Beautiful Words
Mar. 8th, 2008 04:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nightdog_barksPicked up my January issue of Poetry magazine and found myself reading about a Scottish poet named Kathleen Jamie. I've resolved to order a couple of her books from Amazon -- Findings, which is a selection of essays, and The Queen of Sheba, a collection of poems. Here's one of her poems, from Waterlight:
Rooms
Though I love this travelling life and yearn
like ships docked, I long
for rooms to open with my bare hands,
and there discover the wonderful, say
a ship's prow rearing, and a ladder
of rope thrown down.
Though young, I'm weary:
I'm all rooms at present, all doors
fastened against me;
but once admitted start craving
and swell for a fine, listing ocean-going prow
no man in creation can build me.
In one of her essays, she writes about taking the ferry to the Orkney Islands in December, 2004, and visiting the Neolithic site Maes Howe in order to try and see the single beam of solstice sunlight penetrate the darkness and illuminate the stone room. This is a gorgeous piece of writing, with lines like this, where she's talking about the moon:
It shone through a smirr of cloud, spreading its diffused light across the water.
Or this, about the islands:
On Burgar Hill, three wind turbines turned sluggishly, and a ragged skein of geese flew above them. The islands have been farmed for a very long time, and if you climb a hill and look at the green lands below, the farmhouses are so plentiful they look as though they've been shaken out of a box.
Or this last bit, about the birds:
A pair of ravens, Odin's birds, seemed to follow me along the cliff-top, making comments to each other in their intimate cronking.
Here's the link to the full article, as posted in The Guardian:
http://books.guardian.co.uk/lrb/articles/0,6109,1124890,00.html
It's a great read -- I think everyone here will enjoy it.
Rooms
Though I love this travelling life and yearn
like ships docked, I long
for rooms to open with my bare hands,
and there discover the wonderful, say
a ship's prow rearing, and a ladder
of rope thrown down.
Though young, I'm weary:
I'm all rooms at present, all doors
fastened against me;
but once admitted start craving
and swell for a fine, listing ocean-going prow
no man in creation can build me.
In one of her essays, she writes about taking the ferry to the Orkney Islands in December, 2004, and visiting the Neolithic site Maes Howe in order to try and see the single beam of solstice sunlight penetrate the darkness and illuminate the stone room. This is a gorgeous piece of writing, with lines like this, where she's talking about the moon:
It shone through a smirr of cloud, spreading its diffused light across the water.
Or this, about the islands:
On Burgar Hill, three wind turbines turned sluggishly, and a ragged skein of geese flew above them. The islands have been farmed for a very long time, and if you climb a hill and look at the green lands below, the farmhouses are so plentiful they look as though they've been shaken out of a box.
Or this last bit, about the birds:
A pair of ravens, Odin's birds, seemed to follow me along the cliff-top, making comments to each other in their intimate cronking.
Here's the link to the full article, as posted in The Guardian:
http://books.guardian.co.uk/lrb/articles/0,6109,1124890,00.html
It's a great read -- I think everyone here will enjoy it.
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no subject
Date: 2008-03-09 12:03 am (UTC)for rooms to open with my bare hands,
and there discover the wonderful, say
a ship's prow rearing, and a ladder
of rope thrown down.
Wow -- don't we all feel like that sometimes? That's amazing.
no subject
Date: 2008-03-09 12:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-09 01:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-03-09 02:24 am (UTC)I looked at some photos on another site about Orkney -- what an incredibly bleak (yet beautiful) place.
A bit of light on the darkest day of the year must have been a great comfort for these people -- the fact that they would do this for their dead is both magical and humbling.