From a kind customer, Isobel Adams, who also sent us these photographs…
in sleep; organic reverie
to drift and succumb complete to thee
envelopes, enshrouds hopelessly
in wake; earth’s hot heaving soul
on which to run, averting fall
agitates, amuses, absolute all
in breath; country, ground and soil
dusty, sparse, on which man toils
captures, caresses, to persistently coil
in speech; rhetoric flows free
against rule and all decree
ebb, emanation, effusion flee
On Monday the sun shone so I cycled home slowly on quiet roads, tipping my face to the sky. The evening air was dry, a constant warmth broken only by the breeze. As I reached home, clouds gathered low and dark and the breeze strengthened to a wind – the sunshine was to be short lived. But the brevity of that half hour made it all the sweeter; its rarity investing it with more value, forcing me to pay closer attention, to remember it as clearly as possible.
When short is done well it is all-absorbing, its impact staying with you far longer than its own length might suggest. Short can be punchy and poetic, and the best should be celebrated – a shot of concentrated knowledge, atmosphere, feeling, understanding…
As Faber&Faber release an app of The Waste Land, poet Lavinia Greenlaw describes her first, determinedly un-digital, encounters with T.S. Eliot.
A couple of years ago, America’s national poetry month was marked by a poster of a fogged window on which someone had written Do I dare disturb the universe? It looked like the work of a teenager on the bus home from school on a rainy day and it is, with its combination of fragility and grandeur, a very teenage question…
