The Vaucluse, Saturday 2 March

Sunny morning, no wind. Smoke drifting into the open window, someone burning olive branches, which is illegal, law says take them to the dump. Complain? and sound like a city person griping about the pig farm

they married into? No way. I started rereading a much-dog-eared copy of Czeslaw Milosz’s A Book of Luminous Things: an International Anthology of Poetry, which I can open (as with Hughes and Heaney’s Rattlebag) anywhere and find something to inspire me, especially if I am in a be-inspired mood. I read one verse of a poem in the ‘Women’s Skin’ chapter and laid the book down and started typing on my laptop.

Smoky air improving.

Monday 19 February, In the Vaucluse

In our attic room, looking out a very small window at a square containing the north side of the town of Caromb, neighbouring roofs, fields (olive trees) and in the distance to the south, the curved ridge-line of mountains. Sky blue and white (clouds). A mistral seems to be starting.

We arrived yesterday afternoon and are still settling in, greeting our next door neighbour in his adjoining house, family members, settled in this village. This morning I’ve been up to the village cafe-grocery store for supplies - knowing in advance that Monday morning is not a good day to find fresh supplies in most grocery stores, large or small. Found a few potatoes (sprouting), onions, garlic, two slices of ham cut for me (thinly) off the ham in the refrigerated case, one apple, four yoghurts. It will keep us going for 24 hours…

Now an hour to read about Philippe Jaccottet, the Swiss/French poet on the excellent literary website of a younger poet, Jean-Michel Maulpoix. I have been doing a few translations of Jaccottet’s ‘verse’ (as opposed to ‘prose’) poems. Maulpoix’s website has some excellent material, the sort of texts that come from the mind of one poet thinking about a somewhat older, but almost-contemporary poet. Jaccottet is becoming interesting to me for the stripped down nature of his poetic thought.

Paris, Friday 9 February 2024

I’d left the bedroom window open as I brushed my teeth and washed my face: it was raining outside and I love the sound of a good downpour, falling on the zinc roof of a part of the church across the street, tattoo of a woman’s feet on the pavement, one half of a phone conversation, then a car door opening and closing … wet tires of passing cars. But I closed the window before we got into bed, not wanting to be startled awake by loud sounds - an argument - in the middle of the night.

Paris, Thursday 8 February, 2024

Note to self: quiet time is necessary and space to be alone. A busy agenda - beware! Sleep therapist: put the day to bed early, keep time and space to wind down. Do not try to sleep, allow sleep to come.

Paris, 31 January 2024

Tomorrow I should send my manuscript to the publisher.

There is nothing better than reading while eating. Or vice versa.

The best way to read is with your feet up (Calvino).

I’ve just opened Dwight Garner’s book (FSG 2023) The Upstairs Delicatessen: Eating, Reading…

He’s talking about how he made the food not run out before he had finished the reading material he had amassed after school on the living room carpet before he headed to the kitchen for the food: sandwich w/mayo, lots of it, potato chips/crisps, pretzels, a cold drink made with red powder. I haven’t got to what happens to the carpet yet.

Reading at table was verboten where I grew up, but still engaged in if one was alone, and yes, anything would do as reading material, whatever magazines were lying around…well broken-in novels (they would lie flat on the table) from another generation of childhoods (Little Women…), cereal boxes.

I still thinking heaven is reading and eating at the same time.

Dwight Garner is a New York Times book critic. I feel I’m going to gobble his book up.

Paris, Friday 26 January

Did I say the weather had warmed up and turned rainy. Rain shines on the zinc roofs across the street this morning. When I was a child, and especially a teen, I didn’t like Vancouver’s wetness because it made my hair frizz, really frizz, and nothing kept it straight when I went out. Then I taught school in Ghana for a couple years and damp heat wasn’t great either. Then I made peace with my curly hair… . What I love is the sound of rain coming down; in fact, this morning I am sitting with the window open so there’s no glass between the rain’s sssh sssh and me.

And now to a translation and more rewriting - tweaking - of ‘the book’ poems.

Paris, Thursday 18 January

Snow overnight. It must be cold outside, but the sun is casting angular shadows across the zinc roof of the church opposite.

Soon I must send the ‘final’ manuscript of Apples Thieves off to the publisher, Carcanet. Then the in-press details, copy editing, jacket design (a tough one and not entirely my decision), publication on 29 August (so precise already!). MostIy I am tweaking poems, but one, about a sewing machine, I made big changes to this week, more of a problem, since now I am too close to the poem to see what needs to be improved. Need to step back, step away but hard when the deadline looms!

Working on the bed, looking out at the snow. The kite (in lieu of curtains) is chilly.

Paris, Monday 15 January

The zinc roofs of the buildings and church are damp this morning: it rained overnight, which means the temperatures, below freezing, must have gone up a notch or two. Pigeons are splashing in the gutters.

I’m still working - fussing? - with the Jaccottet translation I began last week, a recently-discovered poem in his 1946-67 Poésies (Gallimard). It is a short, apparently simple poem about sitting in room in the morning: ‘Silence enters like a servant come to tidy up.’ The via negativa… .

And so here I am sitting in my own quiet room, waiting…