#j.a. baker

[bookcoverart]

the peregrine by j.a. baker | peregrine falcon by dame elisabeth frink, 1974 (etching and aquatint on paper)

[dare-g]

The Peregrine

[the-hearth-and-the-wild]

I came late to the love of birds. For years I saw them only as a tremor at the edge of vision. They know suffering and joy in simple states not possible to us. Their lives quicken and warm to a pulse our hearts can never reach. They race to oblivion. They are old before we have finished growing.

-J.A. Baker, The Peregrine

[sapokanikan]

Middlemarch by George Eliot / Leaving the City by Joanna Newsom / Tiger Mountain Peasant Song by Fleet Foxes / The Peregrine by J.A. Baker / Anecdotes by Joanna Newsom

[girlwithlandscape]

Slowly the dusk begins to uncoil. Not the short wild pang of winter dusk, but the long slow dusk of spring.

J.A. Baker, The Peregrine

[sleepiestpoet]

My aesthetic entirely.

Not pictured: candle off to the side

[the-hearth-and-the-wild]

In the flat fens near the coast I lost my way. Rain drifted softly through the watery green haze of fields. Everywhere, there was the sound and smell of water. The feeling of a land withdrawn, remote, deep sunk in silence. To be lost in such a place, however briefly, was a true release from the shackles of the known roads and the blinding walls of towns.

-J.A. Baker, The Peregrine

[the-hearth-and-the-wild]

The trees did not reflect the sun so much as glow from within, as though their bark was of parchment, a membrane through which a steady flame was shining. They seemed to have their own light, absorbed from the sun, and retained. When I went past at dusk they were still shining with a strange, almost gaseous, incandescence, a reddening luminosity that only faded, and then quite suddenly, when night came, as though the colder air had frozen it away.

-J.A. Baker, The Peregrine