Welcome to Shimmerings

Welcome to my substack. I’m honoured that you’ve chosen to call in when there are so many stars in this sky.

I write here to share what strikes awe and wonder into my heart. Because I am an introvert, these things are mostly in nature or in books, but can be in encounters with people along the way.

My posts will be occasional. If you subscribe they will come up in your feed when they emerge in Substack.

The writing I love most sings, it opens a window of fresh meaning. It doesn’t just tell a story, although it must do that to draw me on.

I swooned at Kerri ni dochartaigh’s glorious prose in cacophony of bone. She describes the year of the pandemic, a year in a new place away from the city of her birth and life-long friends in the middle of Ireland. There she finds wonders–in the countryside and in herself.

Hannah Kent’s lyrical prose in Devotion also made me gasp with pleasure. The story of a group of German outcasts’ escape to South Australia in the nineteenth century kept me turning the pages, but her lyrical prose repeatedly stopped me mid-sentence. I could only call the first page a prose poem. It ends thus:

‘Thea, if love were a thing, it would be the sinew of a hand stretched in anticipation of grasping. See, my hands, they reach for you. My heart is a hand reaching.’

I am in awe of writers like these and can only aspire to achieve a fraction of the beauty of their work.

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