Luisa A. Igloria, dear friend, is this year’s Virginia Poet Laureate. Her newest collection, Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Crab Orchard Review & Southern Illinois University Press), is such a beauty.
Excerpt from Moving, Changing, Not Moving
In the brick-lined interior of a coffee shop, a man
at the communal table closes his eyes, a pair
of earphones plugged into his cell. Fanning themselves,
people come in from the street; it’s the hottest summer
& everyone wants iced coffees & teas, water &
ice; & parents with little children fall in line outside
people come in from the street; it’s the hottest summer& everyone wants iced coffees & teas, water &
btw: Has anyone EVER tried to contact WordPress about their new Block Editors, and has one EVER received a response? This poem format is ALL OFF, and the code editor does not allow self to switch between single space (within a stanza) and double space (between stanzas). Literally, self has been trying to format since 10 a.m., an hour and a half ago. Even their Customer Service doesn’t work. That is all.
Self decided to join the American Rose Society this year, and was so happy to receive their magazine.
The July/August issue has a very interesting article about Memorable Rose Gardens by Mike and Angelina Chute.
“All great gardens are dynamic, constantly changing over time . . . “
She’s never heard of any of the gardens. There’s one called Roseraie de L’Hay, “in the municipality of Val-de-Marne, five miles south of Paris, and only 30 minutes by train.” From the train station, it’s “a short bus ride to the little rose garden.”
There’s one in Rome, Il Roseto, “located on the slopes of the Aventine Hill, a short walk from the Colosseum. Il Roseto is built on a site once home to a Jewish cemetery. In memory of the cemetery and those that had been buried there, the garden’s paths are laid out in the shape of a menorah.”
There’s Queen Mary’s Rose Garden in Regent’s Park in northwest London (also home of the London Zoo) and there are “approximately 12,000 roses on display.”
And there is Austin Roses in Shropshire, “an agricultural area in England’s West Midlands.”
Next time she’s in Europe, she’ll make it a point to see some of these fabulous rose gardens.
In the meantime, there’s a pretty fabulous rose garden in Filoli, less than 10 minutes’ drive away. And here are a few pictures self took of her own roses:
During the fifteen days Fabrizio spent in the Amiens inn, kept by an obsequious and greedy family, the Allies were invading France, and Fabrizio became an entirely different man, so many and so deep were his reflexions upon the things which had just happened to him.
Choose one (1) word or more – choose all of them if you like! The words available are the following:
Comfortable
Growing
Tangled
Crowded
Exuberant
The word self picked, which was easiest for her since she’s been gardening a lot, is GROWING. Here are a few pictures she took yesterday.
This is one of self’s newest additions to the front garden:
This plant just popped up on one side of her driveway. It seems to be a different kind of ivy from the others. Self finds it so pretty:
Finally, here are some geraniums growing in a huge pot that she bought years ago from Chinatown. Geraniums are very, very easy to grow, and she loves their bright, cheerful colors:
Fabrizio’s looks save him over and over again. After the defeat of the French, he stumbles across the canteen woman who, despite having lost her cart and her horse, is still intent on protecting him.
Chapter Four, The Charterhous of Parma:
Canteen Woman (That’s all she ever goes by) to Fabrizio: “Get yourself away from this defeated army; find some way out . . . The first chance you get, buy yourself some civilian clothes. Once you’re eight or ten leagues away and you don’t see any more soldiers, take the mail-coach and rest up for a couple of weeks in some nice town where you can eat beefsteaks . . . As soon as you’ve got a gentleman’s clothes on your back, tear up your travel-permit . . . never say you were in battle, and don’t breathe a word about Bonaparte . . . When you want to go back to Paris, get yourself to Versailles first, then enter Paris from that side, walk right in as if you were out for a stroll. Sew your napoleons into your trousers. And above all, when you have to pay for something, don’t let anyone see more than what you need to pay. The saddest thing of all is that people are going to cheat you and gouge you out of all you have, and what will you do once you have no money, when you don’t even know how to take care of yourself?”
Don’t worry, self will not be giving blow by blow of each chapter of The Charterhouse of Parma. But she just wanted to do a quick post on the illustrations, by Robert Andrew Parker.
She finds them utterly charming, almost fairy-tale like. She’ll hunt up a hard copy of this book for her personal bookshelf.
It might have been two o’clock in the afternoon . . . when a group of generals, followed by some twenty hussars, galloped past a corner of the vast field, on the edge of which he was still standing; his horse whinnied, reared two or three times, then pulled violently at the bit. “So be it, go!” Fabrizio decided.
Left to himself, the horse galloped off to join the escort following the generals. Fabrizio counted four gold-braided hats. Fifteen minutes later, Fabrizio understood from a few words spoken by a hussar near him that one of these generals was the famous Marshal Ney. His happiness was complete . . .
Good Friday morning. Self spent all last night howling over Chapter Three of The Charterhouse of Parma.
Self will summarize events leading to this chapter.
Fabrizio, hero of the novel, has been trying to join the Battle of Waterloo. He heads towards the scene of battle, but keeps encountering women who point him in the wrong direction because they don’t want a young man so beautiful to die. One, who Stendhal refers to only as “the canteen-woman,” even decides to accompany him, to keep him out of harm’s way.
Chapter Three:
Many delightful conversations later, the canteen-woman caught sight of three or four French soldiers running toward her as fast as they could; she quickly jumped down from her cart and managed to hide fifteen or twenty feet off the road, crouching in a hole where a huge tree had been uprooted. “Now,” Fabrizio decided, “now I’ll find out if I’m a coward!” He stood beside the little cart the canteen-woman had abandoned and drew his saber. The soldiers paid no attention to him and ran past him through the grove to the left of the path.
“Those are our men,” the canteen-woman said calmly . . .
