The Bookshelf ~ November 2024

lectori salutem

Beth Brower is the author of twelve books, including The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion, The Q, the Books of Imirillia, and The Beast of Ten. She also writes here on Beth Brower Scribbles Away.

DEAR READERS,

November is many things. This morning my fancy writes it as a dragon—power leashed in wait as it curls ‘round the gold coins falling from every tree, wrapping autumn with the sense of richness to come. What we humans do not manage to harvest, the dragon will keep for the earth. So take what you will, the gourds and seeds, the crisp fruit, the cider. Move quickly now, before the dragon strikes with frost and cold. For whatever you do not claim will be folded into the fields, the gardens, the long, lonely furrows, deposited in the sleeping soil and left to endure the transfiguration of cold winter unto a gentler spring.

A walk with Beth

Did the poem last month give you a moment’s pause? Were you able to sit down with a cup of tea and drink the words in? I hope so. Whether you were able or not, here is another chance.

For those of you who have read The Q, you know how James Arch feels about the following poem…

To Autumn

John Keats

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
  Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
  With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
  And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
    To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
  With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
    For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
  Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
  Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
  Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
    Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
  Steady thy laden head across a brook;
  Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
    Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
  Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
  And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
  Among the river sallows, borne aloft
    Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
  Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
  The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
    And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Harvest Fog by Boris F. Borzin, 1980

The days are galloping along here at Rhysdon Press so that everything will be at the ready for the release of The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vol. 8. Many of you have sent messages of support and excitement, for which I am grateful. I try to read them all but have found myself without the space to reply to each and every missive. So let me reply now with my ever burning thanks. Your support is tremendous, your willingness to tell the world about Emma, endless. I appreciate it ever so much.

Early December will come quickly.

If you wish to listen to some music to cleanse the palette, the feeling of nostalgia, joy, melancholy, and the deeper places of the season, I recommend you finding the soundtrack to the 1995 Little Women film adaptation. If the clarity of those horns doesn’t make you feel the triumph of harvest, I don’t know what will.

A Harvest Landscape with Blue Cart by Vincent Van Gogh, 1888

May it be a rich, mellow, and blessed season. And do, if you have a chance, review Emma 7—for Emma 8 leaps into May with abandon, nary a look over its shoulder.

All the best,

x Beth