Arts Articles
Bring to book: Alison Leonard takes a prompt
When the author Hilary Mantel died, her many admirers realised there would be no more magical novels, no more of her incisive commentary, or heartbreaking accounts of topics like women’s illness. Six months later, however, it was revealed that Mantel’s next work would have taken quite a departure....
The day and the seed of small things
How will it come, the day of small things between the heart-break and herb robert; the rape and the ox-eye daisies?
Scree at Pendle Hill
i Metal pins heal warts, ground-to-cloud lightning strikes the summit, nightmares the yellow sun of St. John’s Wort might soothe, arthritic...
Come to good
I will not break a bruised reed. I broke a bruised reed. I did not come to own the world. I tried to own the world. I never blew out a sputtering candle I extinguished the wavering wick.
The Meeting
In the soul’s deepest recesses there is a meeting like winds passing and beholding each other in mutual rapture. ‘You are here at last,’ breathes the soul in welcome, ‘you have come’.
What the animals said
Ashamed of cars and war, I went to the place of earth and sat under a ring of damson trees, and asked the damson stone to call the animals round. It took its time, took my hand to feel the twisted trunks, brittle twigs, the age-long infancy of damson, its...
Today I am giving up judgement
It drops but not like a knife skittering across the kitchen floor… The faces across from me: wind- bitten, old and close as mountain streams bloom in the rose steam of Hibiscus tea. I wonder how I hadn’t noticed their beauty in just this way before. Even the dog...
First Friend
Fox by name, George by birth, Earth-Quaker elevated to silent spokesman caught in the fault line of a civil war. Let us live simply, a postscript Penn of beatitudes maintaining a silence towards slavery louder than fear of a good-god inhabiting the crucible colours hung on Calvary.
Last Sunday
To Harvey Gillman Last Sunday I was prompted by love and truth to read out your poem ‘Gloria’ for it seemed particularly apt. Walking to our Meeting House in the keen east wind, I’d passed the bus stop, next bus fifty minutes hence.
The garden
Who they were, what they did, and which one was to blame is what the merry-go-round of sages pondered, dancing on the proverbial pin. And pondered also down the ages if the sin was ersatz or original, or even half and half, and if it started with a forked tongue