Sublime

One approach I favour during the spring is the use of a commonplace book, which I encountered through my studies of a Jacobean playwright called John Webster.

In the west of Ireland there are many stories about ghosts, spirits or fairies who had a special association with particular places; these legends were as natural as the landscape to the mind of the local people.

In the months that follow, word spreads among the new-made steadings: the fey are abroad, invisible, of course, as told in the stories, but also nothing like the stories, for they seek bright iron. She listens to them, unseen, and smiles to herself as they whisper that no man may leave an awl or a chisel for a moment unwatched, or it will vanish;

Easily, he slept; and as he slept, the woman in the photograph took her arm from the pastor’s waist, and crossed the parched lawn towards the camera. Her black skirts, thickly beaded at the hem, obscured the view of Bethesda; then her fine and muddied boots came over the frame, and were first set squarely on the table, then one by one on the floor:

Mutely the chapel looked back at him across a car park glossed by rain. Its door was closed, and newly painted green; beside the door a green bay tree flourished like the wicked in the thirty-seventh psalm. An east wind blowing up the Alder moved the cold illuminated air, and the bay tree danced in its small black bed. The chapel did not dance. Its