A new book spine poem with a medical theme, to see the year out:
*
Hidden Symptoms
Hidden symptoms
Under the skin:
A disaffection,
A ghost in the throat –
Patient or pretender
Waiting for the healer.
Can you tolerate
This parasite?
A new book spine poem with a medical theme, to see the year out:
*
Hidden Symptoms
Hidden symptoms
Under the skin:
A disaffection,
A ghost in the throat –
Patient or pretender
Waiting for the healer.
Can you tolerate
This parasite?
For the day that’s in it, a new book spine poem. Bit gloomy, this one.
*
Touching the Precipice
Zero, zero, zero wild flowers,
The insect societies
Collapse on your doorstep –
Mind and nature
Touching the precipice.
*
It’s been a while since I made a book spine poem (aka bookmash). This one is overdue, but thanks to Edna O’Brien it’s also a month early:
*
Listening to the Wind
Connemara –
listening to the wind,
the songs of trees, wild
December’s nocturnes
on your doorstep,
Going home one by one
in the darkness.
*
If you’re lucky enough to have books and time at hand, here’s something fun you can do in lockdown: book spine poetry.
*
All the Pieces Matter
I choose to live
a life in parts –
insects’ flight
from dream to dream,
through the woods
beyond the sea.
I only say this
because I love you:
All the pieces
matter.
*
Here’s a new book spine poem (aka bookmash). For the uninitiated: This is a game where you make a visual poem from the spines of books on your shelf.
*
Secret Place
Wild flowers, the wild places,
The birds of the innocent wood –
The secret place on the black hill,
Half a life still life,
The living mountain
Changing my mind.
*
Walking clears my head. Especially here, on the eastern lip of the Atlantic, the fresh winds gusting in over Galway Bay clear the cobwebs of editing and writing from my mind. When I need a break from work – from books, paragraphs, sentences, words, letters – I walk.
Sometimes, though, the letters follow me. This one gave me a proper surprise, almost glowing in the wet autumn ground:
Last weekend, driving to the Burren in County Clare (just south of Galway, where I live, and an endlessly interesting place to explore), a friend and I picked up the relevant Ordinance Survey map to get a better sense of the terrain.
Maps are a reliable source of pleasure, firing the imagination as we pore over their flattened geography, their special codes and symbols. Digital maps are ubiquitous now, but I still love to use paper maps when the opportunity arises.