The Nature of Things

Susanna Moodie was a Canadian writer of prose and poetry in the 19th century. Prose was probably her greatest strength as a writer and she was quite well-known in her day. I made her acquaintance last week through a blog called Edith's Miscellany which featured this poem. I found the poem very evocative of those cold winds that come down from the frozen North at this time of year and decided to feature it here as my poem of the week. Can't you just hear that wind whistling through the "groaning boughs" of the trees as it whirls their leaves down to the ground and feel the frost of its breath as it crushes and destroys "every herb and flower"?  The Wind Frost (from  Enthusiasm and Other Poems : 1831) by Susanna Moodie I come o'er the hills of the frozen North, To call to the battle thy armies forth: I have swept the shores of the Baltic sea, And the billows have felt my mastery; They resisted my power, but strove in vain— I have curbed their might with m...

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment : Image by Wilfred Marissen. The Eastern Meadowlark is the American Bird Conservancy's "Bird of the Week." The iconic grasslands bird is a member of the blackbird/oriole family. Its habitat encompasses meadows, fields, pastures, and desert grasslands and loss of these habitats is contributing to the declining population of meadowlarks. Its status is now considered to be "near threatened," a status which it shares with many grassland birds. *~*~*~*  Researchers reported on Wednesday that greenhouse gas emissions worldwide are growing at an accelerating pace this year. As growth surges "like a speeding freight train," it puts the world on track to face some of the most severe consequences of global warming sooner than expected. Scientists lay part of the blame for the increase on an unexpected upswing in the appetite for oil as people around the world not only buy more cars but also drive th...

Time to check in once again on Sheriff Walt Longmire and the quirky residents of Absaroka County, Wyoming. This time there is definitely something rotten in the county but at first it is not clear just what it is. The action kicks off with an old lady telling Walt about the angels that have been helping her out by doing repairs and chores around her house. It seems that she leaves out a list of the things she needs to have done and somehow they all get taken care of. She never sees any of the angels actually at work. His curiosity awakened, Walt decides to investigate the miracle and discovers a teenage boy who is the actual angel in the flesh. Walt learns that he is a "lost boy" cast out from a cultish offshoot of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints that has set up operation in his county. He puts the boy, named Cord, in a cell until he can contact Child Welfare and figure out what to do with him, then gets him a job at the local diner, washing dishes and general...

We have been watching the HBO production, My Brilliant Friend , based on Elena Ferrante's work. Like many Ferrante fans, I was concerned about how television would treat the work and if it would be able to adequately interpret in video this intimate and interior literary portrait of a female friendship in a brutal patriarchal society. I needn't have worried. At least in my opinion, they have done quite an admirable job. Part of the key to the successful production was to film it in Italian, the language in which the books were written, with English subtitles. This can be a clunky way of presenting material, but in this case, it works to help establish the fraught atmosphere of Naples in the 1950s. It was a time and a place where violence was part of the everyday lives of the people. Particularly the lives of women and children. It was a society were bruises on the faces and arms of women or children were not even noticed because they were so common and taken for granted. This i...

I'm really not a fan of the short story and I seldom read them, but, of course, I would make an exception for the author of Fates and Furies , one of my absolute favorite books from recent years. Groff's latest book, Florida , is, in fact, a collection of short stories, not all of them set in Florida, but all of them have a Florida connection and they have the Florida atmosphere - heavy, oppressive heat that infuses a sense of dread. The atmosphere in all of the stories is experienced by a series of women characters, and yet, in a larger sense, they all seem to be the same woman. This woman is alone. She is single, in some cases a single mother usually of two children, or she may be married but, for some reason, the husband is generally out of the picture. Events are experienced through her eyes and her emotions alone.  The woman has no name but she is furious (somehow recalling Mathilde of Fates and Furies ). She is furious about the way we live, the abundance and waste, the a...

Peggy Shumaker is a poet from Alaska. In her poem, "Exit Glacier," she describes the sound and the sight of a glacier breaking up, something that Alaskans might be familiar with, and something that is happening more often in our warming world. She tells us of: "...history, the record of breaking— "prophecy, the warning of what's yet to break..." Exit Glacier by Peggy Shumaker When we got close enough we could hear rivers inside the ice heaving splits the groaning of a ledge about to calve. Strewn in the moraine fresh moose sign— tawny oblong pellets breaking up sharp black shale. In one breath ice and air— history, the record of breaking— prophecy, the warning of what's yet to break out from under four stories of bone-crushing turquoise retreating.

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment : Our winter visitors continue to trickle in. This week the American Goldfinches showed up. Here's one in his drab winter dress sitting on a crape myrtle limb. The goldfinches love crape myrtle seeds and they generally feed on them when they first arrive here. There are plenty of the seeds available just now. A small flock of Cedar Waxwings also put in an appearance this week. The flocks generally grow as the season advances and by next spring there might be 200 - 300 birds wandering through my neighborhood, but for now, I estimate there are about 30 in the flock. Both the goldfinches and the waxwings have arrived earlier than usual. I generally see my first goldfinch the first week in December and the waxwings show up in mid- to late December, but most of the birds seem to be appearing early this year. *~*~*~* The wildfires in California have now been contained but on the other side of the world they are raging. More ...