Archive for September 2020
ghosts are lonely here ….. new poetry collection
This spring, I began to gather together the various poems I have written over the years. One of my recurring interests has been abandoned buildings and other discarded human-built structures. And now, here is my book of poems about abandoned humanscape … ghosts are lonely here.
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My book is available in paperback and includes 45 poems and 14 of my original pencil drawings. Most of the poems are about abandoned structures in New Brunswick, Canada.
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We live in a time when built landscape is often in a state of abandonment: old churches, old bridges, old schools, old buildings. Add to this abandoned vehicles, abandoned boats and deteriorating stone walls, over-grown roads and decommissioned rail lines, and we exist in a landfill of nineteenth and twentieth century projects, abandoned to time. These poems listen to the histories and stories of the abandoned. The poems are sometimes sad, sometimes resentful, always wise.
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To order ghosts are lonely here, click here.
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Have a great day.
Jane
harvesting herbs
The colder nights have arrived and I have decided it is time to harvest my herbs.
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I have a lot of parsley in my deck garden. All summer, I have snacked every day on the leaves, loving the taste, the fresh air feeling that is the result.
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I enjoyed the harvest as well. With scissors, I cut the parsley leaves just below the branching of stems.
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I checked each set of leaves for bugs but the parsley is remarkably bug-free.
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I harvested into my colander, washed the leaves and set them to air-dry. Once the leaves are dry, I will load them into my drier, a Salton VitaPro. In a drying time of about three hours, I will have enough parsley for winter cooking.
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I have followed a similar process with my basil. Everything around me smells really good!!
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Hope you are enjoying your own produce if you are lucky enough to have a garden.
Enjoy your day.
Stay safe.
Do. Not. Get. Covid. Fatigue!
All my best,
Jane
the wisdom of faerie tales
As I write and revise the poetry for my ‘garden escapes‘ project, I search for references to enrich my poems. One category of these is the faerie tale. Many faerie tales include gardens in their tale-telling. Some include wisdom to be applied to my experience of the abandoned garden.
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I have chosen three faerie tales to include in my poems:
Rapunzel: the beautiful girl with the long, long hair is imprisoned in the tower because her father makes a bargain with a witch. In one version of the tale, the father steals rampion bellflower from the witch’s garden and gives his daughter as compensation.
Beauty and the Beast: a beautiful girl falls in love with an ugly beast. The tale tells us that you must sometimes look beneath the exterior to find inner beauty. This is another tale where a father is caught stealing a flower (a rose) from a garden and gives his daughter as compensation. Hmmmm.
Sleeping Beauty: when the princess is put to sleep, a thorny vine grows around the castle to hide her away.
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I have included these faerie tales in three of the poems I have written. Below is my poem incorporating the tale of Sleeping Beauty.
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wild cucumber (Echinocystis lobata)
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I think the story of Sleeping Beauty requires a little retelling, to make the princess less compliant. The three vines in the poem are:
- Clematis (Clematis virginiana): names include virgin’s bower and devil’s darning needle. This climbing vine has delicate white flowers and fluffy seeds
- Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia): an aggressive climber with leaves palmately divided into five lobes
- Wild cucumber (Echinocystis lobata): a prickly annual vine and a climber with tall columns of white flowers
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Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia)
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Sleeping Beauty
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“… round about the castle there began to grow a hedge of thorns, which every year became higher, and at last grew close up round the castle and all over it, so that there was nothing of it to be seen … ” –The Tale of Sleeping Beauty, the Brothers Grimm
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three vines whisper—
Clematis virginiana
Virginia creeper
wild cucumber, reshape
the hawthorn, the rose
with frail flowers
and five fingers
tendrils like springs
disguise the thorns
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keep curiosity seekers away
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dampen noises from
beyond the barrier
where wakeful Beauty
taps her nails
on foundation granite
wonders if anyone
will dare to tear
at tendrils, breach wall
of thorn and vine
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the need for rescue always in doubt
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only decades ago
a home chuckled
behind the hedgerow
mowed lawn and a dyer’s garden
tansy at the cellar door
flax in the meadow
Beauty dibbling seeds
deadheading flowers
tying up sweet pea
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only the cellar remains
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perhaps she will slash
her way through hawthorn
rip out wild cucumber
scrape away suckers of creeper
tame the hawthorn, the briar
renovate house and barn
encourage the scent of sweet pea and petunia
transparency of hollyhock and mallow
whisper of yellow rattle, rustle of grasses
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no more virgin’s bower
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Clematis virginiana
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This work was made possible by a Creations Grant from artsnb!
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All my best.
Are you getting COVID-fatigue?
Stay alert!
Jane
nichepoetryandprose 