Here are two of the cards Miriam has sent me since we started our correspondence.

Some birds have all the talent. Take the Mockingbird, for example. Mimic, composer, arranger, vocalist, clown, he still finds time to devote to his family." Charles Harper's Birds & Words

Both are lino cuts Miriam made herself. She sent three, but although it’s not lost, I can’t lay my hands on the third right now. It was so exciting receiving them. There’s something quite magical about the wood/lino cut as a form. Bare branches become barer. The tree’s limbs more clear. The prospect of news. Letter writing is, I realise, inherently intimate.

Over the holidays I’ve found making things to be very calming. Folding a sheet of A4 was an antidote to the stresses of the season. I created several little origami books of a single poem called An Aviary of Small Birds. The petals you can see in the picture are from bouquets of flowers I dried over the summer and I used these as a backdrop on the paper for the book.

Birds have become something of a presiding spirit in my correspondence with Miriam, as well as a motif within my new work. Now of course they pop up everywhere. We went to Liverpool for Christmas. The city is represented by a mythic Liver Bird, a cormorant-eagle cross.

I didn't write much in Liverpool except on the back of an envelope. The phrase 'foghorns wake me at wren o'clock' has lodged in my head. A starting point.

Something to play with:

Boxing Day and I wake at wren o’clock to the sound of foghorns so deep and loud I think they’re a mobile phone on vibrate. I imagine giant sea lions bellowing across briny mist in  baritones. The foghorns are grief and they miss me….

In her latest letter Miriam says she is more interested in flight than in birds. This made me think about whether I am interested in birds that cannot fly. For Christmas she sent me a beautiful book: Charles Harper’s Birds & Words.

Flightless birds include the Great Auk that Harper says ‘swam like a fish, walked like a penguin and flew like a stone’ who was hunted to extinction for oil and feathers, as was the Labrador Duck, who lost the power of flight during the breeding and moulting season. On Christmas Day we ate goose and in the January sales we bought a new goose down duvet.

I also bought myself a treat: a first edition (in English) of Pablo Neruda’s Art of Birds. Jack’s Schmitt’s translation is sublime. Not that I know it in the original, but there’s such a purity to it I think you can safely say it’s a good one.

OCTOBRINE: The tricolored octobrine/is born, lives, and dies in October:/it has a revolver's blue shape,/feathers descended from mother of pearl,/tail like a celestial sign,/and this bird is fragrant/like the bee's homeland:/it sings seven copper notes:/then seven notes of rain.//And the intense octobrine dies/a blue and natural death.

Octobrine is my favourite poem. It is blue and intense. As high as the foghorns are low. Outside it’s dark now and snow is just starting to fall. I wonder where the parakeets go in this freezing weather?

I suspect that now I am thinking about birds as a subject I’ll have to look away from them to write about them. I think you need to catch a poem out of the corner of your eye. Meanwhile, the snow still falls…

Tags: Charles Harper, correspondence, Karen and Miriam correspond, Karen McCarthy Woolf, letter writing, Liverpool, Miriam Nash, Pablo Neruda

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 at 11:40 pm and is filed under Karen McCarthy Woolf, Tapping the Trend. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.