Transition effect

Tomas Transtromer

"often the shadow feels more real than the body"  
from After a Death
by Tomas Tranströmer

The link above is to a lovely film about the new Nobel laureate from UK publishers Bloodaxe Books - via Dave Bonta's Moving Poems. Such a beautiful and well-judged film, saved from overwhelmingly emotionality by the poet's words, which are often sad, but always intricate, engaging and attentive.

Through the gate

Somewhere

In the dying light of a cold, sunny day: in Cambridge yesterday, it was good to be somewhere else - a mental shift as much as physical.

Vintage

Images from Sunday that suggest a hole in time, another place: reminding myself that there is only here and now and yet in some way also not only this time, this place, the fear and desolation of this chill, flickering Autumn day, this empty ringing in my ears, this flinching and turning away, this mind that wants to be, to be, but not to be this, or thus, or something. Ah, something. Something could, I guess, be a tent pitched next to St Paul's in the City of London financial district. For now, I guess, this elderly person is watching, trying to open my heart and stretch it across the gap between the personal and the collective. Open-heartedness is difficult in a society where sheer survival often feels like it depends on quite the opposite. Action is difficult in a life requiring long hours of physical immobility and extremely restricted thought.

The right light

The austere beauty of Dulwich Picture Gallery is hard to capture in photographs. This past weekend the light was right - the miracle of Soane's design picked out in gold and shadow.

Thursday

Even the greyest of days...

tinywords!

One of my very few really satisfying attempts to date (and that very few are is fine, of course; what I love is writing them - the moment of presence and observation) at the haiku/micro-poem genre has appeared on tinywords. I'm incredibly pleased and proud of this, as I love the tinywords concept, they attract a lot of submissions and publish some really wonderful stuff.  Dave Bonta did an excellent podcast interview a while back with founder-editor Dylan Tweney, who's been publishing micro-poetry online since 2000: an excitingly appropriate and successful use of the medium.

And still the watchers on the wall

The sombre resonance of these figures that still look down on the stop where I change buses every week-day morning and evening rarely fails to move me. Without a doubt, James Russell Cant's giant prints are the most powerful public artwork I've come across. Taking photographs of photographs is an odd thing to do, I know. They're irresistible. In times of particularly relentless self-obsession, I guess I appreciate even more than usual the things that regularly pull my attention outwards. I note that when these first appeared nearly eighteen months ago I presumed their welcome presence at the grim Elephant and Castle road junction would be very temporary. How wonderful that this has proved not to be the case. The longer they stay, the more powerful their presence and the more powerfully they embody the opposite of boring, ephemeral or trivialised, the opposite of what is embodied by too much of the London streetscape.

Empty, white