On not being a poet
Norman Nicholson saw dandelion clocks 'held like small balloons of light above the ground.' MacNeice's tulips have heads like chessmen, bishop or queen. Eilean Ni Chiulleanain pictured Mary Magdalene looking out across the marshes at Marseilles to where the water-weeds 'wait for the right time, then flip all together their thousands of sepia feet.' Alice Oswald tracked the river Dart from it source to the sea and saw, at its beginning, 'eels in the glints, and in each eel a finger-width of sea.' Near Kirkby Stephen in Cumbria, the poet M.R. Peacocke's poems celebrating a year in the life of Cumbrian hill farmers are carved on stones along the Eden valley; 'Snowlight peers at the byre door,' a heron sails, 'drawing behind him a long wake of solitude.' I could go on and on, quoting these words-made-music, these sights, sounds, ideas, captured in enthralling new ways. They make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up in ...