We’re slowing down and entering hyperphagia in preparation for winter hibernation with a couple of Autumnal haiku…
Slow
Slow parabola
Of oxbow lake, speaking to
Thwarted ambition.
Continue reading “Slow and Stretch | Haiku”Slow and Stretch | Haiku
Sunset Hours | Short Story
The mountainside gloams around the man. He sees it in the dulling of the red-brown autumn heather. It is in the greying, the blueing of the chill air. It is in the sound of the ben quietening.
The man already knows what the evening, what the night will look like; he has seen it once before. Umber and steel and fathomless blue and breeze and movement and yawning space. The man also knows that he will not see nights beyond the one approaching.
Continue reading “Sunset Hours | Short Story”No Judgement | Book Review
No Judgement
Lauren Oyler
Virago Press
ISBN: 9780349016511
£20
‘It is the age of internet gossip; of social networks, repackaged ideas and rating everything out of five stars. Mega-famous celebrities respond with fury to critics who publish less-than rapturous reviews of their work (and then delete their tweets); CEOs talk about reclaiming “the power of vulnerability”; and in the world of fiction, writers eschew actually making things up in favour of ‘always just talking about themselves.’
Review
In his series of interviews with Dennis O’Driscoll, Seamus Heaney says that writers should not take account of anything said by critics who themselves have not written anything of note. Lauren Oyler is an established literary critic and less established author; as such, her book on being critical looks at the concept from a multifaceted perspective.
Continue reading “No Judgement | Book Review”Pastel and Prowl | Haiku
It’s nippy in the west of Scotland – this may have influenced my haiku this week…
Pastel
Pastel cirrus trails –
Memories of summer, a
Vapour trail backwards.
Continue reading “Pastel and Prowl | Haiku”Crib Stuck | Short Story
One can always tell by the calves. There they are, facing away from the arete. They are hiker’s calves – seemingly hewn from volcanic rock and looking set to erupt out of the socks encasing them. No mere holiday walker, he. An athlete he might be, but calves don’t lie and this pair, high up on the arete, are spasming in the summer heat.
He’s crib stuck, the lad. Not unusual, particularly on this lonely arm of Snowdon. The boy – young man really – has got it bad. White-cuticled fingers clawing at the top of the knife-edged ridge, chest pressed as low to the mountain as possible, eyes wild and with pupils dilated like discuses. He’s looking for security, for the wide open wind to stop battering at his kagool. All nine-hundred metres of near-vertical drop yawns behind him, whilst ahead and over the crest of the ridge lies only more space, more air. This is about as bad a case as I’ve seen, and not made any better for the lad being alone on the mountain.
Continue reading “Crib Stuck | Short Story”Bark and Brine | Haiku
From shady wood to windswept coast – a couple of Haiku for this Sunday…
Bark
From slow-pulsing roots
Up bark-scarred trunks, into a
Cold, mosaic sky.
Continue reading “Bark and Brine | Haiku”A Clearing | Short Story
The Fishwick house was unashamedly a vanity project. It was set deep in the wooded Northumberland countryside with only a single rutted road providing access, the kind with a precipitous ridge of grass In the middle which one had to navigate via a roaring clutch. The hassle was worth it though, or at least it should have been.
Colonial in style, the building should have had no place in northern England; its displacement, however, was part of its charm. Even now, dilapidated and crowded by weeds, it retained some dreamlike quality – the wide porch which should have played host to a rocking chair, the sloping lawn which should have been littered with toy cards and half-built forts.
Continue reading “A Clearing | Short Story”Storm and Song | Haiku
What appears to have been the Scottish ‘summer’ is now apparently at an end. The first of what I imagine will be plenty of Autumn haiku are below…
Storm
Violent spatter
Against a square of slate sky.
Bulbous autumn storms.
Song
An empty grate, yet
That smell of red embers, of
Songs sung, lilted verse.
*Thanks for reading, folks. Images courtesy of David Wagner and Peakpx. My recent short stories include ‘Rendered Soft‘ and ‘Across the Glassine‘.
Matthew Richardson is a writer of short stories. His work has featured in Gold Dust magazine, Literally Stories, Close to the Bone, McStorytellers, Penny Shorts, Soft Cartel, Whatever Keeps the Lights On, Flashback Fiction, Cafelit, Best MicroFiction 2021, Writer’s Egg, Idle Ink, The Wild Word, and Shooter magazine. He is a doctoral student at the University of Dundee, a lucky husband, and a proud father. He blogs at www.matthewjrichardson.com.
Lull and Long | Haiku
Two haiku for a close, claustrophobic summer day…
Lull
That summer lull, of
Heavy scents, stultifying
Heat and low-run streams.
Continue reading “Lull and Long | Haiku”A Time to Keep | Book Review
A Time to Keep
George Mackay Brown
Polygon Books
ISBN: 9781904898657
£7.99
‘It was early spring. Darkness was still long but the light was slowly encroaching and the days grew colder. The last of the snow still scarred the Orphir hills. One sensed a latent fertility; under the hard earth the seeds were awake and astir; their long journey to blossom and ripeness was beginning. But in Hamnavoe, the fishermen’s town, the lamps still had to be lit early.’
Review
I was first introduced to the work of George Mackay Brown by an academic who came to Ayr Writers’ Club to speak about his work. She spoke of his fiction being centred around the Orkney Isles where he spent most of his life, and of how he captured those Orcadian communities in his writing. I read ‘Simple Fire’, a selection of his short stories, before moving on to ‘A Time to Keep’, his own arrangement of work.
Continue reading “A Time to Keep | Book Review”
Matthew Richardson 