Our moment of amazed beatitude

I've referenced Nan Shepherd's work in recent blips, and was delighted to hear very recently that a 'first' Biography of her life was due out imminently (during October 2017) ...

... well; I've managed to get a copy (as pictured), and whilst I haven't read through the whole book yet, from what I have managed to absorb, it looks like an intriguing volume of work.

And I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Author - Charlotte Peacock - is actually talking about the Biography, at the start of next month, in the Cairngorm National Pak itself!

I am definitely going :-)

Meantime, here's another poem from Shepherd's 1934 collection:


An Ecstasy Remembered

The shining moment of our ecstasy,
Static in memory now, uneased, unmarred,
Too sheer, too sharp, too adamantine hard
For even time to take its edge away.
Time, that involves all old experience
In the eternal flux, until at last
It alters the unalterable past,
Leaves this its adamant, compressed, intense.

A shining group, the bare wet birches stood,
Their trunks like glass, their thousand rain-drop caught
Like crystal globes fine cut on crystal wood,
As though from one pure crystal all were wrought:
So crystal-hard, fine cut in crystal thought,
Our moment of amazed beatitude.

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Nan Shepherd (1893-1981)

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