From the incredible cover to the last short poem (mine!), this latest issue of Blue Unicorn is full of surprises, painful truths, and consolations of the best kind. The cover image takes us to the British Isles and showcases a sculpture created from an oak trunk rooted in Windsor Great Park, England–a place of which I have never before heard but is now on my wish-to-visit list. I am so taken with this image, and especially by the way the sculpture looms over the human, with its polished limbs soaring skyward, its unseen roots anchoring it firmly, and the earth itself as the meeting ground.
Editor John Hart notes in his introduction that the preponderance of poems in this issue take on the wintery and natural subject of death. As a poet whose first (late-blooming) collection is titled Still Life with Poppies: Elegies, I understand the need to explore loss, the deep consolation that comes from reading or writing something that gives voice to this universal human experience. Richard Wilbur famously called this time of year, “the elegy season,” and there is a strong correspondence to the season we are in, especially this year in the midst of a global pandemic, and thoughts about endings, including our own mortality.
Yet, where there is life, there is need to explore and celebrate. To celebrate Tim’s birthday this month, we were able to travel (safely, in a quarantined manner) to nearby Lanesboro where I wrote the title poem for that first book, as well as the place where I took the cover image. While there, I revisited the site of that photograph and took a new one.
If you look closely, under the fallen oak leaves, you see that something is still blooming, even after snow and frost.
I see that the apparent death is only a transition to the renewal that spring will engender.
My own poem in this issue of Blue Unicorn focuses this aspect of winter, cultivating patience while waiting for the season of new life spring from seed and established roots. It is inspired by my friend Beth–writer, reader, ruminator, environmentalist, and traveler–who has visited Ireland and Scotland several times. Not long ago, she taught me a new word, “hibernaculum” which comes from zoology and means, I understand now, means a kind of winter nest.
You can read work by Beth at her own website or in this Winona Media guest appearance from 2013 in a post titled “Celebrating the Diversity of Independent Book Stores”–be sure to scroll all the way to the end for Beth’s essay on Irish book seller Des Kenny.
Whatever you are currently coming to terms with or letting go of, I wish you also thoughts of rumination, hibernation, and contemplation of eventual renewal, individually and for all of us who share existence for a time on this uncertain but spectacularly beautiful planet.
LESLIE
