Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- The Commute
- Warming
- Walking Home
- Cycling the Island
- The Garden
- Swallow Hole
- Sylvia Plath's House
- Sixteen Acres
- The Trap
- Praise Song
- View of a Badger on the Heights Road
- The Meaning of Birds
- The Ghost of a Flea
- Nest
- Twinned Sonnets
- Counting the Pennies
- Swan Upping
- The Frozen River
- Marsh Lily
- Praise Song
- To a Dandelion
- Moths
- Sestina for Rain
- A Perfect Mirror
- The Unicorn
- Praise Song
- Relics
- Getting Lost
- Woods in Snow
- Moon Walk
- Halfway Back
- New Moon
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
Praise Song
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- The Commute
- Warming
- Walking Home
- Cycling the Island
- The Garden
- Swallow Hole
- Sylvia Plath's House
- Sixteen Acres
- The Trap
- Praise Song
- View of a Badger on the Heights Road
- The Meaning of Birds
- The Ghost of a Flea
- Nest
- Twinned Sonnets
- Counting the Pennies
- Swan Upping
- The Frozen River
- Marsh Lily
- Praise Song
- To a Dandelion
- Moths
- Sestina for Rain
- A Perfect Mirror
- The Unicorn
- Praise Song
- Relics
- Getting Lost
- Woods in Snow
- Moon Walk
- Halfway Back
- New Moon
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
Summary
I write in praise of summer, that idyll, waited for through the dark months: light growing from long nights to short, blossom scenting pavements, dandelion heads we blow the hours from, thirteen of them, white flowers of the hawthorn, the birds at dawn. Even when it rains all June we hold out, it's coming, it's coming, if only we are patient; the promise of summer our inheritance: hot days swimming in rivers, picnics in the fields, toast-smell of skin, sleepless in the heat, evenings translucent. Even when it rains all August, the hay ruined, land a soaked sponge, homes washed out, we bed down with our hope for next year, vitamin deficient. Here too I write of the Syrian woman who read and re-read the whole of Jane Austen through the long siege winter. It took me away, she said, as the bombs fell all night, to a perpetual summer, tea on lawns and pastel gowns as lights went out in the last hospital, dances and parlour games as they stripped the trees of leaves for dinner. Irony, humour. This is the art of survival. For when there is too much fear there is never enough summer.
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- Chapter
- Information
- A Perfect Mirror , pp. 42Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2018