‘It’s always been like this for me with spirituality. I catch a whiff of the numinous, and it turns visceral in a moment.’
Hardy called it ‘dimmity’, the moment when the certain shapes of the world dissolve. In the emptiness of the Wessex marshlands, against the twilit mass of Glastonbury Tor, the air begins to quiver, to fill with dark scribblings. More than a million starlings are homing in on this ancestral swamp…
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‘We meet at various points in the great swathes of the past that neither of us were alive to witness.’
Allen Bratton on a daytrip to a castle with his older boyfriend.
‘Listening to three white poets, whom I suspect are academics, talk about the state of poetry.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola eavesdrops on an older generation.
‘I’d been dubious about his company at first.’
Sarah Moss on watching Shakespeare with her twelve-year-old son.
‘She didn’t trust us because, to her, tenants were like children.’
Kate Zambreno on negotiating with her older landlady.
‘A moment now swallowed in embarrassment, I asked a question only a young person might ask an older one.’
Lynne Tillman on trying to understand what makes a generation.
‘Spending the first half of my life in the Chilterns, in southern England’s chalk country, I grew up with yews.’
‘The burden in law on the pregnant person is to show that they are at risk, in need; they must ask, and hope, rather than demand.’
Memoir by Andrea Brady.
‘On Good Friday, the priest in the livestream video stood inside the darkened sanctuary.’
Fiction by Nicolette Polek.
‘They queue up to pass, lap / like waves beside her, to receive the darshan / from her one, black eye.’
Poetry by Phoebe Power.
‘Postures of graceful receptivity, or surrender. How do we tell the difference?’
A.K. Blakemore introduces Suzie Howell’s photographs.
‘His life, unexciting as it may have been so far, was still a detailed, complicated thing.’
