The Bony World by Kelly Shepherd

Kelly Shepherd is a Canadian poet who recently spent some time teaching in South Korea. The Bony World is a pamphlet of poetry that focuses on animals and our relationships with them from rescuing sea turtles to accidentally killing a butterfly chrysalis. There is a strong sense of magic relating to the animals, for example the magpie in one for sorrow is the 'only fixed point in the universe' and the bear in taboo deformation being the 'one who turns the heavens.' Loss permates the poems too, often with the sense of us losing our rightful balance with the natural world, as in the stone turtle:

People said as long as the stone turtle was there,
the real turtles would be there too

 The stone turtle has been damaged by people wanting souvenirs and although this poem doesn't specifically state that there are no more real turtles on this beach, that is certainly the conclusion the reader reaches.

This is a collection imbued with reverence for animal life, written with an eye for detail and a sense of wonder.

from inter canem et lupum

restless sheep dreaming nights
careful tread around the borders of campfire light
high, thin, hungry, howling
you divide yourself in half, in thirds,
into a whole circle of coyotes
so you have someone to sing with

This is not just a book of wonderful poetry, it's also a beautiful looking book, printed on a lovely cream, textured paper with cover art by Erin Candela.

The Bony World by Kelly Shepherd published by The Rasp and the Wine

I was delighted to be offered a review copy of this book and I sent a copy of my chapbook Unthinkable Skies in return.

You can read some of Kelly's poetry on Bolts of Silk here.

Text in red in this post contains hyperlinks.

Gift Box

It's the time of year to start thinking about Christmas gifts. Possibly slightly early to think about wrapping them but a bit of forward thinking may help plan how to reuse materials to wrap gifts! Chocolates and toiletries often come in boxes that can easily be reused as gift boxes. Here, I pasted some gift wrap over the brand name on the box and filled the box with shredded gift wrap that was too torn to reuse.

You can see more of my festive gift wrap ideas by following these links:

Silvery re-used giftwrapping

Green and white reused giftwrap

Fabric gift bags

Technology to the Rescue

It's very easy to see technology as the villain. However technology can be used in very positive ways to help the environment. Open Planet Ideas is an initiative between Sony and WWF that invites ideas on how technology can be used to address some of the pressing environmental issues that face us at the moment.

You too can join the challenge!  Currently there are over 150 ideas in six themes (Behaviour Change, Cleaner by Design, More with Less, Make it Real, Waste Not and  Recycling Revisited. Specific ideas include using technology to reduce waste or improve cooking methods, using rain as a power source or sharing ideas to reduce packaging waste.

My idea is to use mobile technology and CCTV to both help people improve their wildlife identification skills and at the same time to feed into wildlife recording schemes that are vital to the conservation of nature. This would tie in the image recording capabilities of mobile phones and CCTV cameras with the information held by wildlife organisations (such as the excellent online bird information on the RSPB website) to help with wildlife identification and then to tie in with recording systems (such as Birdtrack as run by the British Trust for Ornithology) to offer a interconnected system for both identification and recording, which would help individuals improve their wildlife identification skills and would help conservation organisations to record more wildlife. To find out more about the idea, you can visit this page and leave your comments.

Find Out More About Open Planet Ideas

There is a great potential for this scheme to generate a lot of ideas with potential to make environmental improvements. The best ideas will be selected and filtered to produce one final concept that Sony will research and develop. The winning device or idea will be made open source; Sony won’t profit directly from it.

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Kingfisher

We saw this kingfisher by the side of the Union Canal in Edinburgh today. Uncharacteristically it was posing nicely in a tree and then in this bit of undergrowth. Crafty Green Boyfriend doesn't have a zoom lens for his camera at the moment, but if you click on the photo you will get a larger view. The kingfisher is such a beautiful bird, wonderful colours. There had been worries that kingfishers in the UK might have really suffered over the cold winter, and although there have been fewer sightings than normal along the Water of Leith this year, it seems that overall in the UK, they've not done too badly this year. You can read more about the kingfisher's resurgence here. 

Greener Monday - local food in Edinburgh

Greener Monday is a fairly new social enterprise in Edinburgh that offers a virtual farmers market. They haven online shop offering products made within 100 miles of Edinburgh. They even have a map showing the area this covers.

I was delighted when Greener Monday offered me a sample food box to review and even more delighted when it arrived yesterday. I haven't been able to try anything yet (as I was out for supper last night!) but it all looks wonderful, and was wrapped in a box tied up with a tartan ribbon that I can reuse in a crafting project and including paper packaging material. The food items are:

Devilish Tomato Chutney from Isabella's Preserves, Tayside
Damson Jelly with Gin also from Isabella's Preserves
Ola - extra virgin cold pressed rapeseed oil from Ola, Aberdeenshire (Ola is Gaelic for oil)
Cracked Black Pepper Oatcakes from the Handmade Oatcake Company in Perthshire
Shortbread from the Shortbread House in Edinburgh
Porridge premix (with apple, sultana and cinnamon) from Stoats in Edinburgh
Blueberry drink from Bouvrage in Alloa

I notice though that the blueberries in the Bouvrage come from Finland, which given that Scotland seems to have a lot of blueberries is a surprise and undermines the local provenance of the product. I think this is a perennial problem for processed foods. The product might be produced in one locality but that doesn't mean that all the ingredients are sourced locally. I think the other products are all made from local ingredients though, and so qualify for being genuinely local.

So we'll look forward to eating and drinking and making notes over the next wee while and I'll do the second part of the review when we've tried a bit of everything!

A note about reviews etc: I mostly review books and films that I've chosen (and paid for!) myself but am happy to review products or services that are sent to me. I've set up a new page with a short note about this. I am nowadays sent a lot of press releases, which I may use as the basis of blog posts if I think they fit nicely within the blog. I may even on occasion write a sponsored post (and yes that does mean there's one coming up!) but only where I really believe in what I'm being paid to write about.

The red text in this post links to websites where you can find out more!

haiku

a dove

on the telephone wire -
distant thunder

Green Books Campaign: A Year in the Woods

This review is part of the Green Books campaign.Today 200 bloggers take a stand to support books printed in an eco-friendly manner by simultaneously publishing reviews of 200 books printed on recycled or FSC-certified paper. By turning a spotlight on books printed using eco- friendly paper, we hope to raise the awareness of book buyers and encourage everyone to take the environment into consideration when purchasing books.

The campaign is organized for the second time by Eco-Libris, a green company working to make reading more sustainable. We invite you to join the discussion on "green" books and support books printed in an eco-friendly manner! A full list of participating blogs and links to their reviews is available on Eco-Libris website.
 
A Year in the Woods by Colin Elford is published by Hamish Hamilton (an imprint of Penguin Books) on paper certified by the Forestry Stewardship Council. You can read more about Penguin's commitment to the environment here. The book is a lovely looking hardback in a smallish format with the pages printed on a nice paper.
 
The book is a diary of Elford's working life as a forest ranger on the Dorset / Wiltshire border. It appealed to me because of my voluntary work with the Water of Leith Conservation Trust where once a week I patrol an area of woodland along the river, recording wildlife, picking litter and keeping an eye out for pollution and other issues. Of course Elford's work is much more demanding and seems to take over his whole life, he is often found working late into the night or setting out before dawn into the forest. His tasks are also more wide ranging than I undertake as a volunteer, in fact one of his main tasks is to cull deer. In fact this leads to my one complaint about the book. Too much emphasis on the shooting! I definitely got the feeling that the book is aimed at the outdoor sports fan rather than the naturalist. I understand the need for culling populations of deer, they have no natural predators in the UK since we wiped out all the big carnivores that used to roam our countryside. However, I felt that the narrative could have been a bit less biased towards the hunting.
 
Having said that the book is fascinating. Elford obviously knows his patch of woodland intimately and makes  wonderfully detailed observations of the natural wonders around him.
 
Bobbing and swerving, the owl heads over some young pine. While one crow carries on the chase, the other soars skywards, then suddenly and violently stoops at the tawny; the owl crumples like an airborne mass of feathers, the force pushing  the bird deep into the pine tops, causing a massive burst of pine pollen.
 
It's the detail of the burst of pine pollen that is so interesting here, how many of us would notice that or recognise it for what it is?
 
This book gives a fascinating and personal insight into how our forests (and deer populations) are managed.

Disclaimer - I received a free copy of this book as part of the Green Books Campaign.