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Five Years of Flowers

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I have not felt up to much creativity of late, having lost my mother earlier this year. I have, though, found the completion of various pre-existing projects quite therapeutic, such as this video which I began making late last year and finished today. It is a celebration of five years' worth of flowers, photographed around the Calder Valley and elsewhere in the North of England, and I have dedicated it to my mum, who was a life-long lover of plants and nature, and played a big role in encouraging my own love of gardening and flowers.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-rjv-B91Ng
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Three unpublished bird poems

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Working through some unpublished bird poems for future collections, I have chosen to share the following trio as they are quite apt for the time of year, and I happen to have a photograph appropriate for each. I hope you like them! BULLFINCH With a belly like a bottle of port this birch-basking,  blood-bibbed bird, nut-sucking connoiseur, struts poshly over hedges, plumply patrols herb gardens like a portly Justice-of-the-Peace. LONG TAILED TITS, EARLY MORNING AT THE STATION Notes of mousy music, you bounce the branches of deciduous staves, flip and float, trapezing trees in haphazard dances –   flighty types, brown clowns, impetuous imps, you jump and trick, skip twigs so quick, bob and hop and polka-dot the dawn. DUNNOCK Dusky dove, your pebbly breast a mist-bruised, ash, star-pimpled sky, you tilt a beak, as if fly-catching, slide-fly into a tunnel of tree, and merge into its woody kiss.
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Email From America ... One

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  I am coming towards the end of a three week visit to the United States, my first trip to the country at what is surely by any metric a most significant juncture in its history. These travels take me from New York to Washington DC and back, encompassing a range of other cities in between, and have prompted a large amount of writing and photography, providing me with material for a multitude of projects, far exceeding the one or two ideas I had on setting out.  These include a celebration of my Stateside nature sightings, my thoughts on American railway ("railroad"?) travel, a development of my Night Stations book idea, and a diary of the final week of the Presidential Election and how it seemed to me.   I envisage incorporating these writings into a future book of travel essays, and would like to share a few brief excerpts from them here. With a nod to the late, great British-American broadcaster Alistair Cooke and his legendary radio programme Letter From America (...
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