Month: October 2021

poetry appreciation

hallowe’en

Oct 28, 2021 #ancestors, #Annie Finch, #autumn, #Celtic, #comfort, #connection, #continuum, #day of the Dead, #death, #Eternity, #fear, #Finch, #halloween, #mortality, #mother, #Samhain, #scary, #soothing, #spring, #time, #winter by Lucy Crispin

Well, if Strictly can have a Hallowe’en special, why can’t this column? I do like Annie Finch’s take on the Celtic Feast of the Dead, ‘Samhain‘. I don’t know that I understand it all intellectually but, as ever with me, that matters less than the feeling with which it leaves me. There’s a shiver, not of fear but something more like awe, of apprehending the vastness of time and our place in a continuum. See how the poem leaves you.

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poetry appreciation

walking with bears (or, seeing while walking)

Oct 21, 2021 #awareness, #Catherine Pierce, #Clarion the Bear, #climate, #climate change, #climate disaster, #cop 26, #environment, #glasgow, #Pierce, #pilgrim, #pilgrimage, #planet, #responsibility by Lucy Crispin

To be more precise: one bear. On Wednesday I was, briefly, part of a Climate Pilgrimage in which a polar bear and his companion are walking from Shropshire to the Cop 26 in Glasgow. Seeing all ten feet of Clarion the Bear being moved with great care and tenderness along Kendal’s busy main street was profoundly, unexpectedly moving: all that attention being lavished on one, vulnerable creature—he looked so ectopic in the blare and bustle of town—while the actual vulnerable creatures are unprotected. It was simultaneously beautiful and appalling.

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poetry appreciation

a touch of cold

Oct 14, 2021 #autumn, #Frost, #Hulme, #image, #Imagism, #Imagist, #moon, #natural world, #peace, #poem, #poetry, #stars, #TE Hulme by Lucy Crispin

You know that first smell of autumn? The first morning you leave the house and the air is different?—crisper, with that first whiff of deliciously decaying leaves? That’s one of my favourite moments in the year, and I’ve been looking for a poem which celebrates it. So far I haven’t found quite the thing—do let me know if you know one—but I did like the reference to ‘A touch of cold’ in this small but lovely poem, ‘Autumn‘, by TE Hulme. See what you think.

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poetry appreciation

message in a bottle

Oct 7, 2021 #anon., #art, #beauty, #communication, #function of art, #Joyce Glassman, #longing, #message in a bottle, #poet, #poetry, #sorrow, #transmission, #truth, #Western Wind, #Westron Wind, #yearning by Lucy Crispin

I was interested, the other week, to come across these words from Joyce Glassman: “Artists are nourished more by each other than by fame or by the public. To give one’s work to the world is an experience of peculiar emptiness. The work goes away from the artist into a void, like a message stuck into a bottle and flung into the sea.”

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