Turn Over a New Leaf – 17/08/2024

The earth converses here
with the attentive heavens;
memory overwhelms her
amongst these noble mountains.

Sometimes she seems surprised
that we listen so well—
then she reveals her whole life
and has no more to tell.

From The Valaisian Quatrains by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Martyn Crucefix.

We will welcome Martyn to the shop this evening to hear him read from Change Your Life, his translation of Rilke’s poetry. The poems are filled with surprise and wonder, as well as with ripening fruit, people like trees and trees like people, green sunlight, joyous roses and glowing hearts – all will fill the Arcade this evening. They evoke change and attentiveness to it and invite the same in their readers, as do the books below, revealing the unexpected along the way…

In Overleaf, the forester Richard Ogilvy and botanical artist Susan Ogilvy have created a startling album of British trees. For each tree included there are stories of their personalities and of our mythologies about them mixed in with the more traditional reference guide information. Folklore had it that the goat willow could uproot itself and stalk travellers, for example. The pith of elder can be used to clean the most delicate of watchmakers’ tools. The small-leaved lime makes a calming tea while blackthorn makes a good wand, should you need such a thing.

But it is the artwork which will obsess you, whether you already know which tree can cure nits or not. Susan Ogilvy has painted a leaf from each tree, front and back, life size and with such detail that one can hardly believe they are two-dimensional.

Everyone needs two copies: one to keep pristine next to Ernst Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature and one to take on country walks for consultation.

Ingrained by Callum Robinson will draw your eye from leaves to wood. Robinson is the son of a Master Woodworker. (What makes you a Master Woodworker? He can do things like this. Not to mention these.) Robinson tells the story of how he eventually turned to the craft too, creating furniture that will last for generations from the most carefully sourced materials. The scent and weight of the wood and the history that trees hold fill every page.

This Earthly Globe: A Venetian Geographer and the Quest to Map the World by Andrea di Robilant is the fascinating story of Giovambattista Ramusio, who worked tirelessly to uncover, gather and fact-check the work of explorers in the 16^th century, much of which was top-secret. In 1550 he anonymously published Navigationi et Viaggi, revealing that the world was quite a lot bigger than thought and offering this information to an unsuspecting public…

I did not expect that knowledge of alder trees and craftsmanship and map-making would all be relevant when I turned to In the Shadow of the Wolf Queen by Kiran Millwood Hargrave, an adventure story for readers aged 9 and upwards, following Ysolda and her companion sea-hawk Nara on a quest to rescue her sister from the wolf queen. More fool me. I should have realised that things were coming together when the book opened with a quotation from Rilke.

A different sort of surprise is offered by Isabel Otter’s Songs of the Birds.The loveliness of the book itself, including artwork by Clover Robin (Otter and Robin. It’s too good.) was expected. It is a shock when bird calls begin emanating from a corner of the shop. Particularly when I thought I was alone.

I had planned to write about 1983 by Tom Cox and Yr Dead by Sam Sax. But these are both novels which I picked up without foreknowledge, my only hint of their subject matter offered by the covers, and I’d love for others to do the same. The former shows a school, a Morris Traveller, an alpaca and Saturn. The latter a goat by a subway station. I adored them both; I was floored by them both. For different reasons, they put me in mind of Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively, of Claudia’s superb musings on the stories and languages of generations that we contain. “We are sleeping histories of the world,” she announces. Rather like trees, I thought. But, of course, Kiran Millwood Hargrave had got there before me.

May your weekend bring wonder, a surprise alpaca, calming tea and the song of birds,
Lizzie

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