I’m resuming my work on fiction after a hiatus in which I’ve been writing only some–not much–poetry, usually featured on my account for the poets’ collective, @PoetsonThursday.
In these two flashes, written within a few days of each other, I am examining two different styles of life through fictional accounts, as I have become familiar with them from fact and fiction.
The first is “‘Internal Difference[s] Where the Meanings Are,'” a title taken from a somewhat mournful poem by Emily Dickinson. It’s about a woman very different from myself, and set in a fantasy, but reality- and history-based landscape and culture and time (some many years ago, I’d think, but not absolutely, as many women in the world today still live in cultural chains). It was my attempt not only to imagine what her life might be like; I also derived some satisfaction and relief from writing about a feeling of deep repression of impulses and emotions that is occasioned in any of the many sorts of cultural captivities and binds that people, particularly women, and emotionally at least myself, find themselves in sometimes.
The second flash, “Aufstein Flimmerschwamm,” is a playful sendup of the spy culture that more and more we come to be accustomed to in our modern world.
I do hope you will enjoy these two stories, two flashes, and won’t find them too cumbersome to read, as they are very short.
Here’s a post of a poem I wrote back in 2023, copyrighted on 3/28/2023. Please read and enjoy! (Note that the facts of wombat life are mostly really true, though teatime may be a stretching of the truth!)
The front cover of “Cajoncito: Poems on Love, Loss y Otras Locuras” in paperback, by the author.
Cajoncito [A Little Drawer]: Poems on Love, Loss y Otras Locuras [and Other Follies]” is a book of remarkable poetry by Elizabeth M. Castillo, a British-Mauritian poet living in Paris with her family, who has also lived before in Chile, Mauritia, and the DRC. She is widely published in various languages in which she composes, notably English, Spanish of two countries, and French. My introduction to a smattering of her poetry in English two years ago was through Twitter, where I first encountered her work. At long last, when her second book, Not Quite an Ocean is now out and being read, I find the first still holding its own in the warp and woof of my poetic memory (to use an artistic image as much as possible in the manner of the ones I admire in her work). The first book is a tribute as well to her life with numerous other people whom she has loved, and some of whom she has lost.
Her artistic words are ordinary and simple if multitudinous and mightily creatively used words for passion, and feeling. Not only do words in English and Spanish–only the first of which I came to the work knowing more than a smattering of–respond easily and richly to her call, but they say things, visit emotional places one may have felt, but never known how to have put in one’s emotional passport legally.
The territories and lands of the transgressions against love and the grief resulting, as well as grief and longing drawn from other sources crafted for life, are painted here in vivid language colors, sometimes in matched, paired poems in which some words of Spanish in one and English in the other are reversed, sewing the two bright place languages together like the covers of a book of poetry.
There is too much to quote, too many inspirations to follow down the corridors of the heart of this poet’s work: you have to read it for yourself. Before, I have always been a curious but casual peruser of the Spanish version of the English bus and other public announcements on American walls and ceilings, attempting in my primitive way to match the correct pairs of words. For the first time, but I hope not last, I meet the natural aristocracy of someone’s language who has mastered both, and who can vary them back and forth easily at will, making of them in her matched sets of poems a wife and husband completing each other’s sentences, interrupting, interjecting, but always in complete agreement for the reader, who only has to locate the translated portion in the matching poem to learn “for sure” what the “foreign” phase or sentence means. And learning in any way at all is always lovely. And it’s there that the virtue and smugness of “knowing for sure” is also trickily understood in all life ventures to be a form of foolhardiness and loss except in love with life and language, which have in some way to make their declarations of certainty for the time in spite of really not knowing, as the poet more or less outright states she would have it. I find that I almost begin to understand instinctively portions of the Spanish from this gentle and loving example of what used to be called “immersion” learning, as if in the hands of a dedicated and talented tutor or teacher.
Castillo’s major poetic virtue, and she has many, is thus her comprehensive expressiveness and rich texture of images and references to simple enough things about life that become complex again as she puts them in words. One feels almost as if one oneself is becoming gifted enough to understand a new and alien language about life and its doings and “loves, losses, y otras locuras” (as she puts it in her title).
Finally, the greatest reader’s gratitude I have for Elizabeth M. Castillo as the author of the book is that she makes me stretch myself and my own experiences over the framework of her embroidery hoop to be needled and pierced by her lovely work, a set of images and feelings that I never knew I needed so badly before she created them. Please buy this book and read it soon, and then buy Not Quite an Ocean to see what she is doing!
8/5/23, by Victoria Leigh Bennett (shadowoperator)
The cover of Lawrence Moore’s “Aerial Sweetshop,” published by Alien Buddha Press.
Lawrence Moore, who has quite a bit of recent work published in a number of reputable and well-respected places such as Indigo Dreams and Dreich Magazine, and whose Twitter handle is known by many as simply @LawrenceMooreUK, is frankly unassuming as are many poets, and has patiently waited a year exactly for this much-deserved review, while the reviewer dealt with life and its turmoil. I am delighted at last to be able to bring it to my readers. Aerial Sweetshop, though dedicated as a devout tribute “For Dad,” a flyer of planes both full-scale and model, is actually an experience for every poetry reader, whether a rhymed verse addict (where Lawrence’s work shines) or one of those who prefer blank/free verse.
Moore’s verse is one distinguished in substance by melodic, singing rhythms even when not in rhyming verse, and by kind and altruistic notions. Its subjects are those of mysteries and magic, love poems, and always the sky, and looking up and flying (in both of their literal and metaphorical meanings). Its images are drawn from changing landscapes, the landscapes (when not of pure sky) both actual and even more often those of pure imagination, metaphorical landscapes. The loving rhetoric is one of both faith in a single companion’s human goodness, as well as in the charms and chances of harmless mutual mischief. The villains of the piece are responsible for submerged notes of fear of prejudice and unjust punishments, but are overcome by the claims of gentleness and the strength of togetherness. The one exception (and I’m not sure the female figure leading the narrrator in “My Ardent Friend” can actually be called a villain, in any plain sense) is one who leads on to a sort of accepted ritual or initiatory ending, which is not exactly an ending. Ah! A curious mystery to lead us in and on!
There is a temptation with the rhymed poems, because some of us have grown up familiar with or at least exposed to end-rhyme poetry, to jog-trot the wonderful meters and jar the end-rhymes, but in both the other poems, the blank/free verse poems and the rhymed ones, the rhythms change sometimes unexpectedly and stop that bar to good poetry from taking place. In those cases, if you get too caught up in the sound, you risk missing startlingly lovely and human senses in the poems, such as:
1). p. 9–“don’t let the busybodies ask you why/when they mean don’t…”
2). p. 26–“and if you snore all day/and talk while chewing on your food…”
3). p. 39–“The big wide world is interesting;/you are my greatest adventure.”
All in all, this chapbook is so worthwhile that it hardly seems a first effort at publishing poetry. It contains most nobly, generously, and lovingly a poetry that makes its own happiness, with the inclusion often of a pertinent and essential “other,” a rescuer, guide, and companion in the pieces. In conclusion, Moore’s book is a true “aerial sweetshop,” or as an American like me would perhaps put it, a “heavenly candy store,” full of all the sublime things and beings the heart most wants to have.
In his marvelous collection of sonnets on Buddhist thought, inspirations, and images, sonnets from the dhammapada, the impressive and practiced sonneteer Alex Guenther applies some of fthe same methods, skills, and sensitivity as he consistently does in all his sonnets. A main difference here is that, as he credits in his introductory pages, he is drawing on other works of translation of Buddhist teachings, most notably that of Gil Fronsdal, with whom he feels a great sympathy and in whom he senses a kindred spirit, as he records. But the rest is all his.
Guenther–as he has done in his previous two books, the deodar seeds and the heave, which I have fortunately had the opportunity and privilege to read and review, and as he has continued to do in his later collections and his multitudinous and multifarious daily output, many of which I have been lucky enough to encounter as he has tweeted/posted them on Twitter–is an entirely and shockingly unique artist, but a great one.
He reaches for a topic and topics aplenty he finds to hand, relating as always to the Buddhist practices, virtues, and outlook, which non-practitioners may find strange or alien to things already familiar and known or perhaps contemplated by those of them in his audience. By this method, making the strange or unusual more familiar and understandable, he shows how great a teacher he really is, in a belief system full of great teachers, for this is his belief system as well as the source of his own inspiration. It is not surprising to learn that he is also a literal and down-to-earth teacher of young people in “real life” as well.
In his teaching by sonnet, Guenther brings clarity to any obscurities in Buddhist thought (for example, his sonnets among the “26 Pali chapters” which he calls “the most well-known Buddhist text” are: “filters” through which we construct our realities, “awareness,” human vagaries of thought, foolish people and their opposite, the making of “the wise,” “evil,” “violence,” “old age,” “the self,” “the world” in both the physical and social senses, “happiness” “pleasure,” “anger,” “the just,” “corruption,” “the path” (as in “the way”), “hell,” “the brahmin,” and images important to the original writers, such as “flowers” and “elephants.”
In addition to being a steadfast believer and teacher of Buddhist thought, however, Alex also teaches by example in his wonderful and extremely talented and innovative usage of the Petrarchan sonnet, just as he has done before, and continues to do in many varied ways. He has massively and manifestly increased the territory of the sonnet form by his general use of diverse and attention-getting, witty, original rhymes; his non-end stopped lines that spill over into the next line by sense, thus making the reader read for this sense and significance more than for a dogtrot sound; and the vast, encyclopedic knowledge he shows not only of people, but of the world and its scientific, artistic, architectural, and natural biological properties. Alex Guenther maintains in his daily life quite obviously a system of keeping up his own learning through his curiosity and willing approach to what the world puts before us that can be learned.
In concluding this review essay, it could well be said of Alex Guenther as of another–modest, unassuming but quite ambitious to find, celebrate, and share wisdom wherever it may be–the Clerk of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales–and here I translate from Middle English into Contemporary English: “And gladly would he learn, and gladly teach.” We need so many more Alex Guenthers, poets, teachers, and explorers!
Alex lists as “additional info and links” in his book, these: alexguentherpoetry.wordpress.com, twitter.com/guentheralex [@guentheralex], facebook.com/alex.guenther.104, instagram.com/guentheralex.
I think he also is on substack (you can query him at twitter), and has been on Mastodon at least previously as @guentheralex@mastodon.social.
Come learn somthing significant and worthwhile in beautiful and well-crafted language!
This review by shadowoperator (Victoria Leigh Bennett)
Today, I am going to do something I rarely do, and review two books at once. They are by the same poet, Alex Guenther, a force to be reckoned with in the poetic world and widely known and celebrated on Twitter and other social networking sites for his poetic acumen. Being by the same author is not normally or naturally a reason to put them both in the same review, however, except that by that means I can best compare and contrast them for the reader, and hope to convince the astute consumer of good poetry that though they have certain distinct similarities, they are different enough for anyone to want to own both of them. They are available from various subsites, and as you can see from the image above, one need only go to bitly.com/sonnets2021 to locate these sites. But first to the conviction that these books are worth investing in for the small cost and the large satisfaction to be gained from reading them through.
The two books are respectively “the heave” and “the deodar seeds,” and they were simultaneously released. According to the author, they were begun during the original lockdowns of the first Covid period, which seems to have been a period of intense reflection and soul-searching by the author. The lack of capitalization in the words, according to Alex, a witty and intensely erudite soul, was due to the fact that they were composed on a phone, which called for easy manipulation; later, though still not due to any e.e.cummings-like assumptions of manifesto, this form of writing became preferred for its own sake, possibly a result of the poet’s self-aware but unassuming modesty. “the heave” is a book written more in reference to modern-day life in cities, particularly Eastern cities, as the author and his wife have resided for many years now in the East, and are now resident in Bangkok, Thailand, where Alex teaches and writes. “the deodar seeds,” in contrast, is a book about exploration, conquest and empires, and has a quite broad scope, treating not only of Eastern conquerors, explorers, and literary figures/saints, but also of a few Western or European ones.
Both books are Petrarchan sonnets, being fairly standard in rhyme scheme and meter, except for the odd sound effect or forced rhyme and an occasional extra syllable. Their style is similar, yet in both cases, the rhymes are often quite unique and highly imaginative, with a standard, expected rhyme being quite rare. As well, and this is a major and particularly attractive quality, the enjambment–or carrying over of meaning from the end of a line and resolving the thought with a portion of the next line instead of using end-stopped lines–the enjambment! It produces something of the juggling and oftentimes jarring rhythms of contemporary daily life, and prevents the poems from having a quality rhymed poetry is often criticized for, that of sounding jog-trot and bouncy, too unintentionally comic. Though Guenther has a succinct and piercing wit in the literary sense of the word “wit,” he is never foolishly comical or silly. In fact, though there is no pomposity about the two books at all, it is impossible to read them without reference to the intellectual qualities of the bright and far-reaching examinations of the poet’s chosen topics. In both books, there are many, many words and concepts introduced which would at first be quite foreign to an uninformed or not widely traveled Western person, but there is no reason at all to fear the encounter with these perhaps previously unencountered concepts or facts: Alex is always a good poetic host, and uses such words and concepts in a self-explanatory way, without being condescending.
Now, to the differences: though the two books, “the heave” and “the deodar seeds” are very alike in sonnet paradigms and generally in style, yet the pace of “the heave” is quicker, possibly to convey the haste and scramble of modern life, whereas the tempo of “the deodar seeds” is slower, more considering of all the explorations, discoveries, pilgrimages, and empires discussed. “the deodar seeds” deals with various colonial dreams, and the explorers, artists, holy figures, conquerors, and victims of these imperialisms. “the heave,” on the other hand, deals with the modern streets, shades of experience, and mental and emotional states of contemporary empires, the fragmented, dissonant, sometimes nightmarish echoes of contemporary personhood. There in fact is more of a personal, intense quality of reflection in “the heave,” for a total of 54 sonnets, whereas the 108 sonnets of “the deodar seeds” are personal mainly in the way Alex offers some of them as imaginative explorations of interior states of mind of various world-famous figures, a sort of dramatic monologue in sonnet form.
As a final means of making my points, I would like to offer two sonnets through “fair use” form of quotation, one of my favorites from each book. First, from “the deodar seeds”:
alaric on the walls
let oil-black plumes of mingling smoke arise;
the visigoths are taking rome. we've won
mere plunder; little justice has been done.
The vaunted roman dream, we've learned, applies
to citizens deemed worthy in their eyes--
not streams of stateless refugees who've run
to seek asylum from encroaching huns.
they turn us back, and teach us we're despised.
they mock our leather trousers and our shoes;
we lead their armies; still they keep us down,
and gothic blood has often stained these streets;
we sought security, and were refused.
we tried our best to serve the roman crown;
perhaps they will respect us in defeat.
The genius of the above is that without distorting the historical element, Alex Guenther has driven home the universal and topical elements of Alaric's discourse.
Now, from "the heave," one of the resolving and latter sonnets:
to a lotus
o beautiful, for doubly floating; no--
say triply; rising from frog-spawn and mire,
then hovering as pale empetalled fire
on slender stem, amid the ukiyo
or shifting world of transitory show
in which we swim suspended, where desire
breeds pain--where we, until our cells expire
writhe blindly as the tadpoles down below.
impossible, since nothing is beyond
or separate from matter's pulsing swarms;
impossible, since all is baited bluff,
this apparition from a fetid pond;
your gently glowing, pale empetalled form
is floating briefly, beautiful enough.
This second sonnet of my quotation is consonant with the Buddhist view of life, which Alex is conversant with and which he avers is his preferred outlook. Nevertheless, he is not morose or gloomy, but instead maintains a humorous and gentle persona. He appears on Twitter on Thursdays at @PoetsCornerALW, curated by another poet whom I have recently reviewed–Arthur L. Wood–and also contributes tweets of the occasional haiku, which can be found on his profile timeline, or on your own timeline feed. Also, he is available for converse on two other sites: http://www.facebook.com/alex.guenther.104, and http://www.instagram.com/guentheralex. And, if after you have read the books, you would like to contribute further to a fine poet who clearly knows poetry, history, and human nature, you can do so at http://www.paypal.com/paypalme/guentheralex.
Copyright 2021, Arthur L. Wood, Cover design, Hugh Rochfort
Having read Arthur L. Wood’s first collection of poetry, Poems for Susan, with its tender strains of love poetry and its far-reaching set of influences, one might be at least partially prepared for his second collection, Scarlet Land. Here also, there is sometimes tenderness of language, and the influences, both submerged and spoken of directly, are equally far-flung. But the tenderness here is more tempered with a certain cynicism, an acquired knowledge of more of the world in the tone, a certain sated weariness from time to time in the language, which yet does not make the poetry dull-witted with rancor or wearisome to read.
In Scarlet Land, the poet as a figure has not only the topic of love to contend with; he is also embattled in that same sensation of love, embattled in society, in poetic invention, in many things. And of course, in the background lurks always the awareness, like Rimbaud, Verlaine, Baudelaire, of being a poet in a condition or time of disease: just as in 2020, Covid appeared in Poems for Susan overtly, here it appears more insidiously, in the background as one is aware of the unhealthy influence. There are songs of dismay at modern conditions:
I cannot find my England. Does she lie in dust I sweep,
Does she hide away in sunshine, in darkness does she creep,
Does she hum a pagan melody and converse with the stars,
Is she frightened by the madness and the music from the bars?
I cannot find my England.
There are poems investigating or betraying to view a poet’s states and choices:
What more can I do?
I've channelled the poets,
I've died so many times,
Yet so few are listening;
I've written ten thousand
Miraculous rhymes--
What more can I do?
**************************
So many great poems!
What more can I do?
Tell me, would you please tell me,
Because I haven't a clue--
I get up each morning,
I shower and dress,
Then die many times;
Another call centre
Awaits me, I guess.
*************************
Or, taking a line through Milton, more affirmatively:
*************************
Let my body starve!
Let my soul rejoice!
I cannot fail my task,
I must be precise!
I'll reinvent the songs
With the trumpet of my voice,
And pave the path of poesy
That leads to paradise!
Raymond Keene, OBE, comments in his Foreword to the book that this is “fraught territory,” and indeed, in this book, the poet allows himself to be used nearly as the canary in the coal mines is used, who is the barometer (if he lives or if he dies) of whether or not there are unseen and dangerous substances being breathed by those around him. It is certainly in Scarlet Land a more “fraught” mental and moral landscape than in the previous book.
As to the structure of the poetry, Wood has always been good at achieving a sense of closure of the poetic material, regardless of whether the poem ends on a refrain, on a variation of a previous statement, or even if the contained sentiment diverges from the poetic shape by not being conclusive. He has also not disappointed in continuing his genius with metering and rhyming, though there are herein a bit more of poems in blank verse.
Sprinkled throughout, though not devoted to any one individual love by name as was the case in the previous book, there are still some hopes given out for the persistence of human love. The characteristic love poem here now occurs in spite of negative conditions, not so much in the absence of them as was the case in Poems for Susan:
While We Love
The world of raging fire,
The cold and dark abyss,
The fluctuating chasm,
Are nothing while we kiss.
The lake of burning sinners,
The acid in the sky,
The hole within the middle,
Are nothing while we sigh.
The steel-whitened seaweed,
The limping one-eyed dove,
The corpse upon the mountain,
Are nothing while we love.
All in all, though the poetic voice is often strained here, the poet frustrated in the extreme to the point of sketching it all out for the reader, we see here a more complicated and mature poetic schema than before. Poems for Susan was an astounding and magnificent book, but it was the poet’s courtship of his subject and his talent; Scarlet Land is the beginning of his alchemical marriage to the same.
There is a corollary to the proposition that there’s more rejoicing over the return of a prodigal son than there is over the continuing excellence of a constant one; that corollary is that it’s worse when a potentially good man goes bad than it is when a bad man continues what he’s doing. In Kingsley Amis’s book The Green Man, we get a double reflection of this second notion, when we not only meet up with a modern day man of relaxed moral fiber, but also with the ghost of a minister turned evil revenant who confronts him.
In an English tradition descended from the ancient fear of nature and natural forces–for our worship of nature is an entirely different tradition, though equally ancient, which even so recognizes the power of the earth–the “green man” is a sort of roving spirit, sometimes neither good nor ill, sometimes outright malevolent, and sometimes given to testing mankind, as in the medieval tale “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” which many of you will already have read and I hope enjoyed in a literature class. In Amis’s book, the man of easy morals is an innkeeper named Maurice Allington, who is situated with his wife, father, and daughter in an old inn in Hertsfordshire, England. Though the elemental force is so strong that there’s almost no bargaining with it, Maurice learns from the evil spectre of the minister’s ghost and a mysterious young man, and makes some sacrifices on his way to learning what evil and good may actually be about.
The book relies on a combination of fear and hilarity, the deep-seated source of a certain intensified response from the reader in both directions. The book is not unlike other chilling literary/stage/movie experiences I can think of: for example, the 70’s stage show “Dracula,” with its equally hysteria-inducing combination of the two otherwise opposed tendencies. We alternately thrill with horror and gasp, then laugh out loud. A movie experience utilizing this same formula was “An American Werewolf in London,” which used the by now reliable combination of slapstick, horror, satire, and cultural and occult lore that Amis’s book uses. But Amis’s book preceded these dramatic offerings in time; it was first published in 1969, though also published in the U.S. by an American publisher in 1986.
So, just what are Maurice Allington’s problems? Firstly, he is dissatisfied with his marriage to his wife, Joyce, and wants to bed the lovely Diana, wife of his best friend, the doctor Jack Maybury. His father, who is not in the best of health, lives with his family and Maurice is unsettled by him, too. He also has a massive drinking problem, as his concerned family members and friends constantly remind him. And he has to decide if it’s his drinking which is causing the most unusual of his problems: that is, he sees spirits. He sees spirits and experiences psychic phenomena far beyond the limit of the simple antique ghost tale which is retailed by him to his customers at the inn to pique their interest. Of course the book deliberately, artfully, and effectively leaves it unclear for the most part as to whether these are genuine manifestations, a result of the door between worlds suddenly being opened, or whether Maurice is actually becoming mentally unhinged and debilitated by the liquor and his own lack of balance alone. The only being who seems to confirm the sightings he himself experiences is the cat, Victor, who in the time-honored tradition of cats with psychic abilities arches his back, hisses and spits, or runs out of the room and hides when the ghosts come to visit.
Maurice sees not only the sinful and spirit-summoning minister from the past, but also what turns out to have been the minister’s (Underhill’s) wife; an incarnation of a young man who acts something like a modern version of Christ but something more like a modern version of Satan; an apparent manifestation of a twittering bird which makes him wonder if he has delirium tremens; and a large clump of walking devastation of foliage which reads like one of J. R. R. Tolkien’s ents on steroids: this last is the so-called “green man.”
The dapper young man without a name helps orient Maurice to the experiences he’s undergoing, though the orientation isn’t one conducive to dwelling safely and well in this world. Others try to help him recoup his losses, such as his doctor friend Jack Maybury, whose wife Maurice is trying to bed on the sly. His own wife, Joyce, and his son Nick and Nick’s girlfriend are all equally concerned, and are trying in their various ways to help Maurice come to terms with what they mostly regard as a fiction of his overwrought imagination. His young daughter Amy is in danger of becoming a pawn in the game he is playing with his otherworldly experiences and foes. Finally, he has trouble keeping track of the time, time having no meaning when he’s conversing with the elegant young man, because his watch and clocks no longer aid him in determining how time is passing when they are speaking to one another. Worst of all, perhaps, is his difficulty in coordinating daily reality with the supernatural things which are happening to him (in his head?).
For Henry James readers who have encountered some of the criticism written about James’s story “The Turn of the Screw,” this double-barrelled treatment of suspicious happenings, when a character is proclaimed by different critics to be 1) suffering under a real visitation from the other world or 2) suffering from an overactive imagination, a drinking problem, a psychological disorder, et cetera, will be familiar. James is in fact mentioned in The Green Man. And though I’m not going to reveal the ending of the book (with its unexpected romantic alliance), I can safely tell you without ruining the reading experience that even up to the very end the suspenseful questions of exactly what happened remain. After all, part of the time we may be in the mind of a crazy drunk (or is he in legitimate danger of losing his soul? Or has he squeaked “out from under” losing his soul?). This is a book well worth the occasional difficulty with theological terminology and concepts; in fact, it is a book that I think Henry James himself would’ve been proud, in our time, to have written.
Hello, website, Twitter and Facebook readers! My apologies for going quiet mostly for a whole week or more now. I’ve been busy getting ready for moving (possibly) and simultaneously submitting poems, articles, and prose bits to publishers/magazines and checking on the same in Submittable and other sites. But as your reward, I have a Halloween suggestion for reading which will be guaranteed to shiver your timbers as well as the rest of you, from one of the greats. Please follow the Yellow Brick Road, or the trail of breadcrumbs to my very next post–it wouldn’t be a Halloween post if I didn’t keep you in suspense–and read my 2012 post on Kingsley Amis’s The Green Man. If you read the book, I promise you won’t be disappointed (Brrrhhhhh! And here I thought I was a back-to-nature woman!). Happy haunted dreams!
creativeshadows 