The Belfast Review Team | 14 March, 2024
Thanks for joining us for Week 4 of our Spring Blog. Each week we feature a handful of new creative works by artists, photographers, writers, poets, and song writers. Different days of the week highlight different creative forms: Feast Your Eyes Sundays (art, photography), Wordy Tuesday (fiction, flash, nonfiction), and Rhythm-Verse Thursday (poetry, song lyrics).
This week we're exploring the theme of 'Environment.' It's a topic that seems to be influencing a lot of work submitted to us. In our debut issue, we included a section where Nature and Magic combined in original ways to draw our attention to the plight of Mother Earth. However, for this week we're broadening the scope to include works that interrogate one's place – both in the outer world and nature, as well as the effect is has on the interior environments we inhabit and create.
Welcome to wherever you are.
Featured poet: David Harrison Horton
It's rare to come across a poem that speaks so much to the present moment in a way that's poignant without losing perspective. This poet's razor sharp eye captures something of humanity's ever-present hopes, dreams, and fears along with the ways in which we rationalise away catastrophe. It captures the duality of the physical environment and the cultural environment we currently inhabit, our awareness and blindness of what is going on and our ability to change it. It's a necessary portrait of where we are in this uncomfortable moment of history: caught between hope and fear, comfort and catastrophe, decision and indecision.
The window onto our world is wide open - if you have eyes to see.
A Song of Astroturf
DAVID HARRISON HORTON
They hold the new born
in an old blanket.
Pride
masks their anxiety.
Deputized riflemen
are evicting landowners
somewhere.
There is no community garden.
Mathematicians will never find the equation
that reconciles guilt and forgiveness.
If you turn the fan
to face you,
you might just get comfortable
where you are.
ARTIST BIO
David Harrison Horton is a Beijing-based writer, artist, editor and curator. He is author of Maze Poems (Arteidolia) and the chapbooks Pete Hoffman Days (Pinball) and BeiHai (Nanjing Poetry). He edits the poetry zine SAGINAW. davidharrisonhorton.com
Special thanks to the poet for trusting us with his work.
Thanks to all of you readers for reading! Be sure to like, follow, and share.
Check out our other posts this week:
Feast Your Eyes Sunday (10 Mar) with Photography by Clayton Joe Young
Wordy Tuesday (12 Mar) with Nonfiction by Jonathan Lipps
Rhythm-Verse Thursday (14 Mar) with Poetry by Hiram Larew
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