The Lost Words: A Spell Book by Robert Macfarlane, illustrated by Jackie Morris. The premise of this book is intriguing. Someone noticed that 40 nature words– like fern and heather and kingfisher–were dropped from the Oxford Junior Dictionary in favor of tech words like blog and voicemail. And so a book was born, a book […]
A.E. Stallings. I kept stumbling upon her poems online (mostly thanks to my friend the poet Sally Thomas who is perhaps Stallings’ biggest booster). Every one I have found and picked up like a treasure. This. . . this. . . this . . . this. . . Gradually I came to recognize her name, […]
Five from Andersen for T.G. I I see you as the little mermaid barefoot beside someone else’s marriage bed and longing, yearning for that closeness which you will never never never never have. (And dreams of children you will never carry All the voices that never will be heard and the lullabies […]
“I knew little about Maud Plunkett. I knew I was here because the Major had trained us all as cadets. What I shared with his wife we shared as gardeners. I had wanted large green words to lie waxen on the page’s skin, floating but rooted in its lymph as her lilies in the pond’s […]
Of the Body–Fearfully and Wonderfully for Leticia and A.G. “angel date” the book said, but “he’s not an angel” I replied. And I refused to write it. People can no more be angels than they can be trees. Totally different species. One can’t become the other. And then I pictured Daphne and Apollo […]
Newfound Gap, Great Smoky Mountains, Tennessee See, straddle the line between two states, grasping the sign Tennessee and North Carolina, which are we in? (What a state we are in! Bedraggled travelers, We’ve been on the road quite a while North Carolina makes our ninth state in as many days. We camped last night and […]
Years ago I began an over-ambitious attempt at a blog series on The Waste Land (you can see the link in the menu at the top of the page), but then I was pregnant and quickly ran out of steam. I abandoned the series when I got to a sticky place and I never have […]
All Through the Night: Night Poems and Lullabies edited by Marie Heaney When Dom had to go into the hospital for some tests, I found myself stranded in the hospital waiting room with the ubiquitous television’s relentless beating, with talk show blather and inane commercials. My phone was almost dead so I couldn’t waste time […]
I’ve been swept into a general Heaney retrospective quite by chance. My friend Sally Thomas rediscovered his book of essays, Finder’s Keepers, on her shelf and started sharing tidbits, little nibbles of passages that caught her eye. I realized, “I have that book on my shelf too!” and I found it and realized I’d never […]
INLAND People that build their houses inland, People that buy a plot of ground Shaped like a house, and build a house there, Far from the sea-board, far from the sound Of water sucking the hollow ledges, Tons of water striking the shore — What do they long for, as I long for One salt […]