I've just returned from a few days in Park City, Utah, where the skies are almost always blue and at night filled with stars--perhaps because of the altitude (7000 feet) because one is closer to them? With a telescope and the help and enthusiasm of my scientist daughter we were able to look at the moon with its lacy inner edge, very visible as it set at about 10 pm, and also at Jupiter, Mars and Saturn with their colours and rings and moons. And more earthly things--one morning as I was dressing I looked out and saw a moose eating the tops of the scrub oaks in my daughter's back yard, and he (it was a he) circled around and turned up again on the other side of the house in the afternoon, almost close enough to touch. It was the first time I had ever seen a moose that close, though I've had some close calls with bears in the Canadian Rockies.

Waiting for me back home a copy of Wallace Stevens' Harmonium, a collection of poems I've only ever read as part of a Selected or Collected. My copy was re-published in 2003 by Faber and Faber, and it is quite an extraordinary beast to have in one's hands, and ponder the order of poems one knows, but generally not as part of a collection. It is really quite wonderful to have it--even just to look at and read the first poem, which is not a particularly familiar one, and wonder why Stevens put it there, in that position, and to think about the history of this book since it was first published in 1923.