Illuminating the long dark

Poems for winter by Jane Lovell on the Hazel blog, plus free postage on all book orders between now and Christmas Eve

Here in the rural west country in the month of long nights, it feels as if “we navigate by shadow / and owl call” as Jane Lovell says so perceptively in ‘Hoar Oak Water’, one of three poems now live on our blog.

time measured only
in the rotting of leaves,
	the creep of frost,
light and darkness
	and shades in between.

Jane’s new work is inspired by the landscape of Exmoor, especially its tree-clad combes and fast-flowing streams. She traces its whorls and patterns, finding “hieroglyphics on the stripped trunk” of a fallen tree, “dark, geometric, unfathomable”.

December offers

As well as offering free UK postage on all website orders until 24 December, we also have copies of Edmund de Waal’s Perdendosi at a third off the usual price.

Perdendosi is a study of leaves at the stage of their transformation when they have lost all colour, and become more like parchment than plant. A collaboration between photographer Norman McBeath and ceramicist, artist and writer Edmund de Waal, it takes its title from the musical term perdendosi, which almost always comes at the end of a piece and directs sound, rhythm and tone to gradually fade and die away.

The book has 12 black and white photographs with accompanying text, which de Waal describes as both autobiography and a journal of reading. It begins:

‘After the leaves have fallen, we return / To a plain sense of things’, wrote Wallace Stevens. He knew about return. He knew that you need to come back into a room to see something again, need to listen to a blackbird, to Peter Quince playing a clavier. Sometimes I think his attunement to winter, snow, porcelain, is here in this understanding for the need for only a few leaves, for the time after they have fallen.

And don’t forget all the other books we have in stock. There are very limited numbers left of some of these titles, so do visit our online bookshop soon.