After a long walk to the east end of the city to get the screen on my phone replaced (it wasn’t the screen—it was the screen protector! a Christmas miracle!), and before a well-deserved nap (with the tabby cuddled up against my shoulder), I read Simon Armitage’s Dwell. Like Blossomise, it’s a chapbook more than a book, a collection of a dozen or so poems about the nests animals make (dreys, dens, lodges) and other places they call home (ponds, nest boxes, hives), and like Blossomise, it’s illustrated–this time with prints by Beth Munro. Also like Blossomise, it’s a lovely object.
Armitage was invited to write these poems by The Lost Gardens of Heligan, Europe’s largest garden restoration project, which, along with hosting horticultural research projects, also provides habitat, deliberately and accidentally, for birds, fish, amphibians, and mammals. It sounds like a place to visit on a European junket. The poems (of course, since they’re written by Simon Armitage) sing, especially one that imagines how a variety of creatures might review an insect hotel, which made me laugh. But I hate to single one out for praise; they’re all wonderful.
One nice recognition: Armitage often writes in free verse tercets or quatrains, as I do. I’ve always seen that as a kind of timidity in my work, a structure that keeps the maelstrom of formlessness at bay, but because it works in Armitage’s poems so well, maybe it’s a valid choice and not a pair of metaphorical training wheels. I dunno. The idea makes me happy, and it’s Christmas Eve, so I’m going with it.
I’ve submitted a proposal to a conference in Leeds, where Armitage is a professor, and if I get in, maybe I can get my copies of Dwell and Blossomise signed. They’re small enough that they wouldn’t take up much space in my carry-on. Of course, I could just as easily be told to take my proposal and play on it somewhere else, as Humphrey Bogart says in The Big Sleep.
I hope you enjoy the holidays, no matter how or what you celebrate, or whether you do or not. They’re a deep breath before the long bleak cold that lasts, here in southern Saskatchewan, until Easter. First the wassailing, then the wailing. It’s not that bad, really, but it can seem endless.