Wales Arts Review reviews Used to BE

Here's a great new review of Used to Be in the Wales Arts Review - very insightful in terms of my basic themes and preoccupations. I didn't see it for a while, as I've not been on social media much - coming to the end of a big writing project means spending any spare time catching up in the garden, cleaning the sadly neglected house and spending hours and hours fiddling about with the manuscript - I've edited it twice now, but every time I look at the damn thing I see something that needs changing, and then I have to redo it and print out the changed pages again for my beta readers, who prefer hard copy.

The review, by Frances Spurrier, comments on the way some of the stories touch on technology, which I hadn't thought of myself - I tend to think I've left behind my obsession with technology, as worked out in The Birth Machine and some of my earlier stories, having become more interested in storytelling and memory, but I guess those things are intertwined, all feeding into my underlying theme of power which I made most explicit in Balancing on the Edge of the World.

I'm pretty chuffed by Frances Spurrier's comment:

 'While it may be easy enough to have existential anxieties, to ask what is real and what is not, to question the reliability of memory – it is not at all easy to ask big questions in this most difficult of writing forms, the short story, and using such lucid and poetic prose as the author here uses.'

Off to London today, to the launch of Isobel Dixon's new poetry collection Bearings - can't wait, I love her poetry!

Anniversary prize draw results

Congratulations to the winners of my anniversary draw, to each of whom a copy of one of my Salt books will be winging its way:

Balancing on the Edge of the World: Pratibha Veronica Castle and Fran Slater

Too Many Magpies: Char March and Sarah Schofield

The Birth Machine: mrcc and Frances

Winners: please email me via my profile with your address, so that I can get your book in the post asap.

Anniversary giveaway

How can it be this warm on the 1st October? And in August in Wales I needed a scarf and gloves! It feels right, though, as 1st October will always be a special date for me - the date that my story collection, Balancing on the Edge of the World, and my novel Too Many Magpies were published, as well as the date of publication of the first edition of my novel The Birth Machine.

To celebrate, once again I'm giving away two copies of each of the three books published by Salt. If you want a chance to win one (or more), please leave a message below, email me through this website, or message me on Facebook or Twitter before the end of next Wednesday (8th) when the names will be drawn from a hat. Please say which book(s) you'd like to be entered for - but remember, even if you've read them, those lovely Salt physical books make great Christmas presents!

East of the Web

I'm delighted that another of my stories is to be published in the online magazine, East of the Web. If you don't already know East of the Web I recommend that you pay a visit: it's a fount of stories. Everything they've ever published is there online, easily accessible, and there's an amazing variety, something to suit every taste, while the standard is consistently high. It's definitely a place one is proud to place a story. I've got two stories proudly on there already: 'Compass and Torch' and 'A Glossary of Bread' (both now collected in Balancing on the Edge of the World). They were both stories I'd previously found hard to place: I think the problem with 'Glossary' was that it's a bit off the wall in its form (it's structured around definitions of bread), but I'm not quite sure what the problem was with 'Compass and Torch' which I see as a pretty traditional piece. In any case, East of the Web believed in them both, different as they are, and were vindicated: 'Glossary' was afterwards published again in the prestigious lit mag Stand, and 'Compass and Torch' was picked off the site for an English school textbook, and by the AQA examining board, whose GCSE syllabus it ended up on. That's how significant East of the Web is. Among the most recent publications there is a story by Ailsa Cox, my one-time co-editor on Metropolitan short-story magazine.

My new story, 'Falling,' was shortlisted and Highly Commended in the Sean O'Faolain competition.

Honno ghost story anthology

Although some of my work has included spooky elements, I don't think I've ever written an out-and-out ghost story before. However, I did write one recently and I'm delighted that it's to be published in an anthology of ghost stories from the Welsh Women's Press, Honno, next autumn.

The story came out of a trip I made in May 2012. John and I travelled to Bristol to the launch of the second short fiction collection by my good writing friend, Tania Hershman, My Mother Was an Upright Piano - a lovely event at the Arnolfini Centre on the docks. Here's a photo of us having dinner afterwards (Tania is third from left and I'm next to her; far right is Bristol Prize founder Joe Melia).

In spite of having relatives in Bristol I'd never before made anything but flying visits there, so this time I stayed on afterwards and explored. One place that made a huge impression on me was the Georgian House, built for the sugar merchant John Pinney, preserved more or less in its original state and furnished in the way it would have been in Pinney's lifetime.

It's a beautiful house, with clean lines and airy spaces, so unlike the dark Victorian gothic that lends itself so well to the brooding and unearthly. Not at all suggestive of ghosts... And yet...

The house stayed in mind, an idea was forming, and there I was a year later setting a ghost story in just such a house...

Honno previously published two other short stories of mine, in their anthology Power: 'Power', which is collected in Balancing on the Edge of the World, and another, 'Skin Eaters.'.

Results for anniversary draw of my Salt books.

 

Congratulations to the winners of the anniversary draw for signed copies of my three Salt books (all published on the same date, 1st October):

My story collection, Balancing on the Edge of the World: Paul McVeigh and Armel Dagorn.

My novel The Birth Machine:  Jessica and Hayley Jones.

My novella Too Many Magpies: Dan Powell and Sandy Ferguson.

Above is John making the draw for The Birth Machine  - being interrupted, officially, in writing his textbook on language - he did actually put his laptop aside, but I'm not sure what the Guardian is doing on his lap!

Anniversary giveaway

I emerged briefly this morning from the deep trance of an intensive writing stint to realise that today, 1st October, is the anniversary of the publication of three of my books: my story collection, Balancing on the Edge of the World, the novella Too Many Magpies, and the first edition of my novel The Birth Machine. So I'm making a quick visit here to the blog to announce that, to mark the anniversary, I'm offering two signed copies of each of the three books. If you would like to be put into a draw (to be made a week today, Monday 8th October, at 5 pm) then leave a comment below, email me via my profile or message me/comment via Twitter or Facebook. Please say which book(s) you would like to be put in for (you can be put in for one, two or all three).

Remember, my publisher (of all three books) is the remarkable Salt, which means the books can't be too bad, though I say it myself!

Sorry for recent absence - once I've finished the latest project, and answered a couple of queries from people studying my stories, I hope to return to report on one or two readings etc I've attended.

  
Balancing on the Edge of the Word. 'Quite swept me off my feet.' - Dovegreyreader

Too Many Magpies. 'An appealing, bewitching read, one that feels slightly dangerous and a little bit thrilling.' - Kimbofo, Reading Matters blog

The Birth Machine. 'A damn good read. It’s a cliché to say this is a must-read, but still, I’m going to urge you all to read it. And I’m talking to you, too, boys.' - Valerie O'Riordan, Bookmunch -

Stand Magazine at 60

On Saturday I attended the 60th anniversary celebration of Stand Magazine at Leeds University. The origins of Stand are legendary. As current Managing Editor Jon Glover related, Stand was started by the now sadly deceased poet Jon Silkin in 1952, when he used his £5.00 severance pay as a lavatory cleaner to buy paper from the company office, and printed off the first copies on a mimeograph. He had been trying unsuccessfully to start a union, and instead Stand became his act of protest: to make a stand for things that matter through poetry. At a forum on small presses which I attended in the morning, Jon Glover held up copies of the first three issues for us to see: home-made looking objects, far removed from the classically designed publication Stand became. But very quickly it achieved a prodigious reputation, with huge names - including Angela Carter and Peter Carey - beginning their writing careers between its pages. It is one of the few important magazines to have survived from that time. Also legendary are Silkin's efforts in distributing the magazine: Jon Glover and poet Jeffrey Wainwright, who were later students at Leeds, related how they would come into the students' refectory to find Silkin flogging copies, and Lorna Tracy, who became his fiction editor, told how they would travel the length and breadth of the country by car with the magazine.

I was delighted that Lorna Tracy was present at the celebration. As I said when I read in the afternoon, I have felt very nurtured by Stand - as a new writer I drank in its contents, and it was a huge part of my creative education - and by Lorna in particular. When I first began writing short stories my great aim was to get a story in Stand; Lorna turned down the first story I sent her, but she was so very helpful, discussing my story in detail, and so very encouraging. As I said to her, it's people like her who make writers. Lorna eventually stepped down from Stand but returned in 2004 to edit a special fiction edition, and I was thrilled that she included my story, 'A Glossary of Bread' (now included in Balancing on the Edge of the World). This is a story I've never read at a reading, as it's interspersed with dictionary definitions of bread and types of bread, and I didn't think it could work read out loud. But it seemed so fitting to read it on this occasion, that I had a go, and, after all, it seemed to work fine!

Others reading prose with me with were Janette Jenkins, Elanor Dymott, Elizabeth Cook and my fellow Salt author David Gaffney. Later we heard readings from poets Alison Brackenbury, Julian Turner, Vahni Capildeo and Ian Fairley. Unfortunately I then had to leave and was very sorry to miss a further two sessions of poetry readings, including those from John Cassidy, Amanda Dalton, and a trio of Ians - Gregson, Samson and Duhig.

I do urge you to subscribe to Stand if you don't already. You won't be disappointed - eclectic but excellent poetry and prose. I'm very pleased to say that my new story, 'The Relentless Pull of Gravity', originally scheduled to be included in a 2014 issue, has now been brought forward and will appear in the next issue, due out at the end of September or the beginning of October.

Bookshops I love: Bath Waterstone's

 And here is The Birth Machine on its Fiction shelves. (See why I love it?):

I nipped over to Bath from Bristol on Friday. I'd never been there before, but ever since reading Persuasion and Mansfield Park in my teens, I've had a strong image of it in my head. And, inevitably, I suppose, it turned out to be different from my  image, the architecture much grander and more imposing. Was I influenced by the neatness and economy of Austen's prose, and her intimate human perspective, I wonder? See what happens when you view life through books?

Tomorrow I'm off to a school in north Manchester to talk to three classes about my story 'Compass and Torch' which is on the syllabus of the GCSE English exam they're about to sit. (You can find the story online or in my collection, Balancing on the Edge of the World). I'm finding it a bit strange, quite frankly, thinking about my own work in the necessary analytic terms, the whole process of writing being far more intuitive than people often guess. And, as Mark from the reading group said when I met him in the supermarket last night, I'd have a devil of a job to come anywhere near the brilliant teaching podcast about the story made by teachers Andrew Bruff and Ollie Hayne.

The life of books on the web

A great thing about the web is the way books can go on getting reviews long after publication. To my delight yesterday, four and a half years after Balancing on the Edge of the World came out, Bookersatz published a review by Claire Marriott.  She calls it 'an intense collection of stories' and finds the 'characterisations ... particularly vivid, ranging from comic to tragic but always retaining their believability'. I'm always immensely interested to find which are people's favourite stories in the collection - it's amazing how much that differs! - and this is what Claire says:

'My favourite pieces are Daniel Smith Disappears Off the Face of the Earth which contrasts one life-altering moment in the life of a teenage boy with “all the times and places in the history of the world” and Power, the haunting story of a young girl listening to her parent’s relationship fall apart.'

And of course people go on discussing books on the web on a more casual level. I was thrilled when a couple of days ago poet Steve Waling urged his Facebook friends to read The Birth Machine and called it 'really rather brilliant, deep dark and moving.' And once again it struck me how a book that was first published only for a women's market is now, on its republication by Salt, finding such favour with male readers.

New Libertines at Afflecks

Last night's one-off New Libertines event was quite fabulous. Organised by Literary Death Match winner and Eight Cuts Gallery impresario Dan Holloway, in association with the dynamic women behind the great book site  For Books' Sake, it was held in the Three Minute Theatre in Manchester's Afflecks Arcade. I hadn't been in the venue before - it's been there about seven or eight months, I think: it's cosy and informal and even a bit mad, with not only some raked seating but also stools and tables and cushions for sitting along the sides and some easy chairs, and weird and wonderful decorations on the walls and ceiling, a little bar in the corner as you come in and a toilet at the side of the stage! I wish I'd taken more photos of it than the single one above of the stage. [Edited in: Here are some pics.] The audience who packed the place was a lovely one, and the atmosphere was warm and friendly. Loads to laugh at in the readings, and loads to think about, and a wealth of performance talent - in the open mic as well as in the scheduled spots. Paul Askew got everyone in a hilarious mood, as much with his mordant delivery as with his vivid, off-beat and surreal poems, one of which featured a talking crow; Rachel Genn read a funny but touching section from her novel The Cure in which the male protagonist negotiates a swimming-bath date with ill-fitting swimming shorts; Sarah-Clare Conlon had people in stitches with her extremely smutty flash fictions, and Sian Rathore's poems had us all hooting and delighted by their in-your-face exuberance. Laura Jarratt's extract from her forthcoming YA novel Skin Deep, which starts with a car crash, was vividly harrowing. Claire Robertson, who works across various media including calligraphy gave us some true performance art which featured a beautiful hand-made scroll and referenced her own current advanced pregnancy. Michael Stewart decided not to read from his clever and moving novel, Not-the-Booker-winning King Crow, and instead read some thought-provoking poems from a project on Couples on which he's working. I read from my short story 'Condensed Metaphysics', the first story in Balancing on the Edge of the World. Dan Holloway was a brilliant compere, and his own poems were tough and moving. A great open mic session, too, in which poet, prose writer and Manchester blogger Fat Roland took part.

I really couldn't believe, when the evening finally wound down, that it was already ten-forty-five!

One year to the day and a giveaway

Today is exactly one year since the reissue, in a new edition, of my novel The Birth Machine, and I'm celebrating with a giveaway of 5 signed copies of the book, plus two each of my other two Salt titles, the novel Too Many Magpies and the story collection, Balancing on the Edge of the World. If you'd like one, just leave your name in the comments below, saying which book or books you'd like to be put in the draw for. Deadline Saturday.

The Birth Machine. 'A damn good read. It’s a cliché to say this is a must-read, but still, I’m going to urge you all to read it. And I’m talking to you, too, boys.' - Valerie O'Riordan, Bookmunch -

Too Many Magpies. 'An appealing, bewitching read, one that feels slightly dangerous and a little bit thrilling.' - Kimbofo, Reading Matters blog

  
 







Balancing on the Edge of the Word. 'Quite swept me off my feet.' - Dovegreyreader

Catching up with Goodreads

Catch-up time. After six months of solid writing followed by a summer of immensely enjoyable but distracting family reunions and long periods of absence of internet, here I am with a study under drifts of papers, a hugely cluttered email box and much other business neglected: accounts in turmoil, submissions unmade, websites unattended. I hadn't been on Goodreads for a while, and what a lovely surprise, when I logged on again last night to add some new reading, to find some great new reviews of Too Many Magpies and Balancing on the Edge of the World. I really did think this book was brilliant, says one reader, 'Mew', of TMM, and another, 'Sisterimapoet', says: It felt mad and drugged, despite sharp details of external reality, colours and sounds. It felt doomed and dangerous but thrilling too. That really thrills me, actually: it's exactly the effect I wanted to achieve, and, quite frankly, how I felt while writing it. BOTEOTW now has several five-star ratings, and I'm more than chuffed that  Nick Perring who writes his own striking stories, recommends it highly.


And adding books I'd recently read but which were long-since written or published reminded me what a great site Goodreads is, facilitating serious consideration and discussion of books regardless of their publication dates and countering the sell-by-date situation into which the book industry has got itself locked.

A review missed and found

The internet is really amazing. The story 'Leaf Memory' is one of the very oldest in Balancing on the Edge of the World. It first appeared in an anthology published by Penguin, and I had no idea that the anthology had been reviewed in Punch until, years later, indeed this week, I came across the fact on the internet. Imagine how I felt when I read these words:

'[A short story] must emulate the swift, swallow or martlet. Most impressive in this respect is Elizabeth Baines' "Leaf Memory" which charts the fortunes of three generations in as many pages without any sense of strain or thinness.'

I guess nowadays, thanks to the internet, you wouldn't miss a review in that way!

World Book Day and Save Our Libraries at Crystal Peaks

I was delighted to be invited by Claire Molinari, Chair of Sheffield's Local & Live Community Theatre, to read and talk yesterday, World Book Day, at Crystal Peaks Library. I felt a bit agoraphobic about leaving my novel (I'm in that stage now where it's like a cocoon) but it was lovely to have a change and drive out with John in beautiful sunshine and over the frosty Pennines. When we arrived at the library, retired policeman Martyn Johnson, author of 'What's Tha Up To - Memoirs Of An Attercliffe Bobby' was holding his audience spellbound, and he told how, after its huge local success, the book has now been picked up by a bigger publisher.

The day-long series of events was also part of the Save Our Libraries campaign, so I talked about what libraries had meant to me as a child and the part they had played in the making of my books. As I've said before, I find libraries very inspiring for writing - often when I've got a general idea for a story but can't find the starting point I'll wander down to the library, and sure enough a first line will come to me - it's as though they're there waiting for me, somehow nurtured by the library! This is what happened very startlingly with Too Many Magpies: the first line just seemed to drop down to me from the domed ceiling of Didsbury Library (photo below by Gene Hunt).




The Birth Machine couldn't have been written without the help of the library in Chorlton, where I was living at the time: there was a big Obstetrics book in the reference section which I constantly referred to for the sections set in a maternity ward.

(Thanks to Paul Ashwin for this photo of Chorlton Library)

And my story 'Glossary of Bread' (included in Balancing on the Edge of the World), which is structured around dictionary definitions of bread (and the changes over time of those definitions) was written using the 1933 volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary ranged at the time around the reference shelf walls in Didsbury Library.

Anyway, I had a lovely time yesterday, and thanks so much to those who came and to Claire for inviting me to join in the day.

Results of draw!

Here are the results of the draw made by independent adjudicator John from each of three of our hats:

Kate Brown and Mary of the Shorter Stories blog each win a copy of the brand-new reissue of The Birth Machine.

Michelle Teasdale and Alice Brockway (who came via Twitter) each win a copy of Balancing on the Edge of the World.

Angela Topping and Diane Becker (who came via Twitter) each win a copy of Too Many Magpies.

Congrats all, and please email me via my profile with your addresses so I can send your copies winging towards you!

What's so special about 1st October? A giveaway.

Tomorrow's the 1st October and it's a very special day for me. It's the day that my novel Too Many Magpies will be exactly one year old, and the day that my story collection Balancing on the Edge of the World will be three! It's also the day that the first ever edition of The Birth Machine (which is being reissued by Salt on 1st November this year) was published. (See sidebar for pics and details of them all.)

So: to celebrate this extraordinarily special day in my life I'm giving away two copies of each of those books (The Birth Machine will be sent once it becomes available, which shouldn't be long now.) I'm announcing this today as I'm off to London in a short while and won't be back until later tomorrow.

If you'd like to be entered in the draw(s) for a copy of any or all of these books, just leave a comment specifying which ones(s) you'd like to be put in for. Remember - not long to Christmas, and they make not bad presents, though I say it myself!

And the reason for my trip? Another book launch: Sue Guiney's intriguing-sounding book A Clash of Innocents with which she will be visiting this blog on October 1oth.

Trying to keep the balls in the air (and the knots out of the stomach)

Well, that's not worked out perfectly so far: last night I woke up with the realization that I'd left something off the flowchart that was meant to save me sleepless nights thinking about all I had to do for publicity and trying to remember it. And I couldn't get back to sleep...!

Sue Guiney, who has a new novel coming out this month with new independent Ward Wood, has said on my Fictionbitch blog that she is planning to take a whole year off writing in order to promote the book, A Clash of Innocents, and maybe that's the only sensible way to go. But having done no really solid and sustained writing between the publication of my story collection Balancing on the Edge of the World in October 2007 and April this year when I got down to work in earnest on my novel in progress (with the publication of Too Many Magpies in between last autumn), I've decided that I really can't afford to stop altogether for the reissue of The Birth Machine next month. For one thing, if I did, I'm sure I'd lose the thread of the current novel. If at all possible I'm going to try and keep going while simultaneously working hard on the publicity.

So how's it going, you may wonder? Well, yesterday and today I managed two solid mornings of work on the novel from nine in the morning till one-thirty, and later yesterday I fulfilled the requirements of my flowchart by designing posters for my Didsbury Arts Festival reading and talk on 27th September and creating a Facebook event for it. (Today I'll have spent a good chunk of the afternoon getting back to blogging.) Can't say, though, that yesterday was easy. Although it's true that I'm at a tricky point in the novel, where I'm juggling several threads (and trying to make it look seamless and simple), I can't help feeling that the peace of my Wales retreat, where the connections and sequences seemed just to present themselves to me, would have been more conducive, and that there I'd have had to wrestle with it all less hard. And it's a point in the novel where I'm alternating between two different time levels and different psychic states for a character (while again trying to make it seamless) so it's taking a lot of mental and emotional energy.

And then, quite honestly, after a morning of doing that, I could hardly face sitting at the computer and designing the posters, a job that in other circumstances I can really enjoy, and I really had to force myself to do it. And I'm not sure I had the proper concentration. I thought I'd finished, and, in a hurry to get the job over with, I printed them out before realizing I'd left out some vital information, and will have to print them again...

By then, 4.30, I'd really had enough of the computer and just couldn't get my head around any more publicity collation and blurb, and anyway we needed food for the evening meal, and I'd promised myself a proper break and some exercise (because in the last couple of years glued to the computer I've got so unfit), so out I went shopping and walking. When I got back, I felt refreshed and was keen to get creating my Facebook event, but by the time I'd done that (and had a stupid problem loading up the image) it was 8.00, and we still had the evening meal to prepare and eat, and I still hadn't been on Twitter properly, as I'd intended. Just as I thought I'd finished, a nice email came through from Waterstone's Deansgate about my official Manchester launch for the reissue on 27th October, asking for some publicity blurb, which I really appreciate.

Meanwhile all the time at the moment there's the great mound of washing, including bedding, which we brought back after several weeks in Wales without a washing machine, into which I have to keep trying to make inroads. As for reading, that's confined to half an hour in bed at night: in Wales I finally began reading properly Jenn Ashworth's A Kind of Intimacy, and was really enjoying it, but have had to abandon it for the moment for the book we'll discuss in the reading group next Thursday. This once-voracious reader is now getting about 10 pages read a night...

We don't go out much nowadays, and I guess it's no surprise. And I'll probably forever regret confessing this, but quite frankly when there's so little time in the day, showering and washing your hair begins to seem like an expenditure of time you simply can't afford...!

The glamorous life of a writer, eh?

Well, maybe I'll get on top of it all. After all, I know I'm luckier than a lot of other writers, who have 9-5 jobs and young children or other caring responsibilities...

Bookersatz review of TMM, and getting studied.

Horrible weather today - huge winds sweeping the trees outside the house - but it's still a lovely day: in fact my day has been made by Helen Hunt on Bookersatz, who has reviewed Too Many Magpies and really likes it, concluding:

Too Many Magpies is an incredibly thoughtful novel and as such will appeal as much to the mind of the reader as to the heart. I definitely recommend it as a book to lose yourself in.

If you haven't already read it and this whets your appetite to do so (which of course I'm hoping it will!), I am very pleased to say that the book is at this very moment being reprinted again, and copies will be available direct from Salt sometime this week. Meanwhile Amazon and The Book Depository have copies.

Helen says that she'll also be publishing a review of Balancing on the Edge of the World by another of her reviewers. Speaking of which (ie stories), we were driving along in the car the other day, all packed up like sardines, and someone said, 'Oh by the way, my mum is teaching one of your stories this year.' The story is 'Compass and Torch', which is included in Balancing, and is on the new AQA GCSE syllabus beginning this year. It's such a funny feeling: once upon a time there I was teaching schoolchildren with the stories of famous writers, and now here I am with one of my stories being taught by others. And so strange that something quite so personal as a product of one's own imagination can become part of something quite so public and institutional as an exam syllabus, with people sitting poring over it and devising questions about it for others to answer, as if it's no longer anything to do with you... And especially when it's set on what the family call 'the Compass and Torch walk', the mountain walk here in Wales that triggered the whole idea of the story for me...

Salt 10th birthday flashmob celebration

Welcome to a virtual flashmob timed to happen at exactly the same time (3 pm) as the physical flashmob to celebrate the 10th birthday of my publisher Salt. It's taking place at the Southbank Centre in London, and Pablo Neruda's Ode to Salt is being recited.

There's a lot to celebrate: all the wonderful books Salt has put out over those 10 years, and for me personally their publication of my short stories and my short novel Too Many Magpies (not many publishers will take a chance on short stories or short novels), and their commitment to reissuing my first novel, The Birth Machine, at a time when reissues are generally pretty well unheard of.

Why not buy a Salt book or two to celebrate? In fact, I urge you to do so, since it's never easy going against marketing trends, and while Salt celebrate, they are of course in financial difficulties and having to run their JustOneBook campaign. People have responded wonderfully, and the campaign is having an effect, but Salt are by no means out of the woods yet. So please do spread the word, and please do treat yourself, and your friends, to as many Salt books as you can afford.

And here's Neruda's poem to read while those gathered in London read it out loud:

Ode to Salt

This salt
in the salt cellar
I once saw in the salt mines.
I know
you won't
believe me
but
it sings
salt sings, the skin
of the salt mines
sings
with a mouth smothered
by the earth.
I shivered in those
solitudes
when I heard
the voice
of
the salt
in the desert.
Near Antofagasta
the nitrous
pampa
resounds:
a
broken
voice,
a mournful
song.

In its caves
the salt moans, mountain
of buried light,
translucent cathedral,
crystal of the sea, oblivion
of the waves.
And then on every table
in the world,
salt,
we see your piquant
powder
sprinkling
vital light
upon
our food.
Preserver
of the ancient
holds of ships,
discoverer
on
the high seas,
earliest
sailor
of the unknown, shifting
byways of the foam.
Dust of the sea, in you
the tongue receives a kiss
from ocean night:
taste imparts to every seasoned
dish your ocean essence;
the smallest,
miniature
wave from the saltcellar
reveals to us
more than domestic whiteness;
in it, we taste finitude.
Pablo Neruda