Leaf and Stone

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Every day there is a journey: to bring in the morning paper, to pull out a few weeds, to put out the garbage, to water newly planted seedlings, to feed scraps to the birds.These journeys appear routine, unremarkable, but each brings some event or aspect of the world into sharp focus - apparently insignificant, on the surface, trivial, perhaps, but bearing its own import and carrying subtle echoes of own existence. Outside, things appear then disappear. Bud, burgeon, fall, rot. Something then nothing. Every day there is evidence of this. A petal has fallen. Here is a feather. There the remains of a bird, on its back, claws grasping the chill air. A gnat struggles in a spider-web. In the fierce wind branches fracture, lie akimbo. Twigs scatter. The ground is littered with leaves.It would be easy to view the species that inhabit the small realm of the garden - both flora and fauna - as preoccupied with beginnings and endings; to ignore the unrelenting continuum, the diurnal and nocturnal, the seasonal, the annual cycles. These poems, observe, with gratitude, the grace with which the natural world accepts each small event - events which, were they to occur to us, we, in our conceit, might term catastrophic. Each small collection of words - each poem - is a note, a memorandum of a fragment found or a moment experienced. Evidence that the thing has been. Has happened.

Author Bio

Margaret West, born in Melbourne in 1936, is an artist and writer. She taught at Sydney University College of the Arts, exhibited and lectured extensively in Australia and overseas. Her 32 solo and 70 major group shows include exhibitions at the Victoria and Albert Museum; representing Australia with a major collection at Designmuseo, Helsinki; an invited artist in Clemenger Contemporary Art Award NGV. Her work is comprehensively represented at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Smithsonian Institution, Cooper-Hewitt Museum, NY: National Gallery, Canberra; NGV; SA Art Gallery; WA Art Gallery; Queensland Art Gallery.