“I love borders. August is the border between summer and autumn; it is the most beautiful month I know. Twilight is the border between day and night, and the shore is the border between sea and land. The border is longing: when both have fallen in love but still haven’t said anything. The border is to be on the way.…
It’s been wet this August and last week was topped off by a cracker of a thunderstorm storm that dropped torrential rain and knocked out the power for a few hours. The routine stroll around the lake at Innisfree Garden was more of a squelch. Many paths were waterlogged and you could hear the roar of the waterfall from across…
Here then, as promised is the indulgence of blackberry poems. (For any very young readers confused by Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackberry please know that the Blackberry was a communication device from the early C21st introduced sometime after the era of cocoa tins connected with string.) So many blackberry poems. It’s almost as if all the poets had…
Farm work is one of the best jobs for getting to know people as they really are. The First Job and the Sweetest Sylvia Plath’s first job was on a farm in the summer of 1950. I am grateful to the inestimable Maria Popova (Brain Pickings) for these extracts from her journal and from an article in which…
Spring comes earlier in the UK than it does here and the growing season is longer and cooler. Plath’s poem is set in March. The narcissus are already out in full bloom. But there’s a March wind blowing and a struggle to breathe. Plath’s octogenarian Percy is among the narcissi but never a narcissist. The photographs are of Innisfree Gardens…