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writing the wild
Nature poacher
There were very few animal prints, because the snow was so recent. I headed down the field towards the site of the foxes’ dens – not so exciting since I discovered they were in fact rabbit burrows. I felt faint guilt at not finding rabbits as entrancing as foxes. In the middle of the field, […]
Posted in: Place
What the snowdrops said
February 14, 2013
Our work is underground. Earth holds us, woodland edge protects us, wind dances with us. We teach of transience. We are not interested in surface. The surface is an illusion through which we pass. It is what is beneath that makes us who we are. We are white because we have no need of colour. […]
Mist, ditch, wash
December 4, 2012
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I am lying in the centre of a wide shallow dish overflowing with cloud the colour of waste water. The low sky is unwashed, a matt, mottled grey, with no brightness to it. I can see nothing past the perimeter – no hills, no fields, no sun. The mist is on me like an upside-down […]
Posted in: Place
Half-light, half-life
September 11, 2012
Half-thoughts flickered in the half-light like the wren in the hedgerow impatient for sunrise. The sky and I were only half-awake in a desaturated, foreshortened world. Broken, abstract forms silhouetted against a dark palette of khaki, stone, and mud tones. Dead leaves and broken branches loomed starker than the living. The air seemed translucent with […]
Posted in: Place
Losing sight of the shore
August 22, 2012
Rain stung my face, and tall nettles bowed in the deluge swiped at my legs. The fence post sprayed water as I scrambled over the water jump of a stile into a war zone of thistles and thickly-scattered muck. Sheep blurred against field, wet in wet, getting up wearily, unenthusiastically, at my approach. Their long […]
Posted in: Place
No poem today
July 25, 2012
Water in a hurry slips off leaves of willow and hawthorn and splashes into a muddied, stony-bottomed pool. Beside it, three ponies nuzzle each other, and snuffle at short grass under bracken fronds and fresh shoots of whinberry. Here on the eastern flank of the Stiperstones, the remains of an old conifer plantation has been […]
Posted in: Place
Nordic horizons
July 14, 2012
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Listen to Horisont from the album Blå Harding – evocative, contemporary Norwegian folk music. Nils Økland plays the Hardanger fiddle, a traditional instrument with a particularly heart-rending, sinuous sound. Headphones on, eyes closed, I wrote about the landscape which this spare, dissonant music evoked in my imagination – cold, bleak horizons, and a rawness at the […]
Landscape poetry
June 17, 2012
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What is it? A creative response to the environment, in the form of poetry, prose or other writings; images, photography, art, video; speaking, singing, chanting; any other art form; or just being. At the heart of landscape poetry is the idea of listening to the environment, and creating a sense of connection with it. The […]
landscapepoet 
February 16, 2013
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