Something attacked the blackbird nest from underneath (I’m not sure, a pine marten possibly) and you found the still-soft, faintly speckled mother nearby under a hedge, one of the four chicks in the side of the nest. Those two needed burying, which we did in relative silence, and I tucked in with them two lilac-coloured flowers (a perennial Scabiosa, I forget precisely what) from a nearby plant because that seemed the thing to do. Saddening, ancient-feeling, and brought to mind this piece from Orion, which I initially read inside that winter 2019 issue while sitting in a snow white, geese-overhead part of northern Scotland, just before the world altered that following spring. I had wanted, badly, for those four fragile bodies to have their summer. I want everything to live long enough for summers, I suppose.
WORK-RELATED NEWS:
My new book, Everything, Beautiful, has received an updated on sale date, shifted forwards by just a couple of weeks to August 23rd (still a Tuesday; I find a disproportionate number of the good things happen on Tuesdays). Printer-to-warehouse type delays have been a fairly common happening within a publishing industry context for some years now, particularly with four-colour books, and so while everything else remains the same its actual arrival to people shall be ever so slightly delayed.
While the previous timing felt good this new timing feels perhaps even better, as a book such as this one appearing just as summer (at least in the northern hemisphere) begins its finale of long evenings and dried-out grasses, and just as the first few scents of autumn appear in the nights, this all feels very suitable.
During the intervening weeks I will be sharing (both here and elsewhere) some early reviews, some of my early thinking and sketches that helped to shape its final form, and generally a bit more about why and how Everything, Beautiful came to being a book—I tend to fall firmly into a ‘less is more’ category of sharing but in this case I feel a ‘slightly more is more’ approach would be more, well, beautiful.
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
More work (see also: No.126, No.147, and No.169) by Emma Hardy, including images from her autumn 2022 monograph spanning over twenty years of family life, Permissions.
When you see a seventy-pound octopus squeeze
through a hole the size of a half-dollar coin, you
finally understand that everything you learn about
the sea will only make people you love say You lie.
There are land truths that scare me: a purple orchid
that only blooms underground. A German poet
buried in the heart of an oak tree. The lighthouse man
who used to walk around the streets at night
with a lighted candle stuck into his skull. But winters
in Florida—all the street corners have sad fruit
tucked into the curb, fallen from orangery truckers
who take corners too fast. The air is sick with citrus
and yet you love the small spots of orange in walls
of leafy green as we drive. Your love is a concrete canoe
that floats in the lake like a lead balloon, improbable
as a steel wool cloud, a metal feather. This is the truth:
I once believed nothing on earth could make me say magic.
You believe in the orange blossom tucked behind my ear.
— Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Love in the Orangery
