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How do we come home in a strange land?
Moving to a remote forest hamlet in a new country in the midst of a pandemic, the only way to connect is to take the time to linger, listen and observe-to be with the land that is becoming home. From this observations a series of haiku arise, following the Japanese system of 24 seasons divided into 72 micro-seasons and interspersed with eight lyric poems that travel around the Celtic wheel of the year. And so a forest garden and its surrounding Finistère woodland slowly reveals itself, weaving together the lunar and solar, melding the Celtic shape of the year with the increments of the Japanese solar terms, each one unveiling a new aspect of change.
Charting a life unmoored from the familiar, but permeable to the new the poems find their place at 'the end of the world', as the Romans called Finistère, but also in Penn-ar-Bed, the Breton name which is both the end and start of the world.
Most endings are also beginnings and here in these precise, exquisitely observed poems, we find ourselves both unsettled and settling, exploring what it means to hold together being adrift and belonging; cycles and transformation and how we find a beginning at the end of the world.
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Jan Fortune was born in Middlesbrough and read theology at Cambridge. She completed a doctorate in feminist theology and has worked as a teacher, priest and charity director. She is the founding editor of Cinnamon Press, led numerous creative writing courses, and mentored writers who have gone on to publication. Her previous publications include non-fiction titles in alternative education and parenting, poetry, and novels, most recently Smiling at Grief in a House in a Forest where Life Grows. She blogs on writing and the writing life.
