COVID restrictions have robbed many of us of our chance to get outdoors and into mysterious places to see wild and wonderful creatures in their element. Next best … read about them. Myth and mystery I’m a reluctant seafarer but love the Hebrides and Philip Marsden writes mesmerically of skippering a wooden sailboat up the
The sea has circled me in my reading – through whorls of beauty like Lucía Estrada’s ‘jellyfish, wide-open’ in ‘Medusa’ and Tristan Tzara’s ‘tender water of sleep offered around’ (see below). The ocean is in the poems I’ve explored but also in the novels and non-fiction I’ve been reading. I am thirsty for the sea’s
Here are five things that lifted and lengthened me during lockdown, and in the months since. Bloomin‘ bird “It must be weird to have wings, and not be able to fly.” Penguin Bloom (the movie) is a tear jerker. Naomi Watts plays a devastating Sam Bloom, mother of three, who becomes paralysed from the chest
Stuck for what to read on your Summer break? Browse my top 15 Summer of 2020 reading suggestions to pin it down. This is Happiness by Niall Williams – What a novel! It plaits warmth and wisdom with depth and humour. “Father Coffey, the curate … pale and thin as a Communion wafer.” Laugh and
This was a year in which poetry really had to do its fine work – and it did. These are the poems that most soothed and stirred me most in the latter half of 2020. ‘Short talk on the Mona Lisa’ by Anne Carson Every day he poured his question into her, as / you
Adorable cows, shimmering deserts, and the deep currents that connect us. Found Found has some of the most adorable cow drawings you’ll ever see; their limpidly lashed eyes and big wet noses nuzzling you from the page. Blue Mountains artist, and descendant of the Bundjalung people, Charmaine Ledden-Lewis, has engaged beautifully with Bruce Pascoe’s story
In iso-limbo, these things helped me to drift rather than row against the tide. Life unplugged Covid-19 iso offered inklings of a slower, soulful existence but would any of us go as far as Mark Boyle? In winter 2017, he turned off his phone, laptop, internet and electricity and started life afresh with just a
Here are five things I got up to in isolation during the Covid-19 lockdown (four of them book-related of course). Step away from the fridge With people’s focus on the refrigerator and what they can and can’t buy in the supermarket, it made sense to avert my eyes momentarily from the Covid-19 pandemic and fix
These five books helped me weather a fiery summer … Salt steps Raynor Winn had not thought much about homelessness before it happened to her and her terminally ill husband in their 50s. With little alternative, Winn and her husband Moth decided to walk the South West Coast Path in the UK and wild-camp along the
Here are the highlights of my reading in 2019. These books hummed through the haze of the devastating bushfires Australia has experienced in the last few months of 2019 and into 2020. If you’re suffering from the smoke – grab one and head inside to read! Wolfe Island by Lucy Treloar – ‘Ideas came to
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