A Season of Books

reading to save our lives & our writing

(This post may be easier to read on the website by pressing the title above as some mail senders may truncate it)

Welcome friends, familiar and new.

Living more slowly, lingering and savouring are constant aspirations. Some days time stretches, other days it disappears in a blink. Last week we managed a long afternoon in our local café-bookshop in the forest and I wrote a whole section of a herbal course between cake and coffee and conversation. But on work days when we are chasing deadlines or days like a week-ago Friday when we had an email from the copyright library to let us know that a book they received had the wrong novel printed inside the cover, the day whizzes by in a blur of activity and fire-fighting.

There’s a regular circling back to resetting the rhythm — days with meditation, walking and reading are the days that are the most spacious, when time is at its most elastic and generous. But days when I tell myself I hardly have time to go to the bathroom, let alone walk in the forest, are the ones when time constricts into gnarly knots. This year so far has thrown some challenges (don’t they always?) but I set out in January to give more time to my reading. Of the things I’m most hungry for this year, it is words — books that are challenging or nurturing, stretching or profound, but always that are precise and embodied and connect me to another creature.

Books, I am convinced, are life-saving. Mary Oliver says this in a beautiful essay, ‘Staying Alive’ in her collection, Upstream, writing about how books were her refuge from a miserable childhood:

The second world — the world of literature — offered me, besides the pleasures of form, the sustentation of empathy (the first step of what Keats called negative capability) and I ran for it. I relaxed in it. I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything — other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned: that the world’s otherness is antidote to confusion, that standing within this otherness — the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books — can re-dignify the worst-stung heart. […]

I learned to build bookshelves and brought books to my room, gathering them around me thickly. I read by day and into the night. I thought about perfectibility, and deism, and adjectives, and clouds, and the foxes. I locked my door, from the inside, and leaped from the roof and went to the woods, by day or darkness.

[…]

I read my books with diligence, and mounting skill, and gathering certainty. I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.

For a writer, reading is non-negotiable. As an editor, I wince when someone seeking publication tells me they don’t have time to read other people’s work or that they don’t want to be ‘influenced’, as though our atoms and imaginings could ever only belong to one person. I read for a living — editing, doing book layouts, proofing the layouts… And I love this work, but it’s not the same as unwinding with a book that I can simply lose myself in. And I’m also aware that when my reading is squeezed into too little time, my writing weakens. What I’m reading doesn’t have to have any direct relationship to the writing, unless it’s specifically for research. It’s simply that the riches of language and form and story and sound and so much more get into the blood.

I read while the bath is filling in the evenings and before going to sleep. I have a kindle, but only use it when I’m travelling for and can’t heft enough books for the period, or for books that are otherwise unavailable. The kindle hasn’t been turned on since last summer. I love the tactile nature of books and though I frequently tell myself I’m not going to buy another book till all the ones on the unread shelf are read, I find myself hungry for books that present themselves in particular moments.

Last year I realised that sometimes I started so many books at once that some of them languish, half read, the momentum gone. So this year I decided to give myself a limitation — I would have no more than three books on the go at once — one poetry, one non-fiction, one fiction. It’s been a helpful container and in the first quarter of the year I’ve been delighted to read so many accomplished, fresh and moving works. There are some writers who I can never read enough of. I’d read their shopping lists if they published them. Anne Michaels and Anne Carson definitely come into that category, so having new works from both of them felt like a special blessing earlier this year. And there are also writers who I’ve newly discovered and have loved reading.

Novels

Samantha Harvey Orbital

Orbital is like reading lyrical prose poems. The concept is novel and intriguing — six astronauts from four countries in a spacecraft that orbits the earth 16 times every 24 hours — 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets each day. Every season and weather imaginable is observed daily. It’s one of the many things about their life in space that is utterly unworldly and mesmerising. As they collect meteorological data and perform experiments, including learning more about the human body, they observe the planet below them in reflections that are heart-breakingly beautiful. Glaciers, deserts, mountains, forests, oceans roll by and as they do, they muse on their relationships, on loss (one astronaut, from Japan, has just had news of her mother passing away), and on the enormity of the forces that grip the earth as they observe a typhoon heading for islands off the coasts off the Philippines, about to devastate poor communities, including a village where one of the astronauts recently found kindness and hospitality. And these annihilating forces are not merely random and natural:

The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything.

Everything about this short novel is pitch perfect — from the strange, isolated yet claustrophic dailiness of the spacecraft to its underlying questions about how we treat the home that we cannot survive without. And all in the most exquisite prose.

Sheila Armstrong Falling Animals

I picked up this wonderful novel in Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop in Galway last September and read it in January. Set in a coastal town in the west of Ireland, the story revolves around a body found on the beach, how it got there, what its story might have been. The corpose of man is found sitting with his hands folded in his lap, ankles crossed and smiling a little.

Each chapter changes character and gives the perspective if someone who met the man on his last day or had some connection, though his identity is never discovered. Lives weave together in the process and a sense of disquiet is never far below the surface in this place that has had more than its share of shipwrecks and strange events. There are layers of darkness unravelling in this novel, all beautifully controlled, and I was haunted by it for weeks after reading.

Anne Michaels Held

I have read everything Anne Michaels has written in book form and each publication has felt like a gift. Held is no exception. Moving across four generations in fragments of time and memory, the last chapter is chronologically the first and this novel continually challenges time — how it bends and loops with the weight of love and other emotions.

The links between characters and generations are sometimes fragile, but the echoes that resonate through their lives are deep and unifying and each person felt so vivid and dear. Anne Michaels writes her prose as she writes her poetry — full of reflection, images and space, so that the experience of reading her work feels healing even when the material of her character’s lives is troubling.

One of the unifying threads in the novel is around photography, the bursts of light that capture life, that hold ghosts, that capture love; the light that traces both long gone—human and stars. It’s an incredibly tender, beautiful book:

Steam rises from the pot. The microbial world receives our bones. Perhaps meaning lies in the change of state, thought Hertha. The purpose of synapses is the space between them; meaning is in the gap. How old is starlight? There is always a gap of time between an object and our seeing it—just as we cannot see the stars and just as we do not exist, Hertha thought sadly, to those who might see our starlight.

And this piece, which picks up an earlier reflection in the novel:

…one could make a long exposure—say thirty years of married life, or family life in a kitchen, infants growing to adults—and all that photographic plate would show was an empty room. But it would not be empty, instead it would be full of life, invisible and real. And she thought someday she would look in the mirror and see only the empty room behind her. And then, with a very, very long exposure—say, perhaps, eternity—perhaps we reappear.

*

Where else would spirit be but embedded in matter?

On her website, Anne Michaels says this about the writing process:

Writing Held, I understood instinctively that the disparate pieces of this novel were connected deeply, but did not understand precisely how; connections can’t be forced, one must wait for them to reveal themselves, but this waiting is active, researching and receptive, with all one’s instincts aroused. Every day writing this book I asked myself: in these urgent times, what voice might be small enough to be heard; what do we need now. We measure history by events and actions, but this book wants to assert a different measure for history, the real and powerful effect of our inner lives – what we believe, what we value, what we love, what we aspire to. It is especially important to assert this now, when our values, compassion, ideals, aspirations as a species, are being tested, and will continue to be tested to the limit.

Whatever else you read this year, read Held.

Michael Cunningham Day

I always enjoy Michael Cunningham’s novels. I believe in his characters. I miss them when I finish the last page. And I greatly admire how he presents the internal lives of people without a lot of telling, how he’s able to keep every detail lucid and embodied. It’s set on one day revisited across three years — 2019, 2020 and 2021 - so we know from the outset that it’s about the shattering effects of the pandemic.

It’s very much about how we live now — the dreams that got shelved, the loves that got away or became dull and paper-thin with time and reality, the jobs that ebb from promise to drudgery. And it’s about relationships — in this case a triangle of married couple and the wife’s gay brother, who is living in their spare attic room in the 2019 segment of the book. A triangle that also opens into the couple’s young children, vividly drawn and quirky, and the husband’s brother and his own messy relationship with the gay friend he’s fathered a child with.

It’s domestic and intense and psychologically revealing — as much for the things that don’t get said and the passions that get shunted off the agenda by life happening, as for the conversations we hear. And there is a direction that surprises, which I won’t spoil, that resonates with the way all of us have been changed by those years, even if the individual changes of those details are unique to each of us.

Michael Cunningham By Nightfall

I’m not sure how I managed to miss this novel that came out in 2011, except that it was a strange year for me, but it was good to catch up with it in a double-bill with Day. It’s another novel in which inner lives are centred, and in this case particularly the inner life of Peter Harris, a New York gallery owner and art-dealer, who is good but not great at what he does, who is in a marriage that may be flagging and whose young adult daughter has dropped out of life as he conceives it and isn’t speaking to him.

At the centre of his unreliable self-narrative are two threads: the struggle to justify himself to himself and a fantasy he has constructed around his wife’s family, particularly her beautiful, feckless, much younger brother, a (possibly recovering) addict, who is coming to stay. The question for Peter is whether his romantic notions of perfect beauty (in art and in people) will lead him to ruin his own life. Read it and see.

Irene Solà When I Sing, Mountains Dance

This is an extraordinary, ambitious novel. As someone who has recently completed a novel in which the forest has its own voices, I loved the animistic sensibility of a book in which lightning, mountains, deers and ghosts speak as clearly and forcefully as the humans in this village high in the Pyrenees. And the humans are mesmerising too. There’s Domènec, a farmer who walks the mountains reciting poetry and gathering black chanterelles; there are the ghosts of seventeenth-century witches and the ghosts of the civil war. There is Sió, trapped between her husband’s strangely silent father and the children she can never quite love, Hilari and Mia, whose own lives we watch unfold, meeting Mia’s lovers and discovering their secrets…

The prose is lyrical, fierce, and inventive as it explores love and grief with an insistent rhythm that had me thoroughly immersed.

Lauren Bastide 2060

This is the one novel I’ve read in another language (French) this year — very slowly. Set in 2060, on the last day of the world, each of the twelve chapters takes an hour of the day, beginning at six in the morning. The protagonist is an elderly woman who wakes knowing that today is the day of the predicted disaster that will end it all. What she does is go about a simple day — she makes a herb tea, feels grateful for her house, and revisits memories. We move from of a childhood with women who were either miserable or absent, her unfulfilling years of married life as a mother in a bourgeois family, her break-out into eco-feminist and resistance movements, her lovers, her passion for books and the ways in which she has failed in her commitments to others.

Bastide chose an asteroid as the device for the world’s end, referred to as FDM (la fin du monde), but did so as an ironic device since she is a feminist eco-activist herself and believes it will be humans, not a rock from space, that end life as we know it. Nonetheless, I was constantly reminded of the Lars von Trier film, Melancholia. The tone is full of loneliness and melancholy and in the background is a religious fundamentalist state as dystopic as Atwood’s in The Handmaid’s Tail. It’s a dark, yet poetic novel; not an easy read, but I’m glad I engaged with it.

Poetry and a Play

Alycia Pirmohamed Another Way to Split Water

I subscribe to packets of books from The Poetry Book Society that arrive seasonally. It’s an excellent way to keep abreast of contemporary poetry and the books are always well crafted and intelligent, but don’t always ignite emotional resonance. Not so Another Way to Split Water.

Water runs through these poems, alive and liminal, the element of ocean crossings and the mist that a person might disappear into, the way it transforms from fragmented drops to a cohesive whole. Born in Canada, with a lineage that spans Tanzania and India there, the poems transport us from Dar es Salaam to Alberta, Gujerat to Scotland, where the author now lives. The natural world is alive and embodied in these poems, place figuring as a multiplicity that we can inhabit at once and across time. Prayer too, is central, a binding thread of family and heritage, but also a complex area as the persona of the poet grapples with her relationship to faith, in this case Islam. There are beautiful moments of transformation in these exquisite poems and this collection is the one I’m telling everyone to read currently. And I’ve also just discovered that

Alycia Pirmohamed

is also on Substack.

Jori Graham To 2040

Graham is an incredibly accomplished poet and this is her fifteenth collection. It opens with an ominous question that has no question mark, making it even more foreboding:

Are we
extinct yet. Who owns
the map.

Prophetic and dark, we enter a world where ‘rain’ needs a translation and wired birds sing with the voices of their extinct ancestors. Species loss, ruins and sirens abound, yet Graham also pauses for intimate moments with the earth, from the worm to the soil itself. Narrated by a persona who is undergoing radiotherapy and musing on personal mortality, the collection is an urgent call to avoid a future that might already be inevitable. To 2040 is a hard read and I found this especially reflected in poems of jagged line length set hard against the right hand margin, so that the line turns felt dislocating, and no doubt intentionally so. Yet it is also a collection that refuses to entirely give up on hope and needs to be heard.

Inhale
Are you still there
the sun says to me.

Roselle Angwin River Suite

This is a beautiful multilayered collection with a wonderful sense of place. It was written as a commission with an impossible brief — a local poem that could be used in schools with young children and teenagers and also suitable for adults. That the language is simple and clear fulfilled part of this brief, but that it is also a work that is layered and deep and bears multiple readings fulfills the whole ‘ask’ with aplomb.

Accompanied by exquisite full-colour artwork by Vikky Minette, the poem follows the path of the River Dart and I loved that while stretches of it are exquisite, others are polluted or littered. This is a real place and it sings off the page — the use of rhythm here is incredibly skillful, echoing the movement of the water and giving the poem an energy that is palpable. And you can read more of

Roselle Angwin

’s writing here on Substack.

Anna Swir Talking to My Body

Translated from the Polish, the collection explores World War II experiences, motherhood and the female body. From childhood poverty to being part of the resistance in Warsaw under the Nazi occupation, from memories of her parents to an account of waiting to be executed, the poetry is visceral, precise and frank. For Swir, body and soul are inimical — the body wants nothing to do with the soul, it wants only freedom and to seek comfort in other bodies since, for the poet, religion offers no refuge and all we look forward to is decay and death.

Czesław Miłosz, who knew Anna Swir and translated the collection, writes in the introduction that the over-riding theme is the flesh:

Flesh in love-ecstasy, flesh in pain, flesh in terror, flesh afraid of loneliness, exuberant, running, lazy, flesh of a woman giving birth, resting, snoring, doing her morning calisthenics, feeling of time or reducing time to one instant.

It can be a discomfiting read, but one that arises out of a particular set of experiences and one that pays real attention to the materiality of our existence.

Anne Carson Wrong Norma

I am in awe of Anne Carson’s work. I love the long, complex essay that is Eros: the Bittersweet. I love the way Plainwater moves between essays and poetry and I adore the conversational flow, irony and poignance of Glass and God. Nox is one of the most beautiful poetry objects I’ve ever held, as well as being tragic and elegaic and Antigonick (a retelling of Antigone) is as exquisite as it is heart-breaking. I was delighted by Float, a collection of 22 chapbacks including Nay Rather, which considers the right to remain silent and I adore her edition of Sappho’s fragments, If Not. Winter… I could go on. But suffice it to say that I was extremely excited to receive Wrong Norma, her latest collection, mostly written in lyrical prose pieces that Anne Carson says ‘don’t add up’.

It would be hard, probably impossible, to sum up this extraordinary book and I can see that many people might find it frustrating because Carson insists on saying so much about how hard language really is.

words can squirt sideways, mute and mad; you think they are tools, or toys, or tame, and all at once they burn all your clothes off and you’re standing there singed and ridiculous in the glare of the lightning. (‘Snow’)

The range here is enormous and the pressure on allusion and literary reference is staggering. Carson lists her subjects as

Joseph Conrad, Guantánamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget’s Thesaurus, my Dad … Russian thugs.

And there is more — a prose poem in the voice of Socrates, an illustrated account of a meeting between the fascist philosopher Heidegger and the poet Paul Celan and a sequence about a violent world of assassins and drug lords (Thret)… Yet the collection never becomes heavy or ego-laden. Carson has a razor-sharp wit which she often turns on herself — she’s out to burst her own bubble as well as seeing the wry and absurd in so much of life.

And if all that is not enough, Carson also did the cover and all the illustrations herself. The collection is a facsimile of her hand-done original. Just wonderful.

Jen Campbell Please do not touch this exhibit

This is a moving and powerful short collection that digs deeply into disability, and how we construct narratives, especially around trauma. Using mythology and the strange creatures that inhabit it, Campbell narrates her history of multiple operations and being made to feel likme a medical ‘exhibit’from childhood, as well as her experiences of IVF treatment. The poems are deeply haunting.

Sometimes strange, moving between celebration and pain, and achingly tender. This is an imtimate, courageous collection written with inventiveness and grace.

Maria Stepanova Holy Winter 20/21

When the Covid pandemic forced Maria Stepanova to leave Cambridge to return to Russia, she spent a winter of isolation, feeling the withdrawn world and time as having ‘gone numb’. Later, reading Ovid, she began to translate her pandemic experiences through voices and metaphors, producing this book-length poem. Winter, war, exile, isolation and the existential crisis of feeling cut-off, weave though the poem, illustrated with images that conjure the precise feelings of the moment. Threaded with love letters and travelogues, Chinese poetry and fairy stories, the piece becomes a multi-voiced conjuring of time frozen and time thawing. Experimental and spell-binding, this is a moving and resonant work that captures a time that is still sending shock waves across the world.

Karine Polwart Wind Resistance

Laid out as a lyrical play, Wind Resistance is the written version of a stage play with original music (A Pocket of Wind Resistance). I haven’t heard the musical version but the words alone are haunting and beautiful. The stories that wind through the multi-layered piece (a mixture of narrative. dialogue, song words, ecological information and description) are tender and moving. I was wholly immersed in its spells, moving from a meditation on sanctuary to walking a moor, from an intimate birth story to a local (true) story of horrific loss and profound love, from the intricacies of flight to medieval medicine. This is a gorgeous, original project.

Non-fiction

Kerri Ni Dochartaigh Thin Places

This is a beautiful and sometimes difficult to read book. Charting growing up in the Troubles in Londonderry, in a family with one Catholic and one Protestant parent, a family that breaks, there is a constant sense of danger and not belonging. The forced nomadism from one house to the next and the ubiquitous threat or nearness of violence (including a petrol bomb through the author’s bedroom window at the age of eleven) inevitably lead to deep trauma.

Somehow in this turbulence, intergenerational links and the natural world offer another perspective — providing the portals of ‘thin places’ between the everyday world of insecurity and an enchanted and tender world of healing that is as fragile as a moth’s wing.

This is not a glib offering up of the natural world as an instant salve. The suffering here is never shrugged off or diminished, but there is the possibility of transformation — long, hard-won, but full of wonder, as breath-taking as the wild swims that Kerri takes along the way. And it’s also a prophetic cry against allowing borders to harden, a warning that invisible lines can become lines of terror again, a plea to honour the land in ways that nurture life rather than dividing it with our maps.

The writing moves from exquisitely lyrical to raw, from descriptive to vulnerable, and always with grace and skill.

You can find more of

Kerri ní Dochartaigh

’s writing on Substack.

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May Sarton A Journal of Solitude

I love books that offer insights into living creative lives and the artistic processes that go with them. A Journal of Solitude does this with the added depth of charting a period of depression and slow recovery whilst also beginning to write again:

I hope to break through into the rough, rocky depths,to the matrix itself. There is violence there and anger never resolved. My need to be alone is balanced against my fear of what will happen when suddenly I enter the huge empty silence if I cannot find support there.

The prose is as beautiful as her poetry and although this is a relatively priveleged life, there isn’t a sense of entitlement but of making connections, whether with neighbours or the natural world, and of holding a mirror to the self, not from indulgence but in order to survive and move through a dark period. And I valued it too for its meditation on how difficult it can be to value our own writing.

So much of my life here is precarious. I cannot always believe even in my work. But I have come in these last days to feel again the validity of my struggle here, that it is meaningful whether I ever “succeed” as a writer or not, and that even its failures, failures of nerve, failures due to a difficult temperament, can be meaningful.

James Roberts Two Lights

The two lights of the title of this extraordinary book by

James Roberts

are dawn and dusk. Walking in these lights unites a stunning range of searches for wild place. The pictures painted, both in James’ powerful and fluid black and white images and in words, introduce us to places and creatures near and distant. We meet wolves in the Pacific Northwest and travel from wet and windy Wales to the border between Uganda and Rwanda…

And as we walk the question of all that could be so easily loss, some of it lost already, travels with us. This is a searching, eloquent plea for the earth that is deeply considered and intelligent. And despite the fragility that is discovered, it is a book that dellights in and celebrates the wild, refusing to relinquish hope.

A lyrical, joyous, vital read that has recently been long-listed for the Michael Ondaatje Prize for sense of place, with very good reason.

And if you want more of

James Roberts

’s writing and art, it’s here on Substack.

Gail Reichstein Wood Becomes Water

I hve a stack of herbal books constantly on the go, but often use them as texts to dip in and out of. Most of my herbal practice revolves around Celtic herbs and a cosmology that harks back to the Druids, but the confluence of a research project I’m working on for my final herbal exams and a course with my yoga nidrā mentor,

Yoli Maya Yeh

brought me to this fascinating book.

Drawing on ancient Chinese medicine and the five elements of Chinese cosmology -- wood, fire, earth, metal, and water -- it’s a clear and interesting book that takes a particular approach to how our physical, emotional, and spiritual health interacts and how we can assist our well-being with the wisdom of ancient traditions. I remain a Celtic herbalist, but the dialogue with other lineages is always important and illuminating.

Billy Bragg The Three Dimensions of Freedom

My reading in the first quarter of this year has been a delight. All except one book. The problem was that Bragg seemed to think he’d solved world problems with a tiny book that didn’t dig deeply and didn’t say much at all.

Yes, we’re living in a post-truth age and yes, free speech is at risk and algorithms can manipulate how we vote, but is the problem as simplistic as having a ‘one-dimensional notion of what it means to be free’ and the need to add equality and accountability to the mix?

I have no argument with equality and accountability, but nothing here was deeply defined. It all felt amorphous, like an amateur blog piece that made the right sounds with no substance. Restoring

the individual agency engendered by the three dimensions of freedom

could no doubt raise a lot of ‘likes’ on social media, but where is the map of how we get there or even just the odd sign-post? A rote reptition of the history of Thatcherism won’t, sadly, get us to new territory. In a world in desperate need of new stories I felt severely short-changed by this book.

Katherine May Wintering

I’m a winter person. I love the sense of hibernation, the chance for slowness and solitude, the cosiness of winter nights. I also know it can be a place to get stuck, to be dragged down, to beging feeling heavy and to start longing for the warmth and light to return. All of this and much more is captured in Wintering by the wonderfully lucid and accomplised writer,

Katherine May

.

Struggling with growing depression in the face of the joylessness and mindless bussyness of so much of modern living, and catalysed by a family illness, Katherine May made some brave decisions to change her life, despite the financial insecurity that it could have meant. In a year of living more slowly and deliberately, she learnt from the hibernating dormouse, the tuneful robin and other aspects of the natural world, that there are other ways to live.

Rest and restoration are the heart of this soulful, elegantly written and inspiring book that also recounts other wintering voices to offer us many ways of seeing life from different perspectives. The book invites us to have the same courage to choose healing over living in grooves that are wearing thin beneath our feet, even if it means a spell of wintering.

Read the book and subscribe to

Katherine May

’s generously written Substack too.

Maggie Smith You Could Make This Place Beautiful

In this fragmentary and compelling book, poet Maggie Smith reflects on the unexpected and traumatic breakdown of her marriage while she is a mother of young children. The story is deeply personal, but this is very much a memoir, not a slice of autobiography, so there is a lot of honest self-reflection and also consideration on how a story of betrayal and broken dreams fits into a larger society.

This distinction is an important one — this is not a book about spilling the dirt or taking revenge even when the emotions are raw or bewildered or questions remain unanswered. The best memoirs make us ask questions about ourselves as we read, even if our particular lives are very different from the one we are reading about, and Maggie Smith does this extremely well. There is also space here for fascinating reflection on her life as a poet and how we shape our writing journeys, with poetry along the way, including the final word of the book, a moving and apt poem to finish this chapter of a life that changes in ways that were never looked for but proove transformative.

Ruth Allen Grounded

Grounded is a visually appealing book (full of gorgeous photography) that explores our fundamental connections with the nature that we are part of and how our physical and mental health are so bound up with this connection. It’s an accessible, encouraging book that is invitational and practical.

Structured around 8 chapters: Presence, Connection, Movement, Stillness, Solitude, Wild, Mystery, Perspecive, we are led through different aspects of this connection and ways in which our individual practices can widen to give us a deeper sense of grounding:

Becoming grounded is about taking a broad look at the whole landscape of our lives, as well as focussing on the specific terrain. […] I see grounded as a byword for what it means to be in good relationship with the earth, and by extension with ourselves and others.

Simple, elegant and warm, you can read more of

Ruth Allen

’s work on Substack and I’m excited to be also reading her new book, Weathering.

Kerri Ni Dochartaigh Cacophony of Bone

This is a book that I’ve only partly read, simply because it’s written as a book of days so I’m forcing myself to read it as the year passes, resisting the urge to leap ahead. Written during the extraordinary year of lockdowns, it charts huge life changes, both those shared across the globe and others that are deeply personal.

It proceeds through diary fragments, each tender month beginning with a list of names for the month’s full moon, and also includes some longer (2-4 page) pieces of reflection. There’s a mixture of vulnerability and clarity here that sings off the page, a distinctive prose style that is lyrical and lilting and an engagement with land and environment that is often breath-taking.

It’s a beautiful companion to any year as well as a reminder of a year that changed so many lives. If you don’t subscribe to

Kerri ní Dochartaigh

’s Substack, it is also a place of exquisite prose and honesty about our writing journeys and how we make and mend lives in a an uncertain and challenging world.

What are you reading currently?

Do you have ways of organising your reading?

Particular times of day when you read?

How does reading impact on your writing?

On how you see the world?