authenticity, beauty, colour, inspiration, life
This poem, ‘Into Battle’, was written in 1915 by an officer serving in the First World War, Julian Grenfell. It was published in The Times the day after his death from war wounds. The poems draws on different threads of life as providing strength to the...
beauty, colour, enchantment, moments
A searching definition for the precise shade of California poppies, as recalled in Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Not orange, you understand, but golden cream.And mixed with these were splashes of California poppies. These too are of a burning color – not...
colour, happiness, moments
Elizabeth Bowen’s mouth-watering description of eating a Sicilian orange in Rome deserves a place at the Nuannaarpoq table. And I read it a few weeks after moving to Italy and beginning to find red, sweet oranges of a quality I’ve rarely encountered...
beauty, colour, discovery, enchantment, happiness, moments
A blazingly limpid landscape on the island of Thera, plunging down to the sea, with flashes of passing birds and lizards over patterned stones and anchored plants. But there is a delicate order, too, imposed by tracery of asphodel and grape-hyacinth, purple mallow and...
beauty, colour, discovery, enchantment, happiness, memory, moments
Golding sails from island to island on a land and sea alternating odyssey, and at some point, overwhelmed by enchantment, his memory of moments merge into the map of his travels so he can’t quite recall what happened on which island. But the memories are still...
