In the Vaucluse, Saturday 11 May 2024

Still living the country life. For the past three days, the weather has been sparkling and the land is covered and scented with broom, in addition to the modest wildflowers at the level of the roadside, where I mostly look when I am climbing a hill on my bike. It’s not that the landscape isn’t spectacular - the Dentelles de Montmirail to the west and to the east, the Mont Ventoux.

Yesterday was a rest day, and our neighbour, Paul, thought it was a good day to show us his attic again, especially the crib his father made for him 94+ years ago and a toy wheelbarrow, both cobwebbed and dusty and wormy, but bursting with memories he was happy to share. (Paul is an important person in my new book Apple Thieves coming out in August). My daughter is expecting a baby later this year, and the cradle is for him, though I don’t quite picture her sitting by an open hearth by lantern light, rocking it with her foot, much as I like the idea of it. But first it needs to be dewormed. At the moment both cradle and wheelbarrow are sitting in the yard.

Paris, 20 April 2024

Our two suitcases stand at the front door, waiting to head for the Vaucluse. One hour now, all the packing and dishwashing, and making sure the fridge has been cleaned of anything that would go bad, before we catch Bus 63 for the Gare de Lyon. Paris has a wonderful public transportation, the Metro, of course, though since Covid we have more often taken one of the many buses in all directions more or less on our doorstop - unless our destination is within walking distance, a vast circle that includes much of the centre of Paris from Peter Brooks’ Bouffes du Nord’ to the Gobelin tapestry museum in the 13th.

Yesterday, for instance, I though I’d walk to the Tuileries to check on the plot of land on the river side of the Garden to see how one of my favourite sculpure sites was doing in this season: a very lifelike fallen log (in bronze) lying across a rectangular section of ground planted with ‘undergrowth,’ as if the meticulous Tuileries had been transformed into a suburban wood - for what? 50? 100 paces? You don’t walk through it - this is not bit of forest but a simulacrum. You can, however, sit on a bench and admire it. Which I do. Before turning and returning home through the Tuileries’ lesson in mostly plane geometry.

I am betraying my Canadian northwest childhood when I say that my preferred part of the Luxembourg Garden is the southwest quadrant, designed (very much designed) as a Jardin Englais, an English Garden, whose conceit is again, natural park- and woodland, topped by a very old orchard, meticulously maintained. There are even a couple of redwoods and some Wordsworthian daffodils, recently in bloom. Lawns you can’t walk - or, God forbid, sit on. Still I have grown to like their peacefulness, a little like a pool of green. And I’ve never heard the noise of a leaf blower, though I’ve seen gardeners (lucky them) with string and special clippers trimming the edges.

May I add that The New Criterion for this month of April has one of my Leopardi translations, ‘The Calm after the Storm,’ with its wonderful evocation of the life in an Italian village after a passing downpour which sent all the village’s inhabitants scuttling for shelter.

Paris, Thursday 4 April 2004

Some weeks ago, at a book launch at the Red Wheelbarrow bookshop in the Sixth arrondissement, I was introduced to Victoria Moul, a friend of a friend who thought we might share some interests, notably poetry and translation. Some time later we got together for coffee before she had to pick up a child at the local primary school. Since then I’ve been dipping into Victoria’s online Substack, ‘Horace and Friends,’ and her poetry reviews, on The Friday Poem in particular, but also, in those ‘one thing leads to another’ explorations of the tracks people leave online, other things, including an admirable poem or two on sites I’d never been to before. I think hers is quite an original mind in the one or two poems I’ve seen and in her approach to literary criticism. The texts keep their sheen, the gleams of emotion that prompted her to write them. And they have personality.

It’s late afternoon on a day that began with heavy rain and has turned to blue sky and big white clouds. Street noise: voices, cars and motorcycles and the usual theatre od the absurd at the side entrance to the church across the street. Also I have family in town, so I will just recommend The Friday Poem to anyone who happens to be listening, as well as Victoria’s Substack (Victoria is a classicist and early modern literature specialist with a strong interest in modern poetry, Basil Bunting’s for instance). And now back to cloud-and-pigeon watching, with an eye on a pot of lentil soup, that’s supper.

Paris, Wednesday 20 March 2024

I’ve been reading Louis MacNiece, revelling in it once more. A friend’s comment on a poem sent me back to ‘Snow’ and from there to others, found in various online sites, including the wonderful, British Poetry Archive with its recordings of poets reading their poems, which has several MacNiece poems. The friend who set me off on this quest also sent me ‘Soap Suds,’ which I had never read: https://www.blueridgejournal.com/poems/lm-soap.htm.

A sunny Paris morning with street noise: a woman on her phone, a one-sided bit of a conversation, delivery vans stopping and starting, one street over a siren passing, fading. I am proofreading the manuscript for my book Apple Thieves, last minute changes, trying to decide whether to delete or keep the poem I’m working on.

Gym after lunch, window shopping on my way at Compagnie, a book shop I love across from the Sorbonne, a few steps from the statue of Montaigne, whose bronze foot in its soft-looking bronze slippers is well-polished by passersby.

The Vaucluse, Saturday 2 March

Sunny morning, no wind. Smoke drifting into the open window, someone burning olive branches, which is illegal, law says take them to the dump. Complain? and sound like a city person griping about the pig farm

they married into? No way. I started rereading a much-dog-eared copy of Czeslaw Milosz’s A Book of Luminous Things: an International Anthology of Poetry, which I can open (as with Hughes and Heaney’s Rattlebag) anywhere and find something to inspire me, especially if I am in a be-inspired mood. I read one verse of a poem in the ‘Women’s Skin’ chapter and laid the book down and started typing on my laptop.

Smoky air improving.

Monday 19 February, In the Vaucluse

In our attic room, looking out a very small window at a square containing the north side of the town of Caromb, neighbouring roofs, fields (olive trees) and in the distance to the south, the curved ridge-line of mountains. Sky blue and white (clouds). A mistral seems to be starting.

We arrived yesterday afternoon and are still settling in, greeting our next door neighbour in his adjoining house, family members, settled in this village. This morning I’ve been up to the village cafe-grocery store for supplies - knowing in advance that Monday morning is not a good day to find fresh supplies in most grocery stores, large or small. Found a few potatoes (sprouting), onions, garlic, two slices of ham cut for me (thinly) off the ham in the refrigerated case, one apple, four yoghurts. It will keep us going for 24 hours…

Now an hour to read about Philippe Jaccottet, the Swiss/French poet on the excellent literary website of a younger poet, Jean-Michel Maulpoix. I have been doing a few translations of Jaccottet’s ‘verse’ (as opposed to ‘prose’) poems. Maulpoix’s website has some excellent material, the sort of texts that come from the mind of one poet thinking about a somewhat older, but almost-contemporary poet. Jaccottet is becoming interesting to me for the stripped down nature of his poetic thought.

Paris, Friday 9 February 2024

I’d left the bedroom window open as I brushed my teeth and washed my face: it was raining outside and I love the sound of a good downpour, falling on the zinc roof of a part of the church across the street, tattoo of a woman’s feet on the pavement, one half of a phone conversation, then a car door opening and closing … wet tires of passing cars. But I closed the window before we got into bed, not wanting to be startled awake by loud sounds - an argument - in the middle of the night.

Paris, Thursday 8 February, 2024

Note to self: quiet time is necessary and space to be alone. A busy agenda - beware! Sleep therapist: put the day to bed early, keep time and space to wind down. Do not try to sleep, allow sleep to come.