Online archives - the National Library of Scotland

We were browsing the web, looking for some early English and Scottish poetry, when we stumbled on the National Library of Scotland's Digital Library. If you're the least bit interested in the literature, history and culture of Scotland, this is a must-visit site. Two of our favorite exhibits: The Murthly Hours and Pencils of Light (the albums of the Edinburgh Calotype Club, which was the world's first photographic society). The Murthly Hours are especially enjoyable for the marginal images of animals (fantastic and real) and birds at play and rest. (A blue hare recurs throughout the pages, along with a variety of dragons.)

White

White Towels
Richard Jones

I have been studying the difference
between solitude and loneliness,
telling the story of my life
to the clean white towels taken warm from the dryer.
I carry them through the house
as though they were my children
asleep in my arms.

From The Blessing: New and Selected Poems © Copper Canyon Press.

(Painting by Kasimir Malevich, 1918.)

Night

From Federico García Lorca's Poema de la Saeta - in Spanish and English:

Noche

Cirio, candil,
farol y luciérnaga.

La constelación
de la saeta.

Ventantinas de oro
tiemblan
y en la aurora se mecen
cruces superpuestas.

Cirio, candil,
farol y luciérnaga.

Night

Candle, oil lamp,
lamppost and firefly.

The constellation
of the saeta.

Little golden windows
tremble,
at at dawn superimposed
crosses sway about.

Candle, oil lamp,
lamppost and firefly

(From Poem of the Deep Song, translated by Carlos Bauer, City Lights Publishers, 1987.)

Other places:

Read about the saeta on the Flamenco World site - and listen, too.

(Photo of houses and moon by Juan Ignacio Gilligan, from Cielo Sur.)

Late summer

Out in the garden
the bugs have stopped their chirping
on this rainy night -
but from the wall comes the sound
of a single cricket

- Kyogoku Tamekane

Has dawn come so soon?
The grass I trampled before
is white with dew
when I return through the fields
after a night with the moon.

- Emperor Fushimi


From Waiting for the Wind - Thirty-Six Poets of Japan's Late Medieval Age, translated by Stephen D. Carter (Columbia University Press, 1989).

Hilary Tham

We remember Hilary Tham - poet, painter, encourager - with one of her own poems:

Mrs. Wei on Governments

Malaysian Government is like the American
price system: take it or leave it.
It's easy enough to leave a dress hanging

on the rack, but a country is not something
you can get up and walk away from. Your Congress
resembles our marketplace: haggling and shouting

until everyone is a little satisfied.
Can we visit a shop where I can talk
the price down? I want to buy a victory,

I need a good fight.

- Hilary Tham

(From Bad Names for Women.)

In memory of Hilary Tham Goldberg, 1947-2005.

For more, visit Hilary Tham's website. (Be sure to read her poetry workshops page.)

Seamus Heaney

Personal Helicon
for Michael Longley

As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.

A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.

Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

Click here to listen to Heaney reading this poem.

Arab-American writers find a new voice

We're very happy to see Saudi Aramco World's latest cover story on Arab-American writers. You can read it here.

There's an extensive "Author Profile" section that includes a brief interview with Naomi Shihab Nye, whose work was previously featured on this site. (Click here to read her poem Half-and-Half.)

Ash Wednesday

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

Because I do not hope to know again
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again
.......

Click here to read the rest of T.S. Eliot's Ash Wednesday.

For more info. (and some great links), see the Academy of American Poets T.S. Eliot page.

Their eyes effortless...

Psalm
George Oppen

Veritas sequitur . . .
In the small beauty of the forest
The wild deer bedding down --
That they are there!
Their eyes
Effortless, the soft lips
Nuzzle and the alien small teeth
Tear at the grass
The roots of it
Dangle from their mouths
Scattering earth in the strange woods.
They who are there.
Their paths
Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them
Hang in the distances
Of sun
The small nouns
Crying faith
In this in which the wild deer
Startle, and stare out.

(Quotation from George Oppen, New Collected Poems, edited by Michael Davidson. New Directions. Copyright © 1985, 2002 by Linda Oppen.)