haiku

New Year revellers -
the urban fox pokes its head
through the garden gate.

for a river of stones

Preparing for the New Year

As some readers of this blog will know, I will be participating in A River of Stones during January. A small stone is a polished moment of paying proper attention. Here are two I have already shared on Twitter:

a carrion crow, on a tv aerial, bows again and again, calling over and over 'caw, caw, caw'

fallen leaves trapped in the frozen canal - a carrion crow slides across, drinking the meltwater from the surface

(The second one was written after a wonderful walk along the Union Canal the other day, when we saw a lot of interesting birds, including my first bramblings for years!).

In January I will be sharing small stones on this blog, interspersed with other blog posts. If you want to join in you can find out more here.

If you read my Over Forty Shades blog, you may have noticed that I've not posted all that much recently. I've not been sure what to do with it, and have just kept it ticking over with the occasional poem, photo and book review. Next year however I have committed to three reading challenges, all of which I will be writing about on Over Forty Shades (The Haruki Murakami Challenge, the Italy in Books Challenge and the LGBT Reading Challenge). I also received a new camera for Christmas and am thinking of posting quirky photos of hidden architectural gems of Edinburgh over there, plus of course there will be occasional poems that don't fit on this blog. So it may become worth reading....

As ever, red text in this post contains hyperlinks to pages where you can find out more.

The Bird Artist by Howard Norman

Set in the early 20th Century, The Bird Artist tells the story of Fabian Vas, who paints birds. He also, as he tells us in the opening paragraph of the book, killed the lighthouse keeper in the small coastal Newfoundland village where he lives. The novel is an exploration of the story behind the murder, the relationships between the Vas family and the other villagers and how art and birds played a role in Fabian's redemption. It is full of wonderful details about the birds of the area and how to paint them.


Fabian Vas has a mentor Isaac Sprague with whom he has shared a long exchange of paintings and letters, which have helped him develop his skills and talent. Sprague is short on actual praise but his comments are always helpful: The most recent kingfisher ........ It was adequate. But the bird's reflection itself too closely resembled the actual bird's face. It wasn't even slightly distorted on the surface, so the texture of the water wasn't at all represented is a typical comment.


The novel is beautifully written and made me want to visit Newfoundland to see all these wonderful birds. I also wished the novel was illustrated.


The Bird Artist by Howard Norman published 1994 by Picador USA

Season's Greetings!

Happy Holidays everyone!

Christmas Haiku

fairylights
in the trees -
distant moon

*********************
fir tree -
icicles on the tip
of every branch

A River of Stones

In January 2011 I'll be joining in NaSmaStoMo. National Small Stone Month. The challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to write a small stone every day during the month of January. A small stone is a polished moment of paying proper attention. You can find out more and join in at A River of Stones. You can read a selection of small stones over on a handful of stones.

I'll be sharing my small stones here, interspersed with my other blog posts and I'll also be sharing them on Twitter.

Meanwhile I'm delighted that one of my haiku has been accepted for publication in the innovative and edible poetry journal Poetry Digest.

Lunar Eclipse

Memories of a reddening moon sliding through the sky outside the window. I watched every moment of the last lunar eclipse. Awed. This time though there was no chance to see it. Our flat faces the wrong way. We're too lazy to get up very early and travel through the snow and ice to find (and climb) a hill from which to watch, with no guarantee of clear skies. I took out the recycling early as an excuse to look for the moon. No luck. From ground level it was too low to see.

Somewhere
behind those buildings -
lunar eclipse.

But I have memories from a few years ago, a reddening moon in an awestruck night.