Giles Watson's Blog - Posts Tagged "chalk"
The Flight of the White Horse: Second Edition
I first published The Flight of the White Horse in 2012. It is a sequence of poems in praise of a landscape I love, in the form of an imagined journey of the Bronze Age White Horse of Uffington through the night sky from her home above Dragon Hill, down the ancient Ridgeway to Avebury, with a significant diversion into Dorset. Along the way, she encounters Neolithic chambered tombs, Iron Age hillforts, the largest human-constructed mound apart from the pyramids, the cradle of agricultural civilisation in Britain, other hill-figures, and the enormous henge and stone circle which encompasses the village of Avebury. I decided that it would be fitting to illustrate the written text with chalk pastel drawings, and I even used a little bit of Ridgeway chalk in the cover picture.
My printer managed to completely lose the first edition of the book in a recent site upgrade, but this turned out to be a fortuitous error, because I have now made this second edition, which has more space for the illustrations and text, and is printed on better paper. The text remains largely the same, except that the gender of the White Horse has been changed, and I feel much happier with the way it is now. The notes at the end are somewhat expanded. If anyone would like to sample it, I will share a reading of the old version of the text in the comments below.
I used to be able to see the Uffington White Horse out of my bedroom window in winter when the leaves were off the trees, and I spent countless hours out in her landscape with my dog Pryderi in those happy years, so this poem will always have a place in my heart.
https://www.lulu.com/en/gb/shop/giles...
My printer managed to completely lose the first edition of the book in a recent site upgrade, but this turned out to be a fortuitous error, because I have now made this second edition, which has more space for the illustrations and text, and is printed on better paper. The text remains largely the same, except that the gender of the White Horse has been changed, and I feel much happier with the way it is now. The notes at the end are somewhat expanded. If anyone would like to sample it, I will share a reading of the old version of the text in the comments below.
I used to be able to see the Uffington White Horse out of my bedroom window in winter when the leaves were off the trees, and I spent countless hours out in her landscape with my dog Pryderi in those happy years, so this poem will always have a place in my heart.
https://www.lulu.com/en/gb/shop/giles...
