I'd like to wish a belated Happy New Year to all visitors to this blog. I wish you all peace, health and happiness during 2010. Here's a piece of poetry to start the year with; a bit of summer on this winter night, with snow falling outside. My previous post was a response to Keith Armstrong's criticism of Basil Bunting; it's good to remember that whatever factions, in-groups, vested interests and power structures might exist among poets, what counts in the end is the poetry:

A fowler spreading his net
over the barley, calls,
calls on a rubber reed.
Grain nods in reply.
Poppies blue upon white
wake to the sun's frown.
Scut of gazelle dances and bounces
out of the afternoon.
Owl and wolf to the night.
On a terrace over a pool
vafur, vodka, tea,
resonant verse spilled
from Onsori, Sa'di,
till the girls' mutter is lost
in whisper of stream and leaf,
a final nightingale
under a fading sky
azan on their quiet.

Basil Bunting, from 'The Spoils'