Category: landscape

I like to find
what’s not found
at once, but lies

within something of another nature,
in repose, distinct.
Gull feathers of glass, hidden

…

I like the juicy stem of grass that grows
within the coarser leaf folded round,
and the butteryellow glow
in the narrow flute from which the morning-glory
opens blue and cool on a hot morning.

Denise Levertov, Pleasures

The Eightfold Fence is the fourth episode of the FX limited series, Shogun. The episode premiered on March 12, 2024. A reference steeped in Japanese mythology and the Shinto faith, handled poetically and with agency by several female characters.

Teresa Gierzynska, Four pictures, 2004. via Mala Gallery.

How to construct a picture that will communicate all the magic of spring: augury of something that will inevitably come – space, innocence?
And what about the quintessence of the rich, ripe autumn?
How to present euphoria and freshness contained in the summer.
And, finally, or perhaps first of all: how to present the depressive winter: its moody and full of harmony aura in a way acceptable to us, allowing us to appreciate its qualities, making us to stop complaining and allowing us to rest – before summer euphoria?
How to present it another way?

we cheer him on,

winter softened in the tropic of his strength.

Declan Ryan

Patrick Kavanagh’s poem “Epic” has talismanic importance to older Irish poets who took from the following lines license to write about the minutiae of their own locales:

                                        I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.

To be from a small country and to write intimately about your own affairs is to risk making your poetry impenetrable, irrelevant, or both, even when writing in a global language like English. And yet to exclude your own affairs, to eliminate the parochial from your “epic” entirely risks self-censorship or a denial of one’s own truth.

An American poet can mention the film Predator, Henry Kissinger, or the town of Ferguson and an informed and cultured Irish person will know the references. Conversely, if an Irish poet chose to write about Wanderly Wagon, Pádraig Flynn, or the town of Granard even a cultured American reader, unless a specialist in Irish Studies, would be lost.

Patrick Cotter, Introduction, Poetry, September 2015

Acceptance

Yesterday it was still January and I drove home
and the roads were wet and the fields were wet
and a palette knife

had spread a slab of dark blue forestry across the hill.
A splashed white van appeared from a side road
then turned off and I drove on into the drab morning

which was mudded and plain and there was a kind of weary happiness
that nothing was trying to be anything much and nothing
was being suggested. I don’t know how else to explain

the calm of this grey wetness with hardly a glimmer of light or life,
only my car tyres swishing the lying water,
and the crows balanced and rocking on the windy lines.

Acceptance, Kerry Hardie via poets.org poem-a-day

the interrelation between self and other things.

effort to resist dissolution of those bounds in erotic emotion.

undeniable evidence remains, in the preserved fragments of their verses, of a sensibility acutely tuned to the vulnerability of the physical body and of the emotions or spirit within it.

— Anne Carson

Today ~ I found a squirrel ~ dreaming ~ the sleep of the young and unknowing ~ I pray for a world ~ scatter-starred with that kind ~ of tenderness ~ Nothing hears me ~ Let’s pretend

[…]

I write these words ~ a lifetime away ~ at the foot of the mountains ~ another sea ~ vaster galaxy ~ primordial and without memories

Dear Sister, Emma Trelles

All this beauty is tinder.

[…]

In Glitter Stucco and Dumpster Diving: Reflections on Building Production in the Vernacular City, the architect and urban planner John Chase describes LA as a city that follows no design or aesthetic ambition but insolently unspools from the desires of its people. LA has no Haussmann or Frederick Law Olmsted; it has Angelenos, and in the ‘mad and wonderful’ architecture of the city, with its stucco box houses alongside its faux Swiss chalets, its Tudor cottages, bungalows, faded pink apartment complexes and ancient auto repair shops, glittering strip malls and shabby hotels, there is a romantic stubbornness, at once dogged and extravagant, tender and brash.

[…]

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, … A fawn stumbled out of the smoke, and a horse ran back into it to nudge two other horses onward, faster.

Under the Santa Anas, Anahid Nersessian

Your speech evokes a thousand sympathies,
And all my being’s silent harmonies
Wake trembling into music.

Dreams, Amy Lowell

Newcleus, Jam On it. 1984.