Category: Poetry
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In and of itself: the joy of creation
I was reading, just the other day, how a television series might be suddenly abandoned, after one or two seasons. The creator is cast adrift, and the article provided some evidence of their chagrin, their tristesse. Apparently this process happens much more often than one might think. I thought, as I read the piece, ‘Ah…
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The joy of collections . . .
I’ve been thinking about collections, lately, but more precisely, collections of poems. Small collections of poems are often collated by the poet into small leaflets, or the so-called ‘chapbook’ format. Not a book, more a small collection of a few poems loosely grouped into some sort of theme. I was prompted the other day by…
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A poem, publicly printed
A couple months ago, a call came out through the WriteOn writers group based in New Galloway from a previous member who is now chairing the Dumfries and Galloway Arts Festival. The editor was looking for poems from eager writers about cycling. In response to an earlier stimulus from one of Claire Lynn’s Northumbrian Writers…
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Subtle grace . . .
The Korean dogwood tree, at the bottom (or top, if you consider the gentle rise from the house back up towards the field) of our new-to-us garden, is in full bloom. But you’d never know it, until you get very close indeed. The flowers, a paler shade of green than the bountiful leaves, are an…
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For International Haiku Day, what else?
Our new-to-us garden faces west, so that the sun rising in the east illumines the space beyond the shade of the two extension peaks. I’m sure that there must be a quiet haiku to develop, as a kind of textual representation of the early morning scene before me. Oddly enough, I was writing haiku earnestly…
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Wisps of sphagnum moss . . .
As age creeps up on us, it can get harder to deal with rejections, failures, lack of success, whatever you might feel despondent over, but on the other hand perhaps one’s skin gets tougher too. Strategies for coping might have been developed, and these in turn can contribute to continued productivity. When we took our…
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Of three graces, joy . . .
We saw the delightful sculpture by Canova, the second one he’d created of the Three Graces, by commission, at the Victoria and Albert Museum some decades ago. In researching for this blog (yes, a reasonable amount of study goes into these entries!) I came upon one of the earliest known examples of the graces, as…
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The epiphany
sunlight and shadow two deer bounce through the marsh spiked gorse in yellow dress seed pods brown and empty moss-laden branches, beardy wisps rusty tin can hazel strands droop by the dyke willow herb curlicues broken crockery bits vibrant green rose leaves empty whisky bottle white village on a sunlit hill water mirror dazzle clouds…
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Sleeping on it . . .
It’s a commonplace, isn’t it, to sleep on a problem, hoping to awaken with a solution. As we went to bed last night, I was wrestling, somewhere in my subconscious, with a poetic problem that I thought I’d resolved. My dreaming mind thought otherwise. A better resolution than I’d even considered woke up with me…
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Notes on a marshland walk
For my joy this morning, I can’t do better than to relay some contemporaneous notes of our afternoon walk yesterday. Who knows, one day these notes may find their way into another poetic effort, perhaps less formal than the sonnet of my previous joy. But for now I’ll go with the joy I have in…
Roads to Joy 