Tag: Wolf Crossing
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Foxing
Slip like quiet fire through woods on velvet feet (bad fairies gave foxes their foxgloves to transform them into silent hunters)i. I hear a mouse think under a foot of snow, and making a springing high-dive pounce to catch it, such that my tail waves vertically, joyfully, ludicrously, in the air above me. …
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Tame
the skin peels off my face ……………..Cheap tears of bone organs collapsing, unlace then stitch ligaments. moving spinal columns ……………..I watch my body remove my inner symptoms then cover up pushing against stretched leather ……………..Cut me up for fun in amongst the forest heather displace the poison red staining pale white ……………..Teeth elongating reaching…
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The Light Comes in the Name of the Voice
“The light comes in the name of the voice.” – Jeanne d’Arc, as quoted by Anne Carson in Variations on the Right to Remain Silent And in the end, only this moment. First the ash-pile, white, fine wood-ash, grimy ice, a grey noon. The pigs. Frost lacing the leaves. The girl with itchy…
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Popular Astronomy
Agnes Mary Clerke (1842-1907) was not a practical astronomer, but wrote a number of important books and articles that explained existing astronomical research to the general public. Winter, the ghosts of fuchsias sigh; in the frost, the fox chews mouse-tails. I step in each of my father’s foot-prints as we carry the telescope…
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The Way of Florida
Russell Persson’s The Way of Florida is a compact, driving, rhythmical work – a novel, but quite unlike most. The book revisits the ill-fated Narváez expedition of the sixteenth century, which saw a group of some 600 Spanish, Greek, and Portuguese explorers arrive on the coast of Florida intent on establishing preliminary colonial settlements and…
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Editorial: Wolf Crossing
Look into the eyes of the wolf. What does it see? On 29th August 2016, shortly after the announcement of Steve Bannon’s appointment as Donald Trump’s new campaign CEO, The New Yorker ran a cartoon by Paul Noth. It shows a large billboard standing in a field of grazing sheep. Upon it is a wolf…
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The World Without Us
Deborah Westmancoat is a British contemporary painter based in Somerset, UK. She has a long term interest in alchemy and the philosophical sciences and how they help us to understand landscape and our place within it, particularly how the traditionally held metaphysical stages of alchemy: nigredo (blackness), albedo (whiteness), citrinitas (yellowing) and rubredo (redness) might…
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Wild Alphabet: The Wolf in Irish Poetry
The final wolves in Ireland were wiped out some time during the eighteenth century, outliving the wolf in England by almost three hundred years. The process of their extinction, exacerbated and even engineered by the English colonisation of Ireland, bears multiple parallels with the gradual diminishment of the Irish language, itself subjected to a sustained…
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In Bocca al Lupo: Three Mountain Walks
28th February 2013 1st March 2014 I slid across the leather seats as the car swung around the obstacles on the track; pulled forwards and pushed back as the steep slopes were tackled. The headlights carved tunnels of green from the forest, the keys rattled against themselves and the…
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Mhadaidh, Maddy, Mad
Corrie nam Fiadh, Deer Corrie the gentleness ………of browsing deer Allt a’ Mhadaidh, Wolf Burn will never ………dissolve the wolf Some place-names refer to one-off events, like pegs stuck in the ground of memory. Others reckon the catastrophe of species loss over centuries. In his pioneering study of the influence humans have on…
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Stone Ghosts
On Mount Mitsumine in Oku-Chichibu, some 1,000 metres above sea level and surrounded by forest, is Mitsumine-Jinja – the most famous wolf shrine in Japan. The wolf in Japanese folklore is a powerful presence but, unlike in traditions elsewhere, it is a benign figure revered as a messenger of the spirits, a protector of crops…