Thick With Season - David Morley

I was delighted by the response to the past month's workshop. You might remember there were two parts to it: a poem written while outdoors during the dawn in some natural environment, and a poem shaped by field-guides and the prose of natural history - an outdoor poem and an indoor poem both of which had a type of fieldwork as part of the method.

For me, morning is the favoured time for writing; it feels luckier somehow. Dawn and pre-dawn always offer a sense of possibility, however foul the weather. Senses are sharper; responses less gnarled by day's stress; and there is more to hear in the way of animal life, and to see in "the slant of light" (as Patricia Wallace Jones puts it in her poem below). It was good to find so many poets getting out at dawn as a result of these exercises. It is an unconsciously effective time of day not only for natural revelation but also for self-revelation - dark nights of the soul can make for interesting dawns. Many writers used it as an exercise in mimesis; but some also took the opportunity to look sharply into themselves.

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