CONNIKA

ART

Just been putting a few books together to take down to Canberra tomorrow.  One of them is this beautiful hardback book.  Greer uses the books in the FIVE IN A ROW fashion ie reading one book for a week and doing various craft projects, geography, language, art etc with her girls. 

The artwork in this particular book is just gorgeous and I thought it worth putting up some of the illustrator's thoughts on her mother's encouragement in her early art endeavours.

"...My mother's favorite thing to do was simply to walk outside and look.  She was a painter, and my first painting lessons came from her.  They were really lessons in looking.  She would ask me:  What is the color of the tree shadow?  Is it blue?  Blue green?  Violet?  and what is the shape of the highlight on the copper teakettle?  Oval?  Square?  Diamond?  She was teaching me to paint what I saw, not what I knew.  What I knew could never be enough."

PLANE TREE, MAGDALEN COLLEGE, OXFORD

   

I was going through the cards I have been given recently - I find it very difficult to throw them out - some of them are just beautiful.  One particular card, given to me by my friend Matti in England had this extract from MAGDALEN WALKS by Oscar Wilde.  Into the blog for posterity!  Too beautiful...

And the plane to the pine-tree is whispering some tale of love

Till it rustles with laughter and tosses its mantle of green,

And the gloom of the witch-elm's hollow is lit with the iris sheen

Of the burnished rainbow throat and the silver breast of a dove.

GREEN AS A LEAF

 

The Kingdom

It's a long way off but inside it   

There are quite different things going on:   

Festivals at which the poor man

Is King and the consumptive is

Healed;  mirrors in which the blind look

At themselves and love looks at them

Back;  and industry is for mending   

The bent bones and the minds fractured  

By life.  It's a long way off, but to get

There takes no time and admission   

Is free, if you purge yourself  

Of desire, and present yourself with  

Your need only and the simple offering  

Of your faith, green as a leaf.  

R S Thomas  Collected Poems 1945-1990

HER

Another of Jackie Kay's poems - HER. 

Download HER.doc

    

JACKIE KAY

This morning, before I went for my walk I decided to download a couple of radio programmes on to my MP3 player.  I logged into Radio National's Book Show and one of the programmes I downloaded was an interview (a couple of weeks ago at the Edinburgh Festival) with the Scottish poet Jackie Kay.  If you would like to listen to the interview and a couple of her poetry readings, go to www.abc.net.au/rn then browse down the programmes and you will see The Book Show and the programme.

Jackie Kay was born in Edinburgh.  Her mother was Scottish and her father came from Nigeria.  She was adopted as a baby by a white couple and brought up in Glasgow.

In the review from www.poetryarchive.org, it says "Jackie Kay (b1961) is an award-winning writer of fiction, poetry and plays, whose subtle investigation into the complexities of identity have been informed by her own life...Kay's awareness of her different heritages inspired her first book of poetry, The Adoption Papers, which dramatises her experiences through the creation of three contrasting narrators:  an adoptive mother, a birth mother and a daughter."  She has been awarded the MBE for services to literature and has been nominated for the position of Poet Laureate.  If she is appointed as Britain's Poet Laureate, she will be the first woman in the position since its inception.

I've re-typed a couple of her poems that the website has made available for emailing to friends.  The first THAT DISTANCE APART Download that_distance_apart_by_jackie_kay.doc  describes the extreme emotions felt by a mother giving up her child and the second poem BABY LAZARUS Download baby_lazarus_by_jackie_kay.doc  I think, describes her forgiving herself. 

SPRING IN AUGUST?

The garden is starting to see definite signs of spring.  We have jonquils, some snowdrops, purple irises and jasmine in flower.  All the trees are still bare (apart from the gums that surround the property), although I have noticed some pink buds on the crab apples down by the barn.  After nearly 40 years living in this country, I still find the southern hemisphere seasons very strange.  Download to_a_migrant_girl.doc