some LANDSCAPES

Paul Claudel (1868 - 1955) joined the French Ministry for Foreign Affairs after university, where he had begun writing poetry and attending ...

Yosa Buson, Travels Through Mountains and Fields, c. 1765 Source: Wikimedia Commons I've been reading The Collected Haiku of Yosa Buson ...

     Edward Lear, The valley of the Shkumbin River near Elbasan in central Albania , 26 September 1848  Edward Lear's travel writing is,...

Last year Carcanet published The Threadbare Coat: Selected Poems by Thomas A. Clark, a writer I have often referred to on this blog. There ...

I have been looking back at some books I read before starting this blog and have never got round to mentioning. One of these is Simplicissim...

When I look back on this period of lockdown I think the 'highlight' will probably be the fortnight or so we spent as a family watchi...

In these interminable lockdown days it is easy to get sick of walking the same streets over and over again. Of course there is always Google...

In his poem 'On a Winter Morning before Sunrise', the twenty-one year old Eduard Mörike (1804-75) wrote of his emotions on seeing th...

Joseph Beuys, 7000 Eichen Photograph taken in 2003, from Wikimedia Commons   Following on from my last post I thought I would briefly mentio...

herman de vries in the Steigerwald (source: Vince de Vries, Wikimedia Commons) The meadow planted near Eschenau in Upper Franconia by herman...

  The Coat of Arms of Alland, Lower Austria I like the way that when you look somewhere up on Wikipedia you tend to get given its coat of ar...

A recent edition of The Early Music Show on Radio 3 focused on the music of Latin America and had a segment on the soundscapes of ancient m...

In between the first and second waves of coronavirus I managed to get to an art exhibition - the Royal Academy's Léon Spilliaert retrosp...

John Constable, The Cottage in a Cornfield , c. 1817-33 #cottagecore I have often discussed here the enduring popularity of pastoral poetry ...

The Book of Songs ( Shijing ) contains the seeds of later Chinese landscape poetry.  Its oldest poems are around three thousand years old bu...

I should have more time for the blog soon, but for now I will make do with posting a long quotation from The Compleat Angler , first publish...

I've been a bit short of time recently so here is just a brief post to share a clip from YouTube of the beginning of Werner Herzog's...

Gaṅgā, the personification of the sacred river Ganges, early 19th century watercolour in The British Museum Eric Newby's Slowly Down the...

Sophia de Mello Breyner has been one of my favourite poets since I first read her work in Richard Zenith's translations from the Portugu...

Killed by a landscape! This nearly happens in Bong Joon-ho's multiple prize-winning film Parasite . Chekhov famously said that "one...