The joy of small things / From Keats to Merseybeat / A retreat into my favorite verse is a soul saver

Philip Larkin with wicker rabbit ‘Veronica’; ‘I will always lose myself in Larkin.’ 

THE JOY OF SMALL THINGS

From Keats to Merseybeat: a retreat into my favourite verse is a soul saver

Poems are Swiss army knives of words – they have multiple uses

Hannah Jane Parkinson
Fri 6 Dec 2019 07.00 GMT

Ican’t remember when I fell in love with poetry, though I remember the teachers who encouraged it. I remember bringing in a lever-arch file of my own “efforts”, aged 14, mostly aping Wilfred Owen – a war poet who had the distinct advantage of having served in a war, which I had not. I had been kettled while on an Iraq protest, though, which I maintain counts for something.

The joy of small things / Chekhov and Georgia O'Keeffe loved autumn leaves, and so do I

Autumn Leaves, Lake George, 1924

Georgia O'Keeffe

The joy of small things

Chekhov and Georgia O'Keeffe loved autumn leaves, and so do I

Their colour provides solace as we struggle to adjust from summer to darker nights and rain

Hannah Jane Parkinson
Friday 15 November 2019

T

he colours of autumn are abundant: the cool blue of the sky, the silver frost on the grass, the fuchsia of an early sunset. But the true riches are the leaves. The deep reds; the fierce oranges. The ochre of those curled at the edges. The shrivelled ones; the pale yellow of fading bruises. The combination of these colours against those crisp skies is majestic.