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
Sixteen Acres
- 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
This is the earth, a portion of it –
the boundary of Wicken Hill
and the line of sight over farms,
moorland, a scattering of houses,
the alert wolf of Heptonstall
Church – these sixteen acres
set above the town like a jewel,
a throne of stillness, a green eye.
In spring there will be hares
leaping under foot in the smoky
dawn and sky-falls of lapwings,
their porcelain of broken nests,
the vetch coming, coltsfoot,
starbursts of clover and trefoil
and when the hay is high lacings
of gold spiders; but it is winter,
trees are wiry sculptures,
rooks carved in the branches,
the only things living, it seems,
crows, and the fox at night
getting his dinner, setting
his trail in this year's snow.
The land is tardy now and wet,
the earth spongy with springs
running over millstone grit
a few feet down – you can hear them.
Put your hand where the ground
opens to the blood warmth,
lie and draw the heat as if
your body were a divining rod,
above you the sky a vast lens
and you its aperture, clouds
beasts dispersing across a field
or souls queuing to enter heaven.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A Perfect Mirror , pp. 11 - 12Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2018