balanced on the edge

It was one of those times when you learn a new word, or rediscover an old one, and then it pops up everywhere. For example, one night you might use an astringent to tone facial tissue, and then you read the word astringent applied to a character in a poem.
While reading It Is Daylight by [...]

My dreams have been highly charged with symbolic images lately, more than likely due to my reading of Man and His Symbols, by Jung et al. I’ve scribbled a few haphazard images down in my journal, but there’s been little free time to think about what the dreams might mean. Instead, I’ve been reading poetry, [...]

We’re just finishing Pathways to Bliss in my poetry course, and then we’re going to read the first two essays from Man and His Symbols, a collection of essays edited by Carl Jung for the everyday person. I’m ready to take on Jung after Campbell’s excellent recap  of modern psychology in Pathways to Bliss, from [...]

Not that anyone needs to know, but my derriere was already sore from Vicki’s challenging yoga class yesterday, so slipping and falling on my butt while going down an icy slope didn’t help matters. But the extra padding with which nature has endowed me came in handy, and now I’m fine, drinking tea and eating [...]

The MFA program I’m starting in August has prompted me to make some huge changes, not all of them very easy to make. I’ve had to resign from teaching yoga at the YMCA on Mondays and Tuesdays because I’m going to be in class at those times. This is a tough goodbye for me, because [...]

Spending a few days at the beach with my sister and her daughter was a welcome change from the ordinary, and it was also nice to see my husband, my son and his friends have a good time there. The boys bought a raft and a pirate’s flag to ride the waves, while the [...]

On Sunday my son Freeboarder came upstairs telling us ‘you have to see this documentary,’ so we turned on the TV, and there on our screen was one of the saddest stories I’ve seen in a long time, a National Geographic documentary about a Chinese boy with a horrible facial tumor, billed as China’s Elephant [...]

I found out this spring that I’ve been accepted to the MFA program in creative writing at Georgia State University, with a concentration in poetry. Since then I’ve been preparing myself in all kinds of ways, from diving into my reading list to getting booster shots for tetanus and other diseases (not pleasant – tetanus [...]

Thanks to poet, essayist, and photographer Dave Bonta, (Via Negativa) there is now a growing collection of spoken and animated poetry on his new site, Moving Poems. Some of the videos are interpretations of poets reading their work, as in Sylvia Plath’s reading of her poem Daddy.
Other videos are the poet’s visual representations of [...]

Breathing in Colour by Clare Jay

My review
rating: 5 of 5 stars
Clare Jay’s Breathing in Colour ( Piatkus, Little, Brown Book Group, March 2009) weaves together threads from many disparate areas of life – dreams, travels, the creative mind, family dynamics, memory, and relationships between men and women. The story, which takes place in [...]