Henry Williamson on Curlews: From “Tarka the Otter”
From Tarka the Otter Within the moor is the Forest, a region high and treeless, where sedge grasses grow on the slopes to the sky. In early summer the wild…
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“The tide rises, the tide falls, / The twilight darkens, the curlew calls”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is a poet whose stellar reputation of the late 19th and early 20th Century is rather in eclipse, to say the least. No doubt his star will…
#AprilCountry – April 21st, “Amazing Grace”, Loretta Lynn
For Easter Sunday, here is Loretta Lynn – born a month and a day before my own father – with “Amazing Grace”
“When I landed in the republic of conscience / it was so noiseless when the engines stopped./ I could hear a curlew high above the runway.”
From the Republic of Conscience was written by Seamus Heaney in 1985 at the request of Mary Lawlor, then head of Amnesty International in Ireland. While I find it perhaps…
“Curlew Call”, Peter Bagshaw
The call of the curlew is its best known feature – indeed, the potential disappearance of this sound from the soundscape of the countryside is one of the most potent…
#AprilCountry #GoodFriday , The Kneeling Drunkard’s Plea, The Louvin Brothers
They weren’t the Louvin Brothers, but unlike The Walker Brothers, they were actually brothers – Ira and Charlie Loudermilk. Charlie died in 2011, while Ira died in 1965 in a…
“The Curlew”, song cycle by Peter Warlock of Yeats poems.
One of the more colourful, if not notorious, characters of British music was Peter Warlock. Like Arnold Bax he gained much inspiration from a sojourn in Ireland “The Curlew” song…
Richard Weaver (10 Poems)
Sometimes the disjointed nature of the internet seems a curse, sometimes it seems a place full of the joy of serendipity. Less and less so in recent years, I’m afraid.…
Séamus Sweeney 