Wonderful poems, starting with Clarke's viewing of a "Blood Moon" lunar eclipse in 2019, an ominous precursor to her reflections on the COVID pandemic, a reminder of the unnecessary deaths, the silence of those taken by the virus, the silence of those in power regarding those deaths, and the gradual quietening of the world during lockdown and the temporary resurgence of the natural world. The poems gradually turn to the changing of seasons, ⬇️

"Black sky of stars and a risen moon
in the sleeping arms of the beech."

- Blood Moon
691 and 21 January 2019

We've had a gloriously sunny weekend in Lancashire, but now the predicted storm is brewing, thunder is rumbling closer & lightning flashes briefly cutting through the gathering gloom - I love this weather! ⛈️
Listening to The Doors "Riders on the Storm" & ELO'S "Symphony for a Rainy Day", & about to start Gillian Clarke's latest poetry collection, "The Silence", featuring her native and beloved Wales, COVID lockdowns and WWI, amongst other topics.

Starting this for the #LitsySciFiBookClub @TheSpineView
I watched the first episode of the Netflix series, but Mrs B wasn't taken with it, then the book was nominated for the group read, so I've paused the show to avoid spoilers.
I see this has mixed reviews, but I'm partial to some hard sci fi, so have hopes for an enjoyable read 😊📡👽

That was surprisingly better than I expected it to be 😊
The first story is basically a Western with Dredd as sheriff in a border town run by a corrupt business family, with high explosive weapons, mutants and radioactive twisters.
The second story sees Dredd battered and bloodied, running a gauntlet of violent perps in a locked-down Mega-Block, not dissimilar to the excellent Karl Urban Dredd movie.
⬇️

I went out without a book! ? Panicked! ? Bought this ? so that I had something in case of a reading emergency (you can't be too careful!), and came home immediately without further incident ?
My book-monkey brain likes to play tricks! ???
So, I feel obliged to read this now: from the Old Woman in Purple, Jenny Joseph, a 1978 collection of poems which "gives a better view [than Warning] of the range and originality of her work". Sounds good.

I was running errands in town (ok, I ordered a book and bought a book!) and saw this inspirational prose poem chalked on a wall between the back yards of two pubs. ❤️

"It's never too late to grow back,
No matter how little light there is, no
Matter if it's just bricks and cement
Around you. Even when the circumstances
Feel hopeless, there is always time,
There is always a chance. You are not doomed.
It will get better.
YOU WILL GROW" ?

1947 Faber edition of Brooke's culturally significant poetry collection, containing his five-sonnet cycle of war poems published within weeks of his death on active duty in WWI. That he died from an infected mosquito bite and never saw combat was less mentioned at the time, and that he died in 1915, before the worst excesses of Industrialised War, made his elegiac poems a perfect propaganda memorialisation of the millions of Patriotic Dead. ⬇️

"And after, ere the night is born,
Do hares come out about the corn?
Oh, is the water sweet and cool,
Gentle and brown, above the pool?
And laughs the immortal river still
Under the mill, under the mill?
Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain?… oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?”

- The Old Vicarage, Grantchester

“I would think of a thousand things,
Lovely and durable, and taste them slowly,
One after one, like tasting sweet food.
I have need to busy my heart with quietude."

- The Busy Heart

“If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by the suns of home."

- The Soldier

A bit jingoistic for my taste, but still affecting ???????

"We have built a house that is not for Time's throwing,
We have gained a peace unshaken by pain for ever.
War knows no power, Safe shall be my going,
Secretly armed against all death's endeavour;
Safe though all safety's lost; safe where men fall;
And if these poor limbs die, safest of all."

- Safety

"Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,
Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,
And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,
And all the little emptiness of love!"

- Peace

#FirstLineFridays #ShyBookOwl

The first novel in the three-book omnibus, "Judge Dredd: Year Two", was better than I'd anticipated.
Dredd is still new on the streets of Mega-City One, & having brought down his corrupt clone-brother, Judge Rico Dredd, in the previous trilogy, makes him more, not less, suspicious in the eyes of the Special Judicial Squad's Judge Gillen. Proceeding from an assumption of guilt, Gillen's investigation sees Dredd sidelined & seconded to guard duty ⬇️

In an America riven by factional violence, political in-fighting, gangs, and gun crime, in which human life is held cheap and social cohesion is threatened, a para-military police force rises to enforce the Law, regardless of Justice, to quell protest and protect the vested interest of a rich elite.
So, to distract myself from all that, I thought I'd read a Judge Dredd novel.

A book of poems for children? Perhaps, if written by Uncle Edgar Allen Poe for niece and nephew Wednesday and Pugsley Addams 💀
While not overtly horrific, the overall atmosphere is of melancholy, loss, death, night and febrile passion.
The opening poem, The Horseman, initially reads as a bit of nonsense nursery rhyme, but then, surely, the pale rider on his ivory horse coming over the moonlit hill can be none other than Death stalking the ⬇️

I picked this up in Keswick Oxfam last week: a 1942 illustrated edition of a Walter de la Mare collection of poems for children. It's in reasonable shape, except that Oxfam vandalised it with non-removable stickers on the rear of the dust jacket! I mean, why would you? 🤷‍♂️ Anyway, de la Mare is one of those authors I've always known of, but never read other than the odd short story here and there, so worth reading a book just to have done so.

Just to connect for a moment with something lighter than my previous few posts, this dapper gentlecat is Leto, my son's pet, wearing his harness in preparation for an outside walk 🐈‍⬛
He's a former homeless cat himself (I now realise a connection to previous posts!) and has settled into his forever home very well. He came on a visit to our house at Easter and adjusted very quickly. Sweet little guy 😺
#CatsOfLitsy

Incredibly moving and emotional account of the reality of living as a street homeless woman in 21st century Britain. The dark-edged pages are transcripts of Perriman's interviews with women living on the streets, all of whom report (not graphically) sexual harassment and rape by men with homes to return to, and the common degradation of being urinated on by drunken clubgoers 😮‍💨
The contributors are keen not to present homeless people as ⬇️

"It is far stronger to acknowledge an issue, accept it and attempt to restore it than it is to bear the pain, dismiss what it calls for and carry on. Moving on in this way is not being strong or positive; it is denial. Being positive is not plastering a smile over a hard experience; being positive is recognising this experience for its negative nature and acting upon it to make it transformative.”

- Violence and Trauma: Laura E. Fischer

"The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich."

Well, it's hardly the Hound of the Baskervilles, but the eponymous yellow dog of the story is considered a harbinger of ill fortune by the Breton townsfolk of Concarneau: a relative of the folkloric hellhounds of Britanno-Celtic legend.
Maigret is on one of his many secondments to Brittany, and also in one of his most quixotic moods, presenting himself as bumbling, unconcerned and obtuse, all the while unerringly closing in on his suspects 4⭐

"Since 2010 [when the Conservatives were elected into government] rough sleeping has increased by 169% due to substantial changes to the welfare system, the impact of austerity, the national housing crisis and landlords ending shorthold tenancies. Alongside this, voluntary sector services supporting people who are homeless, women fleeing domestic abuse, mental and drug and alcohol services have decreased due to large-scale funding cuts."

"In this doorway the police used to always move me on, but they never told me where I could go."

Bekki Perriman was a homeless street sleeper, who now uses art installations incorporating photography & audio clips to make visible the invisible people, and give voices to the voiceless. This book collects some of her work together with essays & commentaries from activists, academics, etc., and interviews with rough sleepers about their experience.

"On this night, I met the Arctic Angel and vowed the 22,000 miles of her migratory path between the Arctic and Antarctica would not be in vain. I will remember her. No creature on Earth has spent more time in daylight than this species. No creature on Earth has shunned darkness in the same way as the Arctic tern. No creature carries the strength and delicacy of determination on its back like this slight bird. ⬇️

"I belong to a Clan of One-Breasted Women."

Williams's title essay is about the carcinogenic legacy of 1950s atomic bomb testing in Utah, which the government knew was a threat to the health of its citizens, but went ahead and then covered it up.

The other essays deal with the environment, ecology and conservation, and the book is part of the Penguin Green Ideas series ???

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

I bought a guide to Castlerigg Stone Circle from the ice cream van park on the roadside, staffed by a guitar-playing vendor - definitely part of the experience! I bought a lolly ice, too🍦😊
Mrs B reminded me I'd been before in 2016, but it was pissing down, so that was a brief visit. This time was sunny and more leisurely and immersive. I touched all the stones, but didn't count them as legend says it's impossible! ⬇️

#DayOffAdventures
I wanted to visit one of the sites described in the book while reading it, & I've driven 2½ hours to Castlerigg by Keswick, Lake District. Even with tourists here (of which I'm one) is a special place. A natural amphitheatre on a colossal scale which my photos can't do justice to. Sounds of crows, tweety birds, lambs and the occasional car, engine struggling up hill. The people are quiet and respectful, as befits the setting 😌

#TuesdayTunes @TieDyeDude
'80s sophistipop sounds like it should be awful, but Prefab Sprout were in a class of their own. I love their first few albums, and "Steve McQueen" is just full of wonderful, emotional music. I'll link to the single, "When Love Breaks Down", but the whole album is exquisite. Takes me back to the year me and Mrs B first met ?
https://youtu.be/QeZkLV3ZjeI?si=xe7nhHgBfcONXHzG

#BookMail
PROTOTYPE 1 is the first yearly anthology from indie publisher Prototype, issued 2019. It's a collection of poetry, essays and images, the quality of which I'm about to test, and if it's good I'll see about getting the later editions.
Doorways is about the experience of homeless women, mixing poetry, essays and photographs of public doorways used as shelter by homeless people. Editor/photographer Bekki Perriman was herself homeless ⬇️

I've just finished the chapter on one of my favourite Bowie albums, "Heroes", learning about yet another of David's influences from the art world. The cover itself references Dali examining his hand for ants in "Un Chien Andalou", Heckel's painting "Roquairol" (which also inspired the cover for Iggy Pop's "The Idiot"), and Schiele's stylised hand gestures. The title song was famously inspired by David seeing two lovers ⬇️

I kinda lost interest in Rebecca about ⅓ in, probably my scattergun neurodivergent brain as the writing is excellent, but it's long and I have so many other books to read!
Anyway, I picked it up again this morning and read the chapter about the broken Cupid ornament. A significant theme of the book is the English class system, and this chapter seems to emphasize the way the "lower" class defers to the "higher", how we're complicit in our own ⬇️

French detective, French cake, French apéritif. Literary flavour 🙂
Maigret had quite a few clues to follow and deduce from in this story, though it was, as usual, his psychological insight into victim and perpetrator that led him to the solution.
Unusually, I figured out the key elements of the MO early on, but probably only because it has similarities to one of Doyle's Holmes stories: 🔎⚡🔨⚡🌉

Inspired by Scott's @vivastory post last week about Maigret, I'm continuing my own journey through Simenon's extensive novel series about the gruff but empathic French Chief Inspector.
These three #LibraryHaul are all coincidentally early in the series, 3, 4 and 6 from left to right. Simenon's dating of the tagged story within the narrative is a giveaway, as the later novels contain only vague hints to date, which gives them a fuzzy, ⬇️

"At the close of the last Ice Age, over 12,000 years ago, people walked to a place that would one day become known as great Britain."

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

"Later she enjoyed a delicious chicken salad on the balcony. She treated herself to a glass of port to accompany the ice cream, and she topped it off with a cup of coffee. If it hadn't been for the dead body in the gentleman's room, it would have been the perfect conclusion to a lovely summer's day."

Now that I've thought of Helen Mirren as Maud, I can't unthink it. She's perfect casting, & I'm now finding the unlikable Maud a bit more bearable.

A GN for teens, but certainly helpful for adults.
The Sad Ghosts represent people experiencing anxiety and depression, and several have neurodivergent traits. They develop a community and found family, supporting each other and providing a positive counter-view to each others' low self-esteem.
In this one, Rue takes on lots of tasks to support the club & starts to feel overwhelmed.
Cute & effective look at mental wellbeing & self-care. 💕👻💕

Estella, a defrocked nun turned governess, lives in a decaying house in an abandoned Italian village perpetually threatened by engulfment in a slow landslide. While she is alone of the living, ghosts of the former inhabitants are drawn to her, and they reluctantly relive their sadnesses. There's a nod to Poe's House of Usher in the metaphor of the collapsing structures mirroring Estella's psychological decline.
I learned of Derrida's concept of ⬇️

"The butterfly that shakes the dust from its wings before resuming its flight cares little for the remains of the chrysalis in which it once lived.” ??

#TuesdayTunes @TieDyeDude
Impossible for me to choose a favourite Cocteau Twins album, so "Treasure" stands in for their amazing body of work. I've never taken hallucinogens, but I imagine this album is what it might feel like.
https://youtu.be/nmLJgh6yyoE?si=7EgwDeKgApk3KjtQ

Reading about neolithic monuments, folk traditions and the re-enchanting of the British landscape, & Julian Cope appears in the Avebury chapter, so I'm listening to his albums Jehovahkill & 20 Mothers, which have a high quotient of lyrical & musical relevance to these topics. Julian was well into his Modern Antiquarian phase with these recordings, including songs and poems about stone circles, henges and paganism. It's a mood! 🪨🛸
#BooksAndMusic

I like reading about other people getting their exercise. You keep walking weird, I'll keep reading weird!
I might've expected the hardcover to be a collection of articles from the zines of this collective of ramblers through the British pagan countryside, but I didn't think of it, so now I'm less sure about collecting all the zine issues, but that petty quibble aside, this is a lovely book in the tradition of Julian Cope's The Modern Antiquarian.

"I didn't want to feel unloved. No one should be condemned to see the contempt in the eyes of the one who brought you into the world, to be born, to reach a certain point and a little further than that: all denied. Denied the healing word - 'take care of me because I can't make it on my own.' Denied the chance to reach the source of all beauty. The love that moves the world. While I was moved only by the abyss within."

“I was so convinced that I couldn't be loved that loving me must have been difficult.”

"The room will be warm and filled with the smell of fried food."

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

I'm so sorry to clutter your feed with a picture of a lemon ?, but I couldn't resist buying this amazing fruit, it looked so tempting! Now, to justify buying it, I'm making a White Lady cocktail ?, and to justify posting about it, I'm going to read the story in which I first came across the drink, Tove Jansson's eponymous "White Lady" from the tagged story collection ???
#BooksAndBooze

I enjoyed these poems at least as much as I recall enjoying those of Clarissa's younger brother, Robert Graves, though I've not taken the trouble to do a direct comparison. Still, while one sibling should be lauded and the other largely forgot is a cause for wonder 🤔 The only information I've found about Clarissa is as footnotes in articles about Robert, so she's rather eclipsed by him, which seems a shame.

"I cannot be what you would have me be,
Lopped, pruned within a form, a man-made thing;
Who'd wreak his will upon an almond tree
Wrapped in the bright luxuriance of spring?
And yet to her returns, spring after spring,
The old, pure glory from her blackened bough;
Had I a spring but once in seven years
I would not leave you now.
How many times my heart was sick and sore
At your rough handling ... no, I will not tell,
⬇️

Peter Case's second album, "The Man with the Blue Postmodern Fragmented Neo-Traditionalist Guitar" is a mix of folk rock & country rock wrapped around lyrics that are perfect narrative miniatures. Hard to pick favourite tracks, but probably "Entella Hotel", which wouldn't be out of place on Bob Dylan's "Blood on the Tracks" album, and "Poor Old Tom". These are both slow songs, but there are plenty of up-tempo ones, too.
#TuesdayTunes @TieDyeDude

FitzGerald's Rubáiyát = 5⭐
Euphranor is an earlier work taking the form of a Platonic dialogue one day in late spring in Cambridge between a doctor and several young students while they drink beer and play bowls. It's a reply to a popular book of the 1850s on the proper education of English manhood which, little known today, set the tone for a certain kind of Stiff Upper Lipped Englishness that inspired the Scout movement and running towards ⬇️