Thawglass

I have been reading John Burnside's book Black Cat Bone; I'll be posting more about it, but for now: (1) here, qua teaser, are some bits that are available online: "Late Show", "Nativity" and "Loved and Lost" (the latter has a wonderful ending), the long narrative poem "The Fair Chase", "Notes Towards an Ending", and "Pieter Brueghel: Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap, 1565". (2) Burnside is very good; he is one of those obsessive airless writers without much scenic range -- I am reminded most powerfully of Charles Wright (also, but mostly by coincidence, of Joyce Carol Oates); Burnside often uses the late-Wright trick of starting a poem with a stage-direction line like "Night" -- whose interests are fashionably liminal. There is a lot of dawn/birth/spring ("the trees emerging, piecemeal, from the cold"), a blur of intimations-of-the-otherworldly, and a wealth of headlights. (3) The real point of this post is to note a lovely word that, as far as I can tell, Burnside made up; it appears in the closing lines of this book:

this is the time of year
when nothing to see
gives way to the hare in flight, the enormous

beauty of it stark against the mud
and thawglass on the track, before
it darts away, across the open fields

and leaves me dumbstruck, ready to be persuaded.

The meaning is fairly obvious -- I won't embarrass myself with a paraphrase, but will recall this -- and it is the sort of word that ought to be a word, but I cannot locate any uses outside of Burnside's poems. (There is another, earlier poem with "a litter of small gold apples, newly fallen, / wet with thawglass.")

Ice blink

 Photo by Sara Wheeler, Slate

There was a brief period, between the Russian visa debacle and the other horrors of 2006, when I meant to go to Spitsbergen on the Watson. This is presumably what it would have been like:

Puffins, pink-footed geese, long-tailed ducks, ivory gulls, dunlins, king eiders, sanderlings, and red-throated divers shrieked and squawked around lime-stained fissures. It was startling to see species familiar in dowdy British winter coats resplendent in summer plumage. Gray phalaropes in Arctic carmine, snow buntings transformed from dusty slate into dazzling black and white, golden plovers with refulgent breast feathers.

I'd never heard of "ice blink":

Big wind-sock-shaped clouds hung in the sky below a layer of cirrostratus. Richard lay down to photograph ribs of driftwood. I picked among beluga tusks and rusted barrel hoops in the yard-high ice foot, a weak and unstable wall of ice and snow left on the shore when the winter sea ice broke up. We looked out for bears and listened to small waves slap the pebbles. Out in the open sea at the end of the fjord, a dazzling stripe on the underside of distant clouds mapped the sea ice. In a polar phenomenon called ice blink, clouds are lit from underneath by sunlight reflected up from a patch of pack ice in a contrasting dark area of water. When Nansen first came upon ice blink, he wrote, "I felt instinctively that I stood on the threshold of a new world."

The article also mentions the wild fluctuations in the numbers of barnacle geese in Spitsbergen; perhaps because the ecosystems are both younger and more sensitive, this appears to be a recurring theme. I remember hearing in Shetland five years ago that the population of fulmars had grown to almost dangerous levels.