Because we are bodies

Reading July-September 2026

At some point as I draw together impressions of my reading over a quarter of a year I’m always struck by a thread that runs through them. As disparate as this quarter’s books are, across genres and cultures, across settings and styles, they each have something to offer on how being bodies in time shapes us.

In the seasons and places that we inhabit and that can inhabit us, as we find in Tarjei Vesaas’s The Ice Palace or Kelly Hargie’s Nurture or Dallas Lore Sharp’s Winter. In the way death is approached in Riccardo Bozzi, The Forest or Hang Kang’s heart-breakingly exquisite The White Book. In the way food is treated in Lucy Steeds’s The Artist or Nigel Slater’s Greenfeast. In how we are immersed in the physical relationships of lovers or siblings as Lucy Steed also explores, as does Susan Sellers in Vanessa & Virginia and Alan Murrin, The Coast Road. As does Elisa Gonzalez in poetry that revels in sexuality. In the assertion that these bodies, physical and animal, that we explore in the poetry of Ada Limón or Jennifer Wong, are also more than animated meat on bones, as we find in the fiction of Olga Tokarczuk’s books and the non-fiction that asserts with Limón that this being more than the sum of our parts is there across the animate world: in The Genius of Trees (Harriet Rix) and in the poetry of an Impossible Paradise (Chen Yuhong) that this bodiful world should be.

Poetry

Chen Yuhong, Impossible Paradise

I was entranced reading this collection. Chen Yuhong is a leading poet in Taiwan, but this was the first time her work has been translated. The introduction by translators George O’Connell and Diana Shi sets the tone for this elegant, attentive collection drawing from six of her Taiwanese collections, plus a supplemental group of poems with work from 1999-2022.

Chen Yuhong writes in Mandarin, but is also fluent in English and French and has translated many Western poets’ collections into Manadarin, including Louise Glück, Margaret Atwood, Jack Gilbert, Alice Oswald, Carol Ann Duffy, and Anne Carson.

The poems draw on a huge range of influences. From Sappho to Rilke, Tsvetaeva, to T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop to Jacques Prevért. From Eastern poetry across several dynasties — Li Bai, Li Qingzhao, as well as Japanese classics. And from Buddhist and Daoist resonances.

The result is artful, fluid, graceful poetry that also has strength. Her metaphors are accessible and beautiful. She draws on the animate world, on music (not only as reference but for poetic structure), on relationships and myth, but the effect is not scattered. There’s a coherent voice even as the poetry develops over more than two decades, a voice that is about deep attention and embodiment.

May the stone steps and the deep-sleeping door summon the camellia’s impossible paradise and your face the impossible key May the window shudder May the notes be blue and the candleflame shake unequivocally

from ‘May the Rain’

When I got to the end of this collection I wanted to begin again. This is poetry to savour and revisit.

Jennifer Wong, Light Year

The language of these poems is precise and beautiful, the forms polished and the metaphors luminous. There’s great beauty and skill here, but this isn’t only extraordinary craft and linguistic dexterity (including Mandarin words and phrases explained in the notes). This is also poetry of deep feeling and while the poet is always exquisitely in control of her material, nonetheless we are often rightly and brilliantly unsettled in the midst of such art.

Time, memory and connections across space and years (from the galactic to the human scale) are at the heart of this gorgeous collection. The tone is meditative, often using questions to great effect. But it’s never abstract. We are there with bodies — the mothering body that has been changed by childbirth, the eating body, the body observed in sleep… We are there with coffees and croissants and noodles and dumplings, with crowds on a train or in a grandmother’s living room.

And it’s in places, bodies, letters about immigration, the weight of a baby and of motherhood, that wounds and emotions surface — strong and true.

Planting something and worried that it will flower

This lowering of seed into the soil, this act of belief in something so small and invisible, and when no one believed in it, when no one believed that anything could spring out of this unreasonable grief: what was lowered into the soil?

All the years of who I am, my fissured self and my best intentions — the silent prayers, the love poems, my arms, my closed eyes, my swimsuit, words of kindness, words of harm, words of safety, my favourite recipes, my pearl earring, and along with these, all our muted voices.

This is a collection to read slowly, to immerse yourself in, to go back to.

Ada Limón, sharks in the rivers

Sharks in the Rivers

We’ll say unbelievable things to each other in the early morning— our blue coming up from our roots, our water rising in our extraordinary limbs. All night I dreamt of bonfires and burn piles and ghosts of men, and spirits behind those birds of flame. I cannot tell anymore when a door opens or closes, I can only hear the frame saying, Walk through. …

So begins this extraordinary collection — embodied, brimming with supple, animal language, full of wit and encompassing a spirituality of material existence. It’s the kind of collection that made me want to write out every poem in this review or note them all down to be used in a workshop, full of inspiration.

There’s a lot of water, many rivers and their ability to merge seamlessly with our own watery bodies is breathtaking — a river —

It is at once your body dissolved in this rain and your

beautiful wet hands trying to hold onto water.

From, ‘Diagnosis: Even the Stillaguamish River Cannot Stop Time’

And there are so many birds. Lines and metaphors are so fluid in these poems that land and river, body and events merge, not as a blur, but as connection deeply observed and inhabited. The result is poetry that thrills with life. Poetry of profound wonder and alchemy that, despite the darkness that it does not ignore, will not be suppressed.

She cannot decide what she desires, but today it is enough

that she desires and desires. That she is a body

in the world, wanting, the wind itself becoming

her own wild whisper.

From, ‘The Widening Road’

Guillaume Apollinaire & Velimir Khlebnikov, trans Robert Chandler et al, Birds, Beasts and a World Made New

Two Modernist poets who were also visual artists and worked closely with artists. Two creative minds. They never met, but both were innovative, form-breaking and passionate about the state of the world.

And Robert Chandler finds so many connections that don’t feel forced — both wrote many animal poems and were fascinated by bestiaries, both had distinctive views os war poetry. They were both poets who pushed language and form. Khlebnikov moved through Futurism and beyond. Apollinaire was seminal to several avant-garde movements, including Surrealism, Dadaism and Cubism. Both were collaborative writers, working with other art forms and other writers and continually inspired by the animate world.

Organised into sections: Birds and Animals; Art; Other Poems; War, Revolution, Civil War and Famine; History and Numbers; Last Things; Memoirs by Others, the book also includes black and white illustrations, mostly by Khlebnikov and a chronology.

Khlebnikov’s stretching of language doesn’t make the easiest reading and sometimes lyricism outweighs meaning, but there is method and genius in his inventiveness. Apollinaire can also be a difficult poet, but his dynamism and creativity shine through. A poet at home in the Caucasus and Iran, another who was a showman of Paris, they contrast as well as having unusual commonalities.

It’s a book I’ve read in small doses, section by section, one I’ll return to in admiration.

Kim Hyesoon, trans. Don Mee Choi, Phantom Pain Wings

This book is not really a book

It’s an I-do-bird sequence

‘Bird’s Poetry Book’

begins Kim Hyesoon’s Phantom Pain Wingsas she tries to enter another language, a bird ventriloquy that allows her to interrogate the grief of losing parents, her father and her mother soon after, as well as sexism and violence. Experimental, shape-shifting and giving shape to the void of grief, ‘bird’ becomes the personification of loss and the symbol of the poet’s breakdown:

Daddy, I became bird in the room where you died.

‘Bird’s Diary’

Poems pile image on image — many used long lines to breathless effect, including prose poems. Poems often run to three pages and the first section, ‘My Beloved Parting’ adds to this pressure with a sequence of bird poems, while a later section, ‘Community of Parting’, which deals with her father’s last days in hospital, reads like a single poem in parts, with no page breaks between the individual poems.

When short lines are used they stand out as islands of white space and moments of breath.

From up in the air I can see you and me walking as if I were looking at the fish trapped beneath the ice

‘Inside-Bird and Outside-Bird’

Across multiple voices, emotions layer like sediment. Word play and repetition add to the impact, imagery stretches perception. And though grief is central, this deeply personal collection is also political, examining Korea’s troubled legacy of violence, the roles of women, what poetry itself might mean as well as reflecting deeply on the self.

Ambitious, experimental, fiercely intelligent and ultimately commenting on the human condition from a feminist perspective, this is extraordinary poetry.

Right now, I’m ill up in the air I’m deathly ill, unbearably thirsty I want to open my eyes but my nation says, Wait till I catch you! All of its territory rejects my feet

‘Don’t Fly in This Country’

Elisa Gonzalez, Grand Tour

The Grand Tour was once a right of passage for the wealthy, especially rich young European men. For Elisa Gonzalez the Grand Tour is more complex — a pursuit of sexual freedom and knowledge as well as travel. ‘On the night train from Gdańsk’ she reflects on the repressive sexual mores of her upbringing:

I say to everyone angry

at my body’s inconvenience, everyone who passes, including the nun who returns

rubbing germs between her palms, Forgive me, that I have a body—a thought that I’ve had many times.

My father, who hated my body, asks me to stand—no, it’s the conductor talking again…

But despite her past, she also explores sexuality with relish and delight:

I hold her naked on the carpet,

my body spilling

out of my lavender dress.

Body, if you could be forever

spilling out of your lavender dress.

‘Roman Triptych (1)’

And her sense of place is equally embodied and vivid, as in ‘

Notes on a Divided Island’ (Cyprus, 2018)

Muezzin competes with church bells.

One side of the wall, then the other.

A volley of worship.

I tip into day

through the prayer’s bright holes.

*

In the life that develops,

a ginger car dashes out the door after a gecko,

both soon lost in a convocation of petals.

The ‘Grand Tour’ is also the title poem that narrates a failed marriage, journeying from “dollar-store rings onto ring fingers” to “evenings, we read novels in separate rooms / or in the same room and it makes no difference.” The couple’s “grand tour” unfolds in borrowed apartments in Berlin and Warsaw and with “metal murders / perched on balconies. Blank iron eyes.” Crows, of course. Elsewhere, the speaker notes, “All my husband’s happiness lives in the past. And this, the afterlife?”

Other poems are philosophical — exploring what privilege means, especially to someone who ‘came from something popularly known as “nothing”.’ (Failed Essay on Privilege) or the process of aging and ‘wisdom’.

Between poems written to herself at younger ages: 30, 20, 13… a marriage unravels in Berlin, Warsaw, Cyprus:

How to tell you, The urge to run comes

from time to time.

Your morning murmur: I’ll put the coffee on.

Why tell me when you always do?

When messenger wind alarms the shutters.

When jasmine whirls through the gap.

When I rise. When I dress.

When I shut. When I goodbye.

‘The Aorist’

But the tone of the collection is set by loss. Dedicated to her brother, Stephen, who was murdered, aged 22, ‘After My Brother’s Death, I Reflect on the Iliad’ is a pivotal poem amongst others that return to the theme of death. As in ‘A Tuesday in May’ when:

My grandmother died the day

the missionaries came for our souls.

To save them, I mean.

or in the opening poem, ‘Notes Toward an Elegy’ described by Gonzalez elsewhere as an ‘anti-elegy’, a refusal to make peace with death:

My perversity is silence, a shudder stopped in the throat. When all the time I hear her voice: I am glad my soul met your soul.

Ocean Vuong, Time is a Mother

This is a collection that is full of bodies, fragile and tender, struggling and resilient, wry and self-aware as we hear in ‘Beautiful Short Loser’

…I mean it when I say I’m mostly

male. That I recall every follicle in the failure the way they’ll remember God after religion: alone, impossible, & good.

I know. I know the room you’ve been crying in is called America.

I’m sorry the door is not invented yet.

Wait awhile. Like death, we are most useful at the end.

Finally, after years of failure, I’m now a professional loser.

I’m unstoppable! I’m crushing it in losses! I’m mopping the floor where Jaxson’s drain bags leaked on his way to bed.

I’m done talking, officer, I’m dancing in the rain with a wedding dress & it makes sense.

Because my uncle decided to leave this world intact.

Because taking a piece of my friend away from him made him more whole.

Because where I’m from the trees look like family laughing in my head.

Because I am the last of my kind at the beginning of hope.

Because what I did with my one short beautiful life—was lose it on a winning streak.

It’s a collection in which the language of sexual violence, against women, against trans folk or gay folk, is of a piece with the language of racist violence. And a collection that returns to Vuong’s circling of the themes of time and loss, particularly the loss of his mother.

The tone is sometimes conversational, sometimes restrained, particularly when the poet is narrating emotional distance, as in ‘American Legend’ — the persona and his father on their way to the vet with a dog who will be put to sleep, emotion held tight, the restraint more painful than the car accident that thrusts father and son together:

I wanted, at last, to feel him

against me—&

it worked. As the colors

spun through the windshield, wild

metal clanking

our shoulders, the sudden

wetness warm

everywhere, he slammed

into me &

we hugged

for the first time

in decades. It was perfect

& wrong, like money

on fire.

At other times the personal details are so intense and visceral that the reader needs to take a breath before moving on. Vuong’s debut, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, won the T S Eliot Prize and rightly so, and in Time is a Mother, he pushes his art even further. A writer who, even in violence, locates what is fragile, delicate and human.

Gillian Allnutt, Lode

Gillian Allnutt’s poetry has always had a strong sense of tradition, a deep spirituality informed by the animate world, literary inheritance and Christian faith. But where do we turn after Covid, in climate crisis, in an era when stability is clearly no longer a given?

‘Lode’ can mean a journey (physical and across time) or guidance or a watercourse. A lodestone is both a focus of attention and a naturally magnetic mineral (magnetite). A lodestar is a guide for navigation or person or principle to be followed. Before we even begin this compact collection, we’re already in the hands of someone whose language is supple.

Arranged in three sections: Postwar, Lockdown and Earth-hoard, an intriguing feature of the collection is the final poem — three lines that come after the ‘Notes’:

Roughage

Gusts in grasses. Muster of

grass and ghost and graces.

World without edge.

An echo of liturgy, so many of the Prayer Book’s Collects ending ‘world without end. Amen’.

Postwar is a selection of memories, often family-related — objects given heft by those they relate to, ties that survive death, events that continue to shine bright across decades. But though there is solace in Allnutt’s approach this is not a collection of glib comforts and the literary, Biblical and liturgical referencess that weave through the rhythm of the first section take on new resonances as the book progresses.

In ‘Lockdown’ connection shifts gear when the silence of being alone might replace the generative silence of a meditation group if not for zoom.

Only connect, communicate

courtesy of Zoom —

just as we are, we say, as if we were at home.

‘Azuma Meditation’

And her sharp observation lands an astute political comment with the lightest of touches:

To be honest

Truth is the ash they had to cut down at Flass Hall

Whose black and uncompromising bud was not and never will be at our beck and call.

‘Truth — as we, foolish, applaud with saucepan and wooden spoon —

Is the ambulance standing alone in the back lane.

Quotes from Julian of Norwich’s mediaeval Revelation of Divine Love turn up in more than one poem, including this in the final, Earth-hoard, section:

Wouldst thou witten thy Lord’s meaning in this thing?

Unself-aware, un-

witting as the flower of winter

jasmine – listen

In Julian’s book it is love that is the meaning and that final word ‘listen’ is freighted with Allnutt’s deep sense of attention to a world where she goes on making meaning, despite all that the darkness or our species’ recklessness may bring. This is profound, generous, contemplative poetry from a sharp and vibrant mind.

Fiction

Tarjei Vesaas, The Ice Palace

A haunting novel of winter, childhood and silence, The Ice Palace is written with extraordinary restraint. Set in a Norwegian village locked in deep cold, it centres on the intense, almost wordless bond between two girls, Siss and Unn, whose friendship forms suddenly and with emotional force.

Unn is newly arrived, inward, carrying secrets she cannot articulate. Siss is more popular, a leader at school, yet equally drawn to what lies beyond language. Their connection is immediate and charged, marked by glances, pauses, and an intimacy that feels both sustaining and precarious. Vesaas is exact about how children experience closeness: fiercely, bodily, and without the protective distance adults adopt.

The ice palace itself — a frozen waterfall Unn enters alone — is one of the most memorable images I’ve encountered. It’s not a symbol to be decoded, but a physical presence: beautiful, dangerous, irresistible. The landscape here is not backdrop but an active force, shaping thought, fear, and desire. Winter presses in on every page.

What follows is a novel of aftermath. Vesaas writes with skill about grief, guilt, and the difficulty of returning to ordinary life after something unnameable happens. Siss’s struggle is not dramatic but inward: how to live when language fails, when loss cannot be spoken without distortion.

The prose is spare, luminous, and deeply rhythmic. Nothing is overstated, but childhood here not so much a time of innocence as a time of intense perception and vulnerability. The story lingers like cold in the bones: quiet, yet beautiful and deep.

Riccardo Bozzi, The Forest (illustrated by Violeta Lópiz & Valeria Vidali, trans. Debbi Bibo)

This extraordinary illustrated book with few words and sumptious pictures is an extended metaphor of human mortality, The explorers in the story set out discover the terrain of a forest that we gradually perceive is the world (an echo of Ursula K Le Guin’s ‘the word for the world is forest’, perhaps). Along the way, some of the explorers help others, while others hinder. Some fall in love. Gradually the terrain becomes harsher until… and then what might there be next…

Strange and enchanting and a good book to read with children when discussing death. The illustrations are vibrant and immersive, the thick double pages, many with cut-outs intrigue. And the hand prints on white pages feel poignant. Plus, sometimes adults need this kind of book too.

Lucy Steeds, The Artist

Set in a sun-soaked south of France in the wake of the First World War, The Artist is a sizzling summer read. A stranger comes to town — into the reclusive, claustrophobic life of a brilliant, difficult artist, a young man arrives on a mission to write an article. He comes with one bag and a world of grief — for his lost mother, his brother broken in the trenches, his nascent artistic career in tatters. The house he enters is dark and full of secrets. The artist, Tata, has broken with his mentor, Cézanne, and no-one knows why. He never leaves the house and his every need is taken care of by a his niece, Ettie,. A young woman who moves like a shadow and cannot remember more than glimpses of her mother, who ran away to America when Ettie was seven and returned in a coffin.

In a stifling atmosphere of heat and lies, a mystery unwinds, coiling around a dangerous love story. What do we see? Who do we see? A question of art that cuts to the core of our humanity. What or who we see… the sumptuous food on a table, the rot of decaying food, the destruction of bodies in war… or the yearning at the heart of each of us to simply be seen?

Olga Tokarczuk, The Lost Soul, with Joanna Concejo, artist, trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Olga Tokarczuk’s range is extraordinary. The Books of Jacob, a thousand-page epic is complex, dense, Nobel-prize winning and is followed by this picture book. A simple story introduced at the beginning with a single powerful image: how the soul is lost in the inhuman, unsoulful speed of modern living. The story carried by the beautiful, sometimes eerie, poignant and detailed drawings with no words.

In the drawn-only pages the protagonist’s life is emptied of all the running around that has eroded his sense of self until he hardly knew his own name. And in the silence and waiting. something changes. Eventually sparse words blossom as the soul returns and colour comes to the pages.

It may look like a children’s book, and certainly children would understand it, but there’s a deep story going on here. Written around the time of the emergence of Covid, it echoes something Tokarczuk said at the time:

…it isn’t that the virus is a disruption of the norm, but rather exactly the reverse – that the hectic world before the virus arrived was abnormal.

During the pandemic, how many times did we hear that things would change, that we’d had a taste of ‘what really matters’ and would see time differently… And yet, here the world is, as frenetic as ever, more so…

The Lost Soul reminds us how easily we forget ourselves, how much deep growth takes place in silence and the slow, nurturing spaces where our souls can find us again.

Olga Tokarczuk, House of Day, House of Night, trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Olga Tokarczuk has a remarkable ability to a challenging read one that is also full of playful wit and surprise. Narrated by an unnamed woman with interests in astrology and mushrooms, the novel is set in set in a rural Polish backwater on the Czech border.

The stories are plural, a constellation of fragments recounting extraordinary tales appear between quotidian details of daily life:. Meanwhile, there is the back and forth of a German tourist who dies on one side of the border and whose body is surreptitiously and constantly moved from one side to the other by border guards who don’t want to dealing with the paperwork.

And with Tokarczuk’s genius the strands become more than the sum of the parts and a coherent window into a life, that of Marta — an elderly neighbour of the narrator who is as elusive as she is wise.

People are built like houses inside — they have stairwells, spacious halls, vestibules that are always too weakly lit to count the doors into the rooms, row upon row of apartments, damp chambers, slimy, tiled bathrooms with cast-iron baths, steps with handrails taut as veins, artery-like corridors, joint-like landings, passages, guest rooms, draughty chambers into which a sudden current of warm air flows, closets, twists and turns and cubby-holes, and larders full of forgotten supplies.

A novel that asks deep questions about what we know and how knowledge shapes us, of how we approach the paradoxes and binaries of life: dream and waking, night and day, life and death…, of how stories shape us… Brilliant, imaginative and pushing at writing’s boundaries.

Han Kang, The White Book

Based on memoir, though of life that never happened, The White Book is exquisitely written, heart-breaking and haunting. Han Kang is a maven of writing grief, loss and absence, both personal and political and here it is deeply personal.

Beginning with a list of white things:

Swaddling bands, newborn gown, salt, snow, ice, moon, rice, waves, yulan, white bird, ‘laughing whitely’, blank paper, white dog, white hair, shroud…

she recounts the story of her mother giving birth prematurely, alone, on the kitchen floor, to a daughter who lived only two hours. If the child had lived perhaps Kang would never have been born, yet this lost sister haunts her:

Within that white, all of those white things, I will breathe in the final breath you released.

White is emptiness, but also possibility. In Korea white is a funeral colour yet also a beginning. White is stillness and silence, emphasised by the black and white pictures scattered through the book. And in that stillness Kang creates space for the loss simply to exist, not explained, not railed against, not made maudlin, simple there. And there in its absence.

John Keats coined the phrase ‘negative capability’ to talk about the pursuit of truth and beauty in the face of uncertainty and mystery. The apophatic tradition of theology, recognising the limits of language, defines God by what God is not. Van Gogh wrote in his letters about the fear of the blank canvas, and of the ‘infinitely meaningless, discouraging blank side’ that life confront us with until a person ‘steps in and does something’,

Absence is the creative void staring back at us and Kang uses this with subtlety to create a strange, beautiful and deeply meditative novel.

Susan Sellers, Vanessa & Virginia

I am fascinated by the Bloomsbury set and particularly by Virginia Woolf and her family so Susan Sellers had me from the outset. The start is slow, but this reflects the feel of the childhood and Sellers is good at not filling in every detail. Instead she uses fragments and scenes that cover a vast emotional range between the sisters, giving the reader space to join the dots and enter the story.

Vanessa is the narrator and if you know the story of these sisters well, there is nothing new here in terms of ‘plot’ (something that some reviewers have viewed negatively). But Sellers is not setting out to make up a new story, rather to give a perspective and the inventiveness here is in entering Vanessa’s viewpoint both with scholarly integrity and realistic empathy. I became more and more involved as the novel progressed and was delighted to have found the book.

Sellers is the co-editor of Cambridge University Press editions of Woolf’s work. She knows her territory, but she also has a wonderful grasp of the complexity of sibling relationships. A nuanced and tender telling of ambivalence and love.

Alan Murrin, The Coast Road

Set in a small town in Ireland, the story revolves around three women in a place with no privacy, difficult marriages and before the possibility of divorce. The women are sharply drawn and sympathetic despite their foibles and flaws. Izzy and her politician husband have a decades-old feud that seethes beneath the mask of respectability. Colette, a poet, has returned after abandoning her sons for an affair in Dublin and is now broke and blocked from seeing her children. And Dolores is kept pregnant and stifled by her philandering husband, who begins an affair with Colette.

This is a debut novel and occasionally we’re told a little too much, but it’s a small caveat in a novel that is full of compassion for people struggling to make sense of lives that are constantly hedged in by restrictions, tradition and gossip. The pacing is good and, as the stakes increase, there’s humour in the characters of the local writing group and a strong sense of place. And we know from the start that events can only intensify.

When the detective asked Izzy what had woken her that night she could not say exactly. She’d been sleeping badly all winter. It was not uncommon for her to wake three or four times in the night. It was also the first time in several weeks she’d shared a bed with her husband, but she did not mention that. At some point she’d needed the toilet. Crossing the landing, she’d stopped at the window and looked out across the bay. It had become her habit in recent months to pause there and try to locate the point where on a clear day the gable of the cottage was just visible. The sky was mottled with cloud, the first of the morning light seeping through. Black smoke hung over the headland. ‘And straight away, I knew something had happened,’ she said.

Non fiction

Dallas Lore Sharp, Winter

First published in 1912 and re-issued in 2025, this is a book of deep, quiet observation. A world of silence and snow, of creatures adapting and surviving, of how to connect to the animate world in the starkest of seasons. It’s a gentle, cosy book, but one that also recognises that death and winter can go hand in hand. And the writing is strong — lucid and simply, with some gorgeous lyrical passages enhanced by beautiful black and white illustrations.

Many of the chapters are whimsical and very much of their time, but still hold some enchanting passages. But the chapters that stood out for me were the ones calling for attention to the winter: things to see this winter; things to do this winter; things to hear this winter…

When the snow hardens, especially after a strong wind, go out and see what you can find in the wind furrows of the snow—in the holes, hollows, pockets, and in the footprints in the snow. Nothing? Look again, closely—that dust—wind sweepings—seeds!

You should hear the great three silences of winter: the wide, sudden silence that falls at twilight on the coming of the first winter frost; the smothered hush that waits the breaking of a winter storm: the crystal stillness, the speech of the stars, that pervades earth and sky on a brilliant, starless winter night. You should hear—or is it feel?—them all.

A book that celebrates the season in all its moods.

Harriet Rix, The Genius of Trees

This is a stunning, meticulously researched book. Harriet Rix has the science and history at her fingertips but she is also someone who gets into the field and the stories of trees she has visited. Going in search of the oaks of Amedi just as ISIS were entering Mosul, only eighty kilometres away or going out with the Balochistan forestry service as they tried to save the local juniper trees in an area where Taliban fighters carried AK-47s in the market square…

But amidst the adventures, the focus is sharply on the trees who Rix shows have not only made huge adaptations to their surroundings but have ensured that other creatures and organisms or whole ecosystems have adapted to them. Rix lays this out in chapters on how trees shaping water, soil, fire, air, fungi, plants, animals, people.

And she backs it up with a scientific precision and wealth of pre-history and data that can be dizzying, but it’s worth persisting with because this is not just information, but purpose.

Element by element, trees have learned to control water, air, fire and the ground beneath us.

Their genius is in the scent of terpenes released by trees to seed clouds and cause rain, allowing trees to widen their habitats. It’s in the sweet taste of fruits that persaude animals to do what trees need (and in the process contributing to the development of our ancestors’ brains. It’s in the shelter they gave that was the reason we (and kaola bears) evolved fingerprints that better allow us to grip branches. It’s in our capacity to dream, which began as ways of mapping our bodies in their canopies where we once nested. It’s in our deep love of the smell of wood and its products (like books) that remind us of home. And so much more.

Kelly Hargie, Nurture

How do we live extraordinary, ordinary lives? How do we live slower lives to the rhythm of seasons? How do we stay wildly alive?

For Kellie Hargie these questions are not about lifestyle choices, but survival. Flooded with joy as a first time mother, she also found herself feeling lonely, inadequate, emotionally unprepared, guilty and depressed. Since then she’s experienced post-natal depression after her next two sons were born and always the path to healing and to finding the rhtyhms of mental health has been hugely helped by being outside, particularly in her beloved Mourne Mountains in the North of Ireland.

Kelly isn’t touting a cure-all, but a truth that being safe, present and calm is also about how we connect to the earth that holds us. The book invites us to

seek solace in the pockets of wild nearby

and each season deepens the relationship Kelly has made with the land she lives on, from gardening to serious hikes with her family. Woven in are memories and the gradual revelations of the ways in which healing has been so crucial: mental health and post-partum depression, coping with the painful condition of endometriosis, constructing life outside a church community that had been manipulative and domineering… But this is not only an individual story, but also one of finding support by offering it, by developing community through sharing what she loves: hiking, trail running, guarding the earth that nurtures us…

Each seasonal section ends with a ‘Nurture Connection’: Sow: things to try — from sowing seeds to cultivating wonder. And then with ‘Root: Seasonal Journal Ideas’. And throughout the book are Kelly’s gorgeous pictures of the mountains and lochs.

This is a book of hope that comes from knowing years of

continual breaking and mending

and persisting

in collaboration with others and the natural world

Nigel Slater, Greenfeast: Autumn / Winter

I love reading cookbooks and this is the perfect time to open Nigel Slater’s Greenfeast: autum /winter.

Not all cooks are amazing writers, but when they are the combination is magical. Nigel Slater chooses words the way he chooses ingredients — for their beauty, for their ability to bring harmony to a dish or page. The ingredients are fresh, seasonal and full of comfort and the recipes are elegant — ten or less ingredients, simple steps. The list are delicious before ever getting to the food: pecorino, green cardamon pods, pistachios, orecchiette, pumpkin…

This is a simple gnocci dish:

This is a simple gnocci dish:

gnocchi, peas, egg yolk

Serves 2

gnocchi 400g

vegetable stock 500ml

frozen peas 350g

egg yolks 2

parmesan 4 tbsp, grated

Bring a deep pan of water to the boil and salt it generously. Add the gnocchi and let them cook for three or four minutes, until they come to the surface, or follow the instructions on the packet. Bring the stock to the boil and add the peas.

Remove the gnocchi with a draining spoon and divide between two bowls. Ladle over the stock and peas, then separate the eggs and lower a yolk into each bowl. Sprinkle two tablespoons of grated parmesan over each serving. Stir the yolk into the stock and peas as you eat, making an impromptu sauce.

And this rice pudding reminds me of one made by a friend who catered for the last residential course we held in our home in Wales (ending a couple of days before the first lockdown):

Rice, milk, fig jam

Serves 4

green cardamom pods 6

milk 1 litre

bay leaves 2

vanilla pod 1

butter 30g

pudding rice (short-grain) 80g

caster sugar 3–4 tbsp

fig jam/preserve 8 tbsp

Set the oven at 140C/gas mark 1.

Crack the green cardamoms, extract the tiny brown-black seeds, then crush them to a powder. A pestle and mortar will work if you don’t have a spice mill. Pour the milk into a saucepan. Add the ground cardamom seeds, bay leaves, vanilla pod and butter, and bring to the boil.

Put the pudding rice and caster sugar in a baking dish, then, as soon as the milk boils (watch carefully), pour the hot milk over the rice and stir till the sugar has dissolved.

Slide the dish into the preheated oven and bake for two hours until the rice is soft and creamy and the skin is pale gold. Serve with spoonfuls of soft fig jam.

Accompanied by simple colour matt pictures of the dishes, this is a book of comforts and simple suppers to delight in, but it is also a book to read — to relish how we write about what nurtures the body.

Sven Birkerts, The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again

Time is always fascinating. It loops. The past haunts the present, the future is shaped in the present. The story we make of it expands some moments and erases others. As Birkets says:

The memoirist is generally not after the sequenced account of life so much as the story or stories that have given that life its internal shape. … And because we come to our insights more by way of thematic association than chronology, using hindsight to pick the lock of the then, the structure of the work seldom follows the A-B-C of logical sequence.

Instead the memoirist becomes one narrative voice looking back, whilst a previous ‘self’ is brought into a particular perspective. What we are getting is not ‘and then.. and then’… but patterns and meaning.

the puzzle of what happened in the light of subsequent realization.

Across the book Birkerts has chapters examining different aspects of memoir: the lyrical (often focussed on); coming-of-age narratives; stories that centre on fathers and sons or daughters and mothers; and trauma memoirs. In each group he looks at in depth examples and these are often the most fascinating parts of the book. And he agrees with Virginia Woolf that when memoirs fail it is because the over-focus on events and

leave out the person to whom things happened.

It’s a short, helpful book that covers a lot of ground and rightly insists that memoir revolves around finding of making meaning by choosing a perspective (the writer now) and giving

artistic form to what is the main business of our ongoing inner life.

What are the books that return you to your body?