie, Victorian Writers' Centre staff and panel members, as well as the Helen Macpherson Smith Trust and Sidney Myer Foundation for making these residencies possible for the writing community.

Keeping the home fires burning

2010-06-29T12:32:00.000+10:00

I love open fires. I don’t have the luxury of having one in my own home, but I am a guest at the moment in a house that has both open fire and Coonara (or stove). It’s important to be warm on a winter’s night, but what I love most is turning the lights down low and watching that beautiful, warm glow. It’s meditative and slows you down to Zen monk territory. It's very good for the soul and I need this more than ever at the moment.

Quote of the day

2010-06-22T19:08:00.003+10:00

In the small hours

awake and alone,

waiting for snow, or watching the snow as it falls,
from an upper room,

as far as I am from home,
and as strange as I seem,

what could I really prefer
to the weight of the self?

its deftness, on nights like this,
its immutable grace,

the only means I have
of bearing witness.

-- John Burnside
from his sequence of poems, Responses to Augustine of Hippo (II. Ama et fac quod vis)

Bloomsday

2010-06-16T17:35:00.002+10:00

I thought it fitting to share 3 quotes from Ulysses to honour Bloomsday:

1 / "His smile faded as he walked, a heavy cloud hiding the sun slowly, shadowing Trinity’s surly front. Trams passed one another, ingoing, outgoing, clanging. Useless words. Things go on the same; day after day: squads of police marching out, back: trams in, out. Those two loonies mooching about. Dignam carted off. Mina Purefoy swollen belly on a bed groaning to have a child tugged out of her. One born every second somewhere. Other dying every second. Since I fed the birds five minutes. Three hundred kicked the bucket. Other three hundred born, washing the blood off, all are washed in the blood of the lamb, bawling maaaaaa."

2/ "Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life.
What? says Alf.
Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred."

And, of course, my all time favourite from Molly's wonderful soliloquy:
3 / '...and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.'

Prayers and other poems

2010-06-15T13:19:00.006+10:00

For the past week or so I have had the privilege of reading Robin Robertson and Deborah Digges. Both of their new collections are very fine.

What I love about Robin Robertson's work is that in many respects he is a shapeshifter and his mind is elastic to possibility. I especially like how he takes on various characters and you don't always know what is a deeply personal poem and what is a constructed one because each embodies the human condition so well. I also love his relationship to the sea and it is a pleasure to venture into the waters (or nearby) with him throughout all four of his volumes of poetry. My all time favourite Robertson sea poem would have to be 'Pibroch', which comes from his first collection, A Painted Field:

...all this longing for the right wave,
for the special wave that toils
behind the pilot but can never find a home --
find my edge to crash against,
my darkness for its darkness
my hands amongst its foam.
[from Pibroch]

Then there is the magnificent, 'At Roane Head' that features in his new collection, The Wrecking Light. This poem is dedicated to fellow Scot poet/writer John Burnside and tells the tale of the selkie most beautifully and strange. I love this poem, but I can't strip it back to just a few lines for this post. You need to read it in its entirety to fully appreciate Robertson's gift. And it does feel like a gift to be a reader of such a poem. It's wildly imaginative with a sprinkling of world-weary sorrow. Just beautiful.

US poet Deborah Digges is a very different poet, although she is also preoccupied with nature and the connection to place. Her new collection, The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart is a tour de force. Sadly, this is also a posthumous collection as Digges died in 2009. This collection deals primarily with love, grief and loneliness as Digges worked her way through the hard journey of grief after the death of her husband and eldest brother.

I think my most favoured poem in this collection is, 'The Birthing', which tells of the night Digges and her husband stopped by a country road to assist a cow as she gave birth. The poem is packed with life and the threat of death, then ultimately exhilaration. I found it very moving and again it is not something you can strip down to a few lines. You need to read the complete poem to fully appreciate this special piece and Digges' unique and gutsy vision. But I will end this post with a few lines from one piece in the collection, and these words just happen to be something I tell myself time and time again (so, it's very nice to know I am not alone):

Some things I say are prayers and others
poems. I tell you now that I don't know
the difference.
[from Some Things I Say are Prayers and Others Poems]

Quote of the day

2010-06-14T18:11:00.010+10:00

Only those who are lost in error follow the poets.
-- Qur'an 26.224

Image: Untitled (Perfectionist) by Sarah Hobbs, 2002

The lovely Mr Joyce

2010-06-07T18:16:00.016+10:00

Last week I read a great article by Gabrielle Carey in the ALR, see: A pile of quashed quotatoes. Fabulous stuff. By the end of my read the article was so full of underlines and circles I think I'll be quoting it and Joyce for weeks to come. Always a great thing to do!

Parallel worlds

2010-06-06T01:00:00.018+10:00

Yesterday evening I endured an excruciating train journey wedged up between what appeared to be the entire MCG crowd of the Melbourne versus Carlton (Australian Rules) football match. That's 49,745 people according to a football website I just looked at.

I had brick-hard beer bellies on all sides, most notably shoved into my back and both my hips. Thankfully I was facing the door, otherwise I would have had more of the same in front of me and that would have been slightly (just slightly) awkward. Most days anyone who takes the Sandringham line can be forgiven for thinking they’re in Tokyo and not Melbourne, but yesterday was especially unfortunate. I guess the football drunks, the loud know-it-alls and the people who have no commuter etiquette because they only get on a train when they go to the MCG make it a whole lot worse than it has to be.

And because of this I got to daydreaming about a parallel world where the MCG was called the Wheeler Centre and it took a huge amount of effort just to get 100-200 people to a football match. I’m not exactly sure how literature and poetry would translate to a stadium environment, but it sure would be nice to have that amount of interest and enthusiasm from the Australian (and Victorian) community.

Cas amhran duinn (Hands, Part 2)

2010-05-26T16:23:00.007+10:00

This is a great clip of Colm Tóibín, who was in Melbourne recently. I wanted to see him read, but the event was sold out before I tried to get a ticket. Here he talks about two of my favourite things: Dónal Óg (a lament) and the act of cas amhran duinn (Irish, meaning to 'turn a song for us'). I previously mentioned this lost tradtion in a post in November. It's great to hear Colm Tóibín read such words from his novel, Brooklyn.

When Hart becomes Shart

2010-05-26T15:42:00.001+10:00

Recently I booked a dinner for two in a really nice restaurant. I knew at the time the guy on the other end of the line was having a problem with my name and the spelling of it. And that was fine because it happens all of the time. But when it came to walking into the restaurant last night we couldn't find the booking... that is not until the waiter pointed out to me that the booking was under Shart. Of course that infamous scene in the film Along Came Polly sprang immediately to mind. I still had it stuck in my mind's eye as I was being seated. If you're not familiar with it have a look for yourself (above). Or have a look again.

Quote of the day

2010-05-04T18:03:00.028+10:00

If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character... Would you slow down? Or speed up?
-- Chuck Palahniuk

The Eclipse

2010-04-21T14:13:00.002+10:00

Recently I went to see the film, The Eclipse. It's a quiet, slow-paced film that unfolds not unlike the natural phenomenon it is named after. And just like an eclipse the viewer experiences both darkness and light, as well as the many shades in between. Co-written and directed by Conor McPherson, The Eclipse is a ghost story and a romance. Some would argue that this is an usual combination, but it works very well.

Set in the seaside town of Cobh (County Cork, Ireland), the film follows the life of Michael Farr (played by Ciarán Hinds) during the town's annual writers festival. Farr is recently widowed and lives a life of almost helpless disorganisation with his two teenage children and the family dog. He seems to spend his days stretching himself thin as woodwork teacher, festival volunteer, father and absent-minded son in law to the equally grieving Malachy McNeill (Jim Norton) who is wheelchair bound and lives in a nursing home. Slowly but surely we are introduced to the visiting writers, namely bestselling "ego on legs" Nicholas Holden (Aidan Quinn) and the supernatural writer Lena Morelle (Iben Hjejle), but it is Farr's dilemma of seeing what he thinks might be a ghost on the first evening of the festival that leads this moody little film along.

The Eclipse questions many things, most importantly what it means to be human. It is essentially a study of grief, of love and the unknown, and how each of these things shape and reshape our lives. It's also about two lost and lonely souls (Farr and Morelle) who find comfort in each other, albeit for a brief moment in time. Conor McPherson's vision is in keeping with his work as a playwright and both he and Billy Roche deliver a sparse, but beautifully written film with many layers. And it is these layers that make The Eclipse so compelling. Ciarán Hinds plays Farr brilliantly with warmth and quiet dignity. His grief, when finally he allows himself to feel, is heartachingly moving. Equally powerful is Jim Norton's last scene. Iben Hjejle brings a freshness to a character that is just as harassed and haunted as Farr and Aidan Quinn revels in Holden's boozy and over the top ways.

This award winning film shows us that in many ways all adults are haunted - either by the past or by past actions, by a love that cannot be, by a lover or a child that has died, and a myriad of other things. The Eclipse is a film that stays with you long after the closing credits. And that is a very special thing.

Currently I am the resident Café Poet at Palace Cinema Como. Please check out their website for session times. For more details about the Café Poet program please refer to the Australian Poetry Centre website.

Tweet tweet

2010-04-15T17:09:00.001+10:00

This is a wonderful clip. It's from French artist Celeste Boursier-Mougenot who draws on the rhythms of daily life to produce unexpected soundscapes. This time it's with zebra finches! I think this installation gives a fresh definition to "rock chick".

Remembering to look up

2010-04-10T17:05:00.004+10:00

I happened to spot a tawny frogmouth last night. It was resting on a telephone line above where I was walking at the time. I stopped and in the darkness we both looked at each other - he (or she) looking down at me and cocking his (or her) head and me looking up and losing my breath at such a marvellous sight. I am not a birdwatcher by any means, but even I know that a tawny frogmouth is a rare site in urban Melbourne. Soon it took off and I watched it's splendidly languid style of flying until it disappeared completely in the early evening gloom.

I've been incredibly busy of late, with many 'fingers in many pies' and perhaps too many things on my mind. When this happens I have a tendency to look down while I am walking in order to fully concentrate on the task or tasks at hand (i.e. to nut out whatever needs to be sorted for the day). I think this is the worst thing for me to do. Yes, it helps me from stumbling! But the key is to always look around and most importantly look up. I only happened to do this because I heard a noise above me. It was a purely instinctive reaction and not a curious one. And I have been thinking how unfortunate that was, yet at the same time how fortunate. So, the following is something I will need to remember: Look up. Look around. Keep curious. Otherwise I might just miss something rather special.

Quote of the day

2010-04-06T20:25:00.008+10:00

Every human needs a certain degree of sentimentality to feel free.
-- Josef Frank

Doppelganger / time-traveller

2010-03-28T11:00:00.006+11:00

A couple of days ago I happened to see a man on the street who looked exactly like Robert Louis Stevenson. Same moustache and everything. How wonderful is that!

Music and poetry

2010-03-17T17:06:00.011+11:00

I went to see the Máirtín O'Connor Band on a balmy Naomh Pádraig eve. The band played at the Brunswick Town Hall as part of the Brunswick Music Festival, which runs until 21 March 2010. It was an interesting night of music and reflection. I guess the introspection was coming more from within than from the band itself because I was pensive – perhaps about a whole heap of things. In the end I walked away knowing what I’d just experienced was a great gift. So, thank you Máirtín O'Connor for your gentle humour, the sweet smile that appeared often as you played, and for the aisling (played solo) during the encore. Thank you Seamie O'Dowd for your fine, fine voice and expertise. And thank you Cathal Hayden for your wonderfully mellifluous style.

I sat listening to Cathal Hayden and for some reason got to thinking of Seamus Heaney's beautiful poem, The Given Note. This is one of my favourite poems. The reasons for this are many, but ultimately I guess it stirs up something so deeply about Corca Dhuibhne for me. I have ‘the most westerly Blasket’ vividly in my mind’s eye when I read Heaney’s words and, of course, what comes with it - that wild magic so embedded in Inisvicillane and the surrounding area, the determination and verve of the Blaskets' past inhabitants, and of how music and stories were so vital. I don’t think anyone can experience this landscape and not come away a little haunted (and for those romantics like me, utterly in love with this special place).

To the people I care about who are far, far away on this Saint Patrick's Day:
Lá Fhéile Pádraig Sona Daoibh (tabhair dom an rud céanna atá ag an bhfear ar an urlár!).
[Oh, in hopes you and I will meet again...]

Cloud watching

2010-02-28T20:31:00.005+11:00

Last Friday as I was leaving work I looked up at the sky and marvelled at all the mair's tails. Slowly but surely the evening became a tale of perserverance thanks to a cool change passing through Melbourne. All manner of clouds appeared and stretched languidly across the sky.

A few years ago I became rather partial to Luke Howard’s cloud classification system, as do many people when first introduced to it. Such things helped me write a poem called ‘The Anatomy of Clouds,’ which tells the tale of my great-grandparents brief moments together. At the time of writing this I’d just finished researching their lives. Both research and poem were my small way of unearthing a deeply buried family secret.

Early research revealed that my great-grandmother had been unmarried when she gave birth to my grandfather in 1913. What followed this discovery was a 3-year trail of intrigue that led me all over Melbourne and eventually to Mayo in 2005 to visit the gravesite of my great-grandfather who was a Catholic priest.

‘The Anatomy of Clouds’ was published in my first collection, Fresh News from the Arctic and I include this now for you...

The Anatomy of Clouds

Altostratus, 1912

She: containing the swell of her
He: the soft vowels of Athenry

the damned or the mighty
in their Sunday clothes

Her home: a room, an idea of marriage, a coat hook
He: a stranger in this part of town

removes his dog collar
before taking the steps to her room.

She: like a bird hiding itself in cloud
He: like soft, patient rain

this, being the ocean of air in which they live

one knowing it would last
the other, believing in a promise of something more

as he moves from one world to another
with a sense of belonging but not belonging.

Cirrus, 1910

Just blossom and exist, he said
so I stretched out across the wild blue
and beyond the sea
becoming shapeless and delicate
drifting along the light breezes

a tuft of blossom
inside a wild garden of air

Nimbostratus, 1911

We are clouds.

Moving and abating
breathing in the wind

measuring condensation

collecting its persistency
until it glistens on our backs.

Buried deep is the nimbus

that holds us together
a suspended water, bulking.

The softest kind of rain

that lasts all through the day
making a street slick in the wake of it

until it crackles with promise

against a black umbrella –
a multitude of bat wings vaulted.

The air is still now. We only know

a delicacy of vapours,
an infinity of revelation.

Cumulonimbus, 1913

A storm takes a long time to build
(sometimes it even takes a lifetime)

all its seams and tangles become
a song, a thread unfolding

dark and blown away
its chiaroscuro forming all the words for moody,

the sky pressuring into rain.
A shape-shifter from way back

it’s too grief-stricken to know anything of routine,
instead it clings to the form of ideas

to the wool bags that fall heavily at its knees.
You once said that you saw yourself

in the energy that strains and boils, and
I remember how you grew overcast

shadows blooming to great height,
your cold front meeting my warm front like hailstorm.

My heart closed itself within itself
as a form of preservation

binding our secrets in layers
until I am all but an onion, wrapped tight.

The midwife urges me to push
as a ribbon of light divides the sky, and

into the woods comes whalesong
the sea, lapping in a gale force

underneath the soil of things,
all shipwrecked and wretched.

I feel the swell of my belly,
sense the moving child within

pushing his way through me.
He’s determined to arrive.

I say, here are my pearls of breath
here are my hands.

Even in the harshest storm
I will shelter you.

Melbourne graffiti

2010-02-21T18:06:00.003+11:00

Yesterday I took some photos of Melbourne to send to a friend. For some reason I got very fixated on graffiti and thought it would be a good idea to post some of these on this site...

Poem for Valentine's Day

2010-02-12T17:48:00.004+11:00

Valentine's Day is soon upon us and I thought I might include a poem I wrote over a year ago. The "bones" of the poem were scribbled down during a late night taxi ride from Charles de Gaulle Airport to Rue de Temple in Paris. The fine-tuning came later. I hope you like it...

If I Were To Build a Heart

If I were to build a heart
it would be made of fire with a touch of rain,
with steam and all things steamy.
This heart would know that the best virtue is subtlety.

I don’t want to play God
or have the legacy of Dr Frankenstein
around my neck, but I know if I could build it
it’d be a little larger than a fist,
its weight would measure four hundred grams
and that its four chambers
must beat a thousand times a day,
for there is so much counting on this heart.

I’d make it steady and unwavering,
because my own is known to falter.
I’d add in the patience of a saint.
I’d include warm-bloodedness and authenticity.
I’d create a heart that pulses like a red silk balloon
rising heatedly above a crisp dawn so splendid.

And if I were to shape this heart, would you come?
Would you come and place your hands around it, and scoop it up?
Would you tuck it into your chest, just like so?
I know it would fit you like a glove.

Something whimsical

2010-02-09T18:22:00.000+11:00

Truth. Love. Justice. Freedom.

2010-01-21T18:02:00.004+11:00

A little (and very wise) bird told me the following today...

Ralph Waldo Emerson said: Truth, love, justice, freedom. They are the things that matter (and I would add authenticity and dignity to that). A beating heart should have the rhythm of a gentle, slow, meandering song or river not the sound of thundering drums and crashing waves. No good comes from chaos, whether you create it yourself or whether it hurtles towards you. Eventually it is just you and the sound of your heart in the middle of the night (and also the quietness or thunder of your thoughts) and what you can live with within yourself and in life.

A great hum of words

2010-01-18T17:06:00.025+11:00

I recently fell head over heels in love with the poetry of Ciaran Berry. I know I have come late to his first collection, The Sphere of Birds (published by The Gallery Press in 2008), but it's always very hard to find quality Irish writing/new poetry in Australia. Because of this I tend to spend a lot of time in the poetry section of as many Irish bookshops as I can each time I visit and my last visit was no different. And I also try to walk away with as many titles as my budget can manage (always a hard thing to do).

Ciaran Berry's volume is my favourite out of all the titles I walked away with, but the others are very fine too. I had the utmost pleasure spending time with his words while I was on a Hong Kong flight (my reading time stretched somewhere between Denmark and Tibet). And up there in the sky I was able to savour words and imagery in a way that became almost magical. Of course it did help to have an empty seat beside me.

Here are just two samples of his work without any explanation as to why I love them so much...

From The Hive:
I think the heart must
be like this, a sort of hive sending its workers out

from flower to flower, leading the drones into the snow
every winter, always doing a dance to please someone.
It has its swarm, its sting, and, if you rub a finger gently
round its rim, it starts to hum, as though flexing its wings.

From Donegal Fences:
There's something to the way
the old men round here put it, their grammar still
inflected with the Irish, so that the words

often hit on a separate truth. For them, it's not
today, but the day, as in 'it's a grand day the day',
as if there's only one to be got through.

Just wonderful and very inspiring (as well as something to aspire to).

Beauty in the most unlikely places

2010-01-12T17:31:00.004+11:00

I've just returned to Melbourne after having a white Christmas, which basically translates to a little sleet, a little snow, a little ice and some flooding too. As well as closed roads and airports. When I left Ireland it was -7 degrees Celsius and when I touched down in Melbourne the weather was steadily working its way up to 45 degrees Celsius. Boy, that was cruel. (Needless to say I was in a pretty bad way yesterday.)

Today it was so hot and steamy where I work that I met a Monarch butterfly in the basement. It called to mind that beautiful scene in the film, Bright Star when all the butterflies are flying around in Fanny's room. A mere fancy, I suspect, but absolutely beautiful nonetheless.

So, beauty does exist in the most unlikely places. You just need to keep your eyes open!

A new year message...

2010-01-02T23:30:00.006+11:00

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.
-- Soren Kierkegaard

Image: Reflejo by Barbie Kjar

Lost lives

2009-12-01T07:25:00.004+11:00

Recently I spent a long and sleepless night reading Lost Lives: The stories of the men, women and children who died as a result of the Northern Ireland troubles (2007 edition). And when I say I was reading it, I do not mean in the traditional sense. This book is more like a profound experience, more like a time for deep reflection because as the Sunday Tribune says, this is 'a huge, sorrowful, brilliant book, to be read sparingly, slowly and with reverence'. As the subtitle suggests, Lost Lives provides an account of every known death from the troubles up to the end of 2006. More people have died since this edition was published, so a third edition is sadly inevitable. (Renewed tension in the North is also straining the peace process.)

I read of people and events I knew well and those that I didn't know. I was struck by the immensity of grief, of how so many people died by mistaken identity. I shook my head many times and shed as many tears. I even gasped when it all got too much for me. According to the authors, 3720 people died as a result of the troubles during the period 1966-2006. This breaks down to 562 paramilitaries, 1039 security forces and 2119 others (mostly civilians). The civilian dead totals 2087, of which 1259 were Catholic and 727 were Protestant. Most deaths occurred in West Belfast.

Some may see the following as macabre, but I felt compelled to list just a small amount of entries for the last thirty years. It is my small way of paying my respects to the dead. May they rest in peace.

8 May 2006
3712. Michael McIlveen, Antrim
(Civilian, Catholic, 15, schoolboy)
He died in hospital less than 24 hours after he was attacked during a night out in Ballymena as he made his way home with a friend. Shortly after midnight in the early hours of Sunday morning, the two youths were chased by a 30-strong mob. His companion, a classmate at St Patrick's College, escaped but Michael McIlveen was cornered following a 1-mile long chase. He was badly beaten and eventually, having become reunited with his friend, was helped back to his home. He told another person who helped him home that he had been hit several times on the head with a baseball bat and that some of his assailants had 'jumped on his head'. By the time he reached home, his voice had become slurred and he was rushed to Antrim Area Hospital.

11 July 2005
3705. Craig McCausland, North Belfast
(Civilian, Protestant, 20, unemployed)
He was shot by UVF gunmen at around 4am at the home of his partner exactly one month before his 21st birthday. Although the attack came during a feud between the UVF and the LVF, it is not believed that he had any connection with either organisation.

1 October 2004
3701. Darren Thompson, Derry
(Civilian, Protestant, 22, labourer)
He was shot in the left eye on 29 September as he walked towards Altnagelvin Hospital, where he worked as a labourer on a construction site. He died in the hospital two days later with his family by his bedside. His girlfriend was three months pregnant with their first child.

17 August 2003
3695. Danny McGurk, West Belfast
(Civilian, Catholic, 35)
He was shot five times by gunmen who burst into his home. At the time he was looking after five of his six children. Members of the Real IRA carried out the killing. He had been beaten with hatchets and hammers a week earlier after standing up to local paramilitaries.

1 August 2002
3681. David Caldwell, Derry
(Civilian, Protestant, 51, construction worker)
[He] was fatally injured when a booby-trapped lunchbox he had picked up exploded just as he arrived for work. The lunchbox had been left in a Portacabin used by the construction workers.

29 July 2001
3667. Gavin Brett, Antrim
(Civilian, Protestant, 18, student)
He was killed when loyalists in a car opened fire on youths standing next to the Hightown Road in Glengormley. Because they were near the entrance of St Edna's GAA club, the gunmen assumed they were Catholics.

26 May 2000
3641. Martin Taylor, North Belfast
(Civilian, Protestant, 35, shipyard worker)
He was helping a friend build a wall outside a house when gunmen opened fire. Police said they believed the other man was the target of the attack.

5 June 1999
3635. Elizabeth O'Neill, Armagh
(Civilian, Protestant, 59)
A Protestant married to a Catholic, she was killed when loyalists threw a pipe bomb into her home. It is thought Mrs O'Neill had picked up the device and was attempting to throw it out of the house when it exploded.

12 July 1998
3594. Richard Quinn, Antrim
(Civilian, Catholic, 10, schoolboy)
He was the eldest of three brothers all killed when loyalists petrol bombed their family home in Carnany Park, a predominantly Protestant area of Ballymoney. The attack took place at around 4.30am. The family [had] only moved into the house the previous week.

3 February 1997
3553. Larry McCartan, Down
(Civilian, Catholic, 79, councillor)
An SDLP councillor in Banbridge, he collapsed and died of a heart attack during a hoax bomb alert. He and his wife were among 200 people evacuated from their homes around midnight after a telephone call warned of bombs in Laurencetown village where they lived.

8 July 1996
3542. Michael McGoldrick, Armagh
(Civilian, Catholic, 31, student)
He was shot dead by loyalists at the height of the 1996 Drumcree Orange marching confrontation. He had just graduated from Queen's University Belfast [and] was working as a taxi driver. He had gone to pick up a passenger at around 11.30pm on a Sunday evening at a bar in a loyalist area, and depot colleagues raised the alarm when he did not check in again. His body was found early in the morning slumped over the wheel of his cab. He had been shot twice in the back of the head.

2 March 1995
3522. James Seymour, Tyrone
(Civilian, Protestant, 55)
He died in South Tyrone Hospital almost 22 years after being shot by the IRA in Coalisland. He was hit in the head in May 1973 by a gunman who opened fire on a patrol returning to the RUC station where he was on guard duty. James Seymour was paralysed but remained conscious. His sister-in-law said: 'He could smile and he could cry, but those were the only emotions he had. He couldn't speak and he couldn't eat. There was never any hope of Jim making a full recovery.'

25 February 1994
3459. Sean McParland, North Belfast
(Civilian, Catholic, 55)
He was shot by loyalists while babysitting four grandchildren at his daughter's house. He was wounded in the neck and died in hospital a week later. He had recently had his voicebox removed during an operation to remove throat cancer.

15 October 1993
3415. Paddy McMahon, North Belfast
(Civilian, Catholic, 23)
He was shot by the UDA/UFF in front of his girlfriend and young son. They had just got out of a van when the gunman opened fire from a derelict house across the street.

30 September 1992
3342. Harry Black, South Belfast
(Civilian, Protestant, 27)
A Protestant married to a Catholic, he was shot by the IRA in a flat belonging to another man near his home. A number of people were watching a European soccer match when gunmen attempted to break down the door and force their way in. Failing to do so, they fired around 20 shots through a window of the ground-floor flat. The victim was hit four times in the head and chest and died at Belfast City Hospital.

10 August 1991
3221. Jim Carson, West Belfast
(Civilian, Catholic, 33, newsagent)
He was shot at his shop by two masked men. The murder was claimed by a group calling themselves the Loyalist Retaliation and Defence Force, who said the killing was carried out because the shop stocked the Republican News.

7 September 1990
3130. Emmanuel Shiels, South Belfast
(Civilian, Catholic, 34)
He was shot by the UDA/UFF as he slept beside his girlfriend in their home. His girlfriend was pregnant at the time.

8 March 1989
3023. Stephen Cummins, Derry
(Soldier, Royal Artillery, 24)
Lance-Bombardier Cummins was from Cosham, Hampshire. After his death his parents opened a letter he had written to them which was only to be read if something happened to him. The letter thanked his parents for their love and asked them to look after his fiance. He wrote: 'I can't decide how I want to be laid to rest -- perhaps beside Grandad. If I have left anything out I am sorry but I am not used to this sort of thing.'

24 November 1988
3002. Phelim McNally, Tyrone
(Civilian, Catholic, 28)
He was in the kitchen of his brother's house when shots were fired through the window. His wife gave birth to their sixth child the following morning.

9 August 1987
2866. William Cockburn, West Belfast
(Civilian, Protestant, 35)
His badly beaten body was found near Townsend Street Presbyterian Church in the early hours of the morning. He had been killed because a loyalist youth wrongly believed he was a Catholic.

15 March 1986
2738. John O'Neill, North Belfast
(Civilian, Catholic, 25, painter)
His body was found lying in the Glen River at Ballysillan after he had been beaten to death by loyalists. The young Catholic was so badly beaten that police at first thought he was in his 50s.

22 August 1985
2712. Daniel Mallon, Tyrone
(Civilian, Catholic, 65)
He was shot by the IRA in the Railway Bar in Strabane. The IRA said his death was a mistake.

2 December 1984
2666. Kieran Fleming, Fermanagh
(IRA, Catholic, 25)
Once of those who escaped from the Maze prison in 1983, he drowned in the River Bannagh following a gun-battle between the IRA and the SAS.

12 December 1983
2588. Tony Dawson, East Belfast
(Civilian, Catholic, 18)
He was standing on a corner when he was shot in a random sectarian attack by an apparently drunken RUC officer. The policeman was said to be in a temper after having a row with his wife.

23 January 1982
2404. Robert Mitchell, East Belfast
(UDA/UFF, Protestant, 45)
He and his son (21) were killed in their home by UVF gunmen. The killers broke in around 2am and shot the father and son. They also killed the family's dog.

19 April 1981
2301. James Gary English, Derry
(Civilian, Catholic, 19)
He was one of two teenagers killed in disputed circumstances when an army Land Rover ploughed into a crowd at speed during rioting in the city.

21 January 1980
2212. Anne Maguire, West Belfast
(Civilian, Catholic, 35)
The mother of the three Maguire children whose deaths gave rise to the emergence of the Peace People in August 1976, she took her own life three and a half years later. She was badly injured in the incident and is said never to have recovered psychologically from the loss of her children.

27 August 1979
2135. Paul Maxwell, Republic of Ireland
(Civilian, Protestant, 15, schoolboy)
He died in the Mullaghmore explosion. A fourth-year pupil at Enniskillen, he had taken a summer job as Lord Mountbatten's boatman. The job was due to end the day after the bombing.

12 February 1978
1989. Mary Smyth, North Belfast
(Civilian, Catholic, 70)
The pensioner was killed with her ten-year-old grandson when a loyalist firebomb exploded on her doorstep.

25 January 1977
1878. Frank Moyna, West Belfast
(Civilian, Catholic, 68)
He died from a heart attack during an army search of his home. Locals claimed he was refused medical attention and that a priest had to force his way past soldiers to give the last rites. The army press office said he 'seemed to have had a heart attack'.

4 October 1976
1806. Brian Stewart, West Belfast
(Civilian, Catholic, 13, schoolboy)
He was fatally injured in disputed circumstances when his skull was fractured by a plastic bullet fired by an army patrol.

19 December 1975
1554. Trevor Bracknell, Armagh
(Civilian, 32, joiner and youth leader)
An Englishman living in the area with his wife, a local woman, he had gone to cash his Friday evening pay cheque and celebrate the birth of his new baby. His wife was in hospital in Newry at the time with their two-day-old daughter.

30 September 1974
1193. Ralph Laverty, East Belfast
(Civilian, Catholic, 55, bakery worker)
He was killed at his work in the Sunblest Bakery by a UVF gunman who walked up behind him and shot him at least five times in the back. He was loading cakes on to a rack when he was shot. He had been employed at the factory for six years and was one of a small number of Catholics working there.

4 February 1973
758. John Boyd, East Belfast
(Civilian, Protestant, 33)
A group of children spotted his body naked apart from a piece of cloth around his neck, floating in the Connswater River. He had been abducted, tortured and killed by the UDA/UFF.

30 January 1972
Bloody Sunday is looked on as a watershed and one of the most significant events of the troubles. Thirteen people were killed and another fatally injured when soldiers of the Parachute Regiment opened fire following an illegal though generally peaceful civil rights march. Seventeen others were injured in the incident, which lasted for around half an hour.
243. Jack Duddy, Derry (Civilian, Catholic, 17, weaver)
244. Paddy Doherty, Derry (civilian, Catholic, 31, construction worker)
245. Hugh Gilmore, Derry (Civilian, Catholic, 17)
246. Bernard McGuigan, Derry (Civilian, Catholic, 41, ex-fireman)
247. James Wray, Derry (Civilian, Catholic, 22)
248. Michael Kelly, Derry (Civilian, Catholic, 17, apprentice electrician)
249. William McKinney, Derry (Civilian, Catholic, 27, painter)
250. Gerard McKinney, Derry (Civilian, Catholic, 35)
251. Kevin McElhinney, Derry (Civilian, Catholic, 17, grocery shop assistant)
252. John Young, Derry (Civilian, Catholic, 17, salesman)
253. Gerald Damien Donaghy, Derry (IRA, Catholic, 17 - He was the only member of the republican movement killed on Bloody Sunday)
254. William Nash, Derry (Civilian, Catholic, 19, docker)
255. Michael McDaid, Derry (Civilian, Catholic, 17, barman)

27 January 1971
50. John Joseph Kavanagh, West Belfast
(Civilian, Catholic, 28, roof tiler)
He was shot, apparently as an alleged informer, by republicans who left his body by the bank of the Blackstaff River. He was the first of many people killed in the troubles as alleged informers. It is thought he was killed by the IRA.

27 June 1970
27. William Kincaid, North Belfast
(Civilian, Protestant, 28, factory supervisor)
He was shot in the Crumlin Road area. A witness told the inquest: 'A man came out of Hooker Street and knelt on one knee, took aim and fired into the crowd.' Kincaid was a member of the Orange Order.

16 July 1969
5. Samuel Devenney, Derry
(Civilian, Catholic, 42)
He was beaten by police and fatally injured as he stood at the front door of his home. He was standing with a neighbour when RUC officers charged a group of young people, several of whom ran into the Devenney home. The police, in pursuit, broke down the front door and batoned the family.

When words were like magic

2009-11-26T07:23:00.004+11:00

Buddha said that, 'we are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world'. There is also a Chinese proverb: Words are sounds of the heart. In many ways the following poem says the same things...

Magic words

[anonymous Inuit poem]

In the very earliest time,

when both people and animals lived on earth,

a person could become an animal if he wanted to

and an animal could become a human being.

Sometimes they were people

and sometimes animals

and there was no difference.

All spoke the same language.

That was the time when words were like magic.

The human mind had mysterious powers.

A word spoken by chance

might have strange consequences.

It would suddenly come alive

and what people wanted to happen could happen --

all you had to do was say it.

Nobody could explain this:

That's the way it was.

-- Translated by Edward Field

Image: Reindeer by Barbie Kjar

Quote of the day

2009-11-25T17:47:00.020+11:00

Wherever you haunt earth, you are shaped and bright.
-- Ted Hughes

Chekhov's notebook

2009-11-24T17:59:00.031+11:00

The American poet, William Stafford once wrote, 'I never came back to earth after reading Chekhov'. And I've never been the same since I picked up a very tatty book of short stories many, many moons ago. But one of my all time favourite Chekhov books is actually a compilation of notebooks dating from 1892 until his death in 1904. Note-book of Anton Chekhov was translated by SS Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf 17 years after Chekhov's death and includes little anecdotes, snippets of overheard conversations, philosophical musings and fragments of ideas/writings. I have a habit of picking it up every now and then for inspiration. It is, all in all, a chaotic little bundle, but that is the true nature of a notebook.

Here is just a sample:

How delightful when on a bright frosty morning a new sleigh with a rug comes to the door.

"Are you in love?" -- "There's a little bit of that in it".

A black dog -- he looks as if he were wearing goloshes.

A bedroom. The light of the moon shines so brightly through the window that even the buttons on his night shirt are visible.

Solomon made a great mistake when he asked for wisdom.

And I dreamt that, as it were, what I considered reality was a dream, and the dream was reality.

In a love letter: "Stamp enclosed for a reply".

Russia is an enormous plain across which wander mischievous men.

If you wish to become an optimist and understand life, stop believing what people say and write, observe and discover for yourself.

N., heavy, morose, gloomy, says: "I love a joke, I am always joking".

Image: Anton Chekhov

Inuit (day)dreaming

2009-11-20T07:30:00.005+11:00

It's always around this time of year I begin to daydream about cooler climates. Having already endured temperatures close to 40 degrees Celsius it looks like it will be another very long and hot Australian summer.

The following words give me chills each time I read them (in a very good way, of course):
Ayak: Inuit for snow on clothes
Pukajan: Inuit for 'firm snow that is easy to cut and provides a warm shelter'

3 quotes above my desk

2009-11-19T19:00:00.005+11:00

Carol Ann Duffy:
Poetry above all, is a series of intense moments -- its power is not in narrative. I'm not dealing with facts, I'm dealing with emotion.

Anne Carson:
After all the heart is not a small stone to be rolled this way and that.

Paul La Cour:
Being a poet is not writing a poem, but finding a new way to live.

Portent language

2009-11-18T18:00:00.003+11:00

Kilo lani: Hawaiian for an augur who can read clouds
Aayyaf: Arabic for predicting the future by observing the flight of birds
Sortes: Latin for seeking guidance by the chance selection of a passage in a book

Just a little bit of country

2009-11-17T19:06:00.020+11:00

You just can't beat country music song titles:

     - You done tore out my heart and stomped that sucker flat
     - I keep forgettin' I forgot about you
     - I liked you better before I knew you so well
     - She got the ring and I got the finger
     - Get your biscuits in the oven and your buns in the bed
     - I'm so miserable without you it's almost like having you here
     - How can you believe me when I say I love you when you know I've been a liar all my life
     - She's actin' single and I'm drinkin' doubles
     - You're a cross I can't bear
     - You can't have your Kate and Edith too

Image: June Carter Cash and Johnny Cash [via Big Hollywood]

Something to remember...

2009-11-15T12:00:00.003+11:00

Everyone is a house with four rooms -- a physical, a mental, an emotional and a spiritual room -- unless we go into every room every day, even if only to keep it aired, we are not a complete person. -- Indian proverb

Hands (Part 1)

2009-11-13T17:24:00.040+11:00

I love hands. I think they tell you so much about a person. I tend to collect passages or artwork about hands. The photographer, Paul Strand was an early favourite of mine (see above). Only recently did I discover that his hand studies were influenced by his mentor, Alfred Stieglitz. The first serious poem I ever wrote was a response to his photograph, Rebecca's Hands, 1923. Rebecca was his wife and muse.

This week I finished reading Piano Lessons, a memoir by the Australian pianist, Anna Goldsworthy. In it she writes lovingly of her piano teacher, Mrs Sivan. When meeting the nine year old Anna, Mrs Sivan asked her:

'What is the result of a clever, clever heart, and a very kind and generous brain?'

I stared at my mother, willing her to answer, but she avoided my gaze.

'It is clever hands!' Mrs Sivan declared.

Here is another golden message from Mrs Sivan:

'Always remember, your hands must speak. Your hand[s] and your instrument are one, not two, and your music [is] inside of you.'

I think that last quote is so important. And the magic of getting swept up in all of it because to be fully in the moment (and fully inside the music, indeed to be the music) is the thing. In many ways this happens in writing too, although there are too many stops and starts.

Noirin Ni Riain's wonderful new book, Listen with the Ear of the Heart, recently introduced me to the term, 'to turn a song for us':

In the Irish tradition, when we asked someone to sing a song, the call is 'Cas amhran duinn'. This literally means 'turn a song for us'. Tradition has it (sadly but a memory now) that when you were invited to 'turn a song', you'd take and gently, timelessly turn and turn again the hand of a listening neighbour seated or standing beside you. The tender circle both of your own hand and the hand held in it in an empathetic palm cycle is a physical accompaniment to the song.

I think this is so beautiful and exquisite. I saw all of it in my mind’s eye as I read Noirin's words and I keep thinking about it, and thinking how sad that such a tradition has passed. I would love one day somehow to write something that evokes this palm cycle in order to bring it back to life. But how would I do that? That's a big mystery for me. Maybe one day I will figure it out.

Image: Hands, South Uist, Hebrides, 1954 by Paul Strand

The beauty is in the detail

2009-11-12T18:14:00.005+11:00

I've been reading the old tales on and off for months now, and each time I pick them up I've been so struck by the level of intricacy in each story. The beauty is in the detail. Take for example the Welsh giant, Olwen. Wherever this delightful girl wandered clover flowers sprung up behind her. Olwen means white footprint (ol + gwen, "footprint + white") and she is also the Welsh symbol of fertility.

And then there is Aengus, God of love, youth and poetic inspiration. He was said to have four birds flying above his head that symbolised kisses. This is where "xxxx", now often found in correspondence, is said to have originated from. And I am rather fond of how the Lord of the Sea, Manannan Mac Lir, has a boat called The Ocean Sweeper.

Reading Thomas Kinsella's translation of The Tain Bo Cuailnge has been a revelation for me. Kinsella's use of language and intelligence shines on every page alongside sumptuous artwork by Louis de Brocquy. I loved reading the speeches, the riddles and all the various poems inside this immense tale. I am often drawn back to reading Derdriu's lament for her lost Noisiu:

...His cropped gold fleece I loved,
and fine form -- a tall tree.
Alas, I needn't watch today,
nor wait for the son of Uisliu.

I loved the modest, mighty warrior,
loved his fitting, firm desire,
loved him at daybreak as he dressed
by the margin of the forest.

Those blue eyes that melted women,
and menaced enemies, I loved;
then, with our forest journey done,
his chanting through the dark woods.

I'm also rather partial to Cuchulainn's bawdy riddles with Emer, particularly: 'I see a sweet country,' said while staring at her clevage. And what was her reply? Well, if you don't already know the answer you'll need to have a look yourself!

Failte. Tunngasugit. Velkomen.

2009-11-10T12:50:00.013+11:00

Every word has three explanations and three interpretations -- Irish proverb

Welcome to The World as a Room. This will be a blog about writing, language and ideas. I'll also be including quirky information about the world in which we live because, after all, the beauty of the world is often in the quirky details. Take for example the complexities of language. In Welsh, the word for carrot is moron. I love that.

Here are a handful of other wonderful examples:

   Turkish word for violin bow: arse
   Tongan word for jumping flea: ukulele
   Persian word for delicate or fragile: turd
   Latin word for old woman: anus
   Afrikaans word for elephant trunk: slurp
   Arabic word for owl: bum

And how do you praise an accomplished dancer in French? Call them a jerk.

Now, from the ridiculous to the sublime. Japan has a lovely and very popular pick-up line - rainen no kono hi mo issho ni waratteiyoh - which literally translates to, 'this time next year, let's be laughing together.'

Here are some other wonderful expressions:

   Japanese for having an intimate talk: Hiza o majieru
   (meaning, 'to mingle at each other's knees')

   Italian for reviving an old love affair: Cavoli riscaldati
   (literally, 'to reheat cabbage')

   Turkish for loving someone from the bottom of your heart: Cigerimin kosesinden
   (meaning, to love them 'from the corner of my lung')

   Japanese for breaking one's heart: Harawata o tatsu
   (literally, 'to sever one's intestines')

   French for being down in the dumps: Avoir le cafard
   (literally, 'to have the cockroach')

I don't know about you, but I tend to get a lot of spam emails. Most are of the "Triple X" variety and for some reason they tend to originate from the Balkan states. This generally makes the subject headings very interesting.

Here is my top 5 list from recent emails:

    5. Bring electricity back to your love circle!
   4. Your battleship won't sink
   3. Your shuttle needs better fuel
   2. If the nuts don't get you, the apple will
   1. Croak after her

It's now only fitting to leave you with a lovely sentence from the novel, Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey: 'The declared meaning of a... sentence is only its overcoat, and the real meaning lies underneath its scarves and buttons.'

I hope you return again to The World as a Room. If so, I look forward to your company. Should you like to subscribe to The World as a Room please email me. Remember to include the words "subscribe to blog" in your subject heading.