8 posts tagged “illustrations”

flaming june 

I really like her illustrations.

 

another lost book with an awesome story and illustrations that stays with you: Heckedy PEG!

Heckedy Peg (A Voyager/Hbj Book)

Audrey Wood

the other night i reminisced with rand about kids books that were kind of a cut above other kids books. ones that weren't just cute but kind of--great art. illustrations and stories that you can never get out of your head. but we couldn't remember the titles. i got panicky tonight because i thought i would never find out what they were, so i looked through the whole house until i found the one we remembered being about this girl who enters the outside world for the first time through a tapestry. we remembered she gets tied down by these vines which grow over her hands and how creepy and magnetic the book was. then we started talking about this other amazing one where this woman weave a tapestry--with her own blood and tears. turns out they are both by the same person--marilee heyer. wow!! what a cool coincidence. the first one is called "the forbidden door" and the second is the weaving of a dream. 

The Weaving of a Dream (Picture Puffins)

Marilee Heyer

gods, that was a good magazine. it really brings back the memories of bagels and goat cheese and the old blue leather couches at the house, fall days, having bangs, and hannah anderson leggings and such. now i like to read O magazine and the New Yorker, along with every other magazine in print, but they don't really compare. it's still in print! i'd like to get a subscription. 

 

sometimes poems i've read mesh together in my mind so that i think lines from three different poems are in the same one poem. the meshed poem i am thinking of has two people lying in a bed with a headboard that is intricately carved with gods and goddesses and rain outside falling on the roof and a river rushing under them--and a weird sense of setting out on a journey, a sense of unknown things to come. now i have to find where these images came from and why they all seem to go together. what i do is search through all the books of poems i have for the matches, and i recognize them instantly usually. 

Sunday Night in the city

Hand in hand, we lie on the bed, 

our long legs crossed like folded

wings, our long feet touching the

footboard in shadow, carved like a headstone

with grapes. Your hair is ruffled, dark

as black walnut, curled like the tendrils of

vines. Your right hand is in my right

hand. My left hand is in your left. 

Arms linked like skaters, we lie

under the picture of farmland: brush

dark and blurred as smoke, trees

lifting their ashen fish-skeletons,

and central to it, over us, 

the calm pond

silent as if eternal. 

by Sharon Olds

and i just found the other! 

Rain Travel

by W. S Merwin

I wake in the dark and remember

it is the morning when i must start

by myself on the journey

I lie listening to the black hour

before dawn and you are

still asleep beside me while

around us the trees full of night lean

hushed in their dream that bears

us asleep and awake then i hear

drops falling one by one into

the sightless leaves and i

do not know when they began but

al at once there is no sound but rain

and the stream below us roaring 

away into the rushing darkness

plus i think a few other poems about rain and a journey and two people lying still at night in a bed are mixed into this idea of a new poem in my mind.  I haven't really thought about what these poems really mean but what stuck in my head was certain feelings and images from each. when i read these over they do have similar feels--both are still and silent. kind of like a winter night when you wake up and there's snow outside. kind of like the feel of that book, the tomten and the fox, written and illustrated by--who knew? Astrid Lindgren, author of Pippi Longstockings.