'When you've set the world on fire / there will still be herons'

Another peek inside my notebook

What’s been happening in my notebook this week? Some editing, some tidying, some avian take off.

Current notebook, if you’re interested in the physicality of these things. I can’t deal with lines so I prefer to write on blank pages or ones with tiny dots or squares.

I’m in the early stages of writing a prose non-fiction book about herons and why I’m so obsessed with them, what they’ve meant to us (humans that is) through time and place. Norman MacCaig said that frogs kept on ‘jumping’ into his poems. He couldn’t stop writing about them because they wouldn’t let him. Well, herons stalk their way through mine: they’re not content with the prose.

With thanks to poet and birder Suzannah Evans

Last year, I collaborated with musician Hayden Thorpe

on a piece for Kendal Mountain Festival ‘Music on Nature’ where we tried to address those canal ghosts, river omens. Hayden is a magician of sound and has a voice that gives me goosebumps when he sings - you might know his incredible work with Robert MacFarlane on ‘Ness’.