Other half in IT….

Today we’re embracing those autumn colours with Walter Osborne’s ‘A November Morning’. The rich, warm colours and hazy, sunny skies of this late-Impressionist landscape perfectly encapsulate the coziness of the season. We can practically hear the crunching leaves! 🍂 #CrawfordArtGallery #AutumnVibes

That’s very sad, the testimonial from his friend Stephen Burke is moving and shows too how great clubs are made of the people who love them.

Arlen House & Books Upstairs invite you to enjoy readings from 5 stunning works of Irish literature: Deirdre Cartmill *Under the Blue Seraphim* Rosemary Jenkinson *Laganside Lights* Luke Morgan *Blood Atlas* Francis O'Hare *A Different Light* Csilla Toldy *Firebird* Sun 9 Nov 2pm, Books Upstairs

Pre-orders for the new Archipelago are now available. Not sure of the general contents yet, but I have a little essay on Heaney and Jutland, ‘Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard’. www.clutagpress.com/product/arch...

With a little time looking out the window I checked the old shows on the Fugazi website and saw the flyer for the band I played in, Sunday 16th September 1990 at the Belfast Art College. Those were the days. The joke was we should have been called Unsigned.

The woods in their autumn dress, the trees inclined to the lingering sun

Chimneyscapes of Brussels

Blackwell’s have been kind enough to host a book launch at 5.30pm on Thursday 5 March for Late Heaney. I’ll be having a conversation with my friend Fiona Stafford and tickets are below, with an option to include the book. I’d be glad to see you. www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/nicholas-a...

Herbert List, Liguria, Italy, 1936

The heavens call and wheel about you, showing you their eternal beauties, and your eye still gazes on the earth Dante

I cannot see into the bird’s mouth, nor do I know what the wind says to the water. -Whit Griffin

In the light machine

Autumn

Wheaten for Godot

The book isn’t out until January in Ireland and March in the States, but if you’d like a copy eventually here is the pre-order discount code. I’ll share it again and have some launches planned in Bellaghy, Belfast and Dublin for late Feb/ early March. Do come along, I’d be glad to see you.

'I feel the energy of the light that makes the stone break into music.' Nelly Sachs in a letter to Paul Celan, from 'Flight and Metamorphosis' tr. Joshua Weiner (F,S &G, 2022)

I am at a lecture and the speaker keeps saying ‘as far back as the nineties’ and I‘m like

Gisèle Freund, ‘Walter Benjamin in the Bibliothèque Nationale’ (1939) Benjamin fled Paris in the following summer to escape the German invasion, and lacking the necessary exit documents committed suicide at the Spanish border town of Port Bou on September 27, 1940. Things fall apart.

It is a feeling which he would like to call a sensation of ‘eternity’, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded - as it were, ‘oceanic’.. One may, he thinks, rightly call oneself religious on the ground of this oceanic feeling alone, even if one rejects every belief and every illusion. Freud

New England is quite like old England

And then from the edge of woods

My son is in a book shop in New Orleans

So, the book has a cover, thanks to the kindness of Colin Davidson. Out in January 26 with some events in Ireland the end of February, start of March. Will be available in the US slightly later. Thanks to you all for encouragement along the way. global.oup.com/academic/pro...

Belfast Lough an echo of Galway Bay on this beautiful day

For all that, for me, the north of Ireland seems stuck in a certain kind of history, there are places, like the remains of the dual court tomb at Ballybriest in the Sperrins, where the deep river of time opens up into something else entirely.

Rather than live in a village where people talk a great deal, I should have gone along with the geese that called this morning. -Imperial Princess Tajima (tr. Hiroaki Sato)

Little dragon

Spirits

And for us, descending into the vale, The altars burn Anna Akhmatova

Virgil, Eclogue VIII Trans. David Ferry ‘Farewell to woods, let all be ocean now’

Nanzenji Temple, Kyoto

Jewish cemetery, Cluj

We heard mass in the Orthodox cathedral in Cluj, exquisite

Icarus