'When we got in my cousin said / let’s climb that hill. We had just / got in from Rome and Cantelice / twisted away from the second story / window in cobble and brick.'
Nature writing, but not the kind you'd expect. Robert Macfarlane, Jay Griffiths, Benjamin Markovits, Arthur Bradford, Roger Deakin, Alison Macleoad and even Raymond Chandler.
'Snubbed by her cheerfulness like a loud door / how can I greet her without adjustments? / So when she’s gone I always stray / after her temperament, her air – / hoping to keep step with her in her absence.'
'This is a classic squatters’ landscape, and all the better for it. I always feel immediately at home in such makeshift places. Even the little palings have a Dickensian sort of attraction.'
'Walnut Tree Farm, the house he eventually completed, and in which he died in August, 2006, is made largely of wood. It is as close to a living thing as a building can be.'
'For indigenous people everywhere, nature is an enlargement of your mind and your sense of kin – your social mind. Trees have long been associated with knowledge.'
For years I have been an illicit cultivator of neglected patches of public land. I ‘fight the filth with forks and flowers’ and until now had never been confronted with the choice between arrest and retreat.