In the basement’s single bulb—olive light—He oils a stubborn canvas till it hums;A moth keeps time against the lampshade’s white,His brush translates the hush of absent drums. He paints a woman who will never leave,A mouth half-open, caught between a song;The floorboards keep each night’s small, private grieve,A stack of postcards—unsent proofs of wrong. Impostor … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – “The Locksmith’s Lamp” – Grand Displays of Imagination, v.2
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s comic fantasia remains, more than four centuries after its first performances, a small universe where love, language, and theatricality chase one another in circles until witty chaos becomes a kind of logic. In this review I treat the play both as a tightly engineered comic machine and as an example of poetic imagination that … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
Revisionist Poetry – “Hymn of the Heap” – Beautiful Detritus, v.4 (Dylanesque)
Winter loosens its grip on the gate,lets the snow slide off like a bad alibi.The ground coughs up its old confessions—knotted string, a split glove, last year’s lie. There’s a tangle of jute in the belly of the bed,leaf bones rattling their thin, dry prayer,a rusted hook humming to the worms,like it still remembers holding … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – “Hymn of the Heap” – Beautiful Detritus, v.4 (Dylanesque)
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare
The Taming of the Shrew is one of those plays that refuses the neat categories critics try to pin on it: at once a farce, a satire of social performance, and an uncomfortable meditation on marriage and power. The play’s comic machinery is brilliant — quick-paced plotting, disguise and mistaken identity, witty repartee — but … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare
Revisionist Poetry – “The Garden’s Leftovers” – Beautiful Detritus, v.3 (a touch more wabi-sabi)
When thaw begins, the garden exhales—thin ice lifting from the hollow of the beds.Beneath: torn burlap, rust-kissed wire, one pale glovegone to the soft apprenticeship of soil. These are the beautiful terms of loss:string looped like an old promise, leaf veins like maps.Frost has taught everything how to fracture well.Time stitches rag to root; the … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – “The Garden’s Leftovers” – Beautiful Detritus, v.3 (a touch more wabi-sabi)
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s work here reads like a distilled drama of human contradiction: love and violence, chance and design, speech that soars and action that wounds. This play—set in Verona—remains instructive not because it tells us something entirely new about passion, but because it shows, with rare intensity and compression, how quickly language can conjure a world … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
Revisionist Poetry – “Spring in Rags” – Beautiful Detritus, v.2
At winter’s end the thaw unfurls—snow sighs away, exposing mud:brown earth, matted jute, a coil of string,a seed packet emptied of its promise. The gardener’s tools—glove, snapped stake—lie like punctuation across the beds.Rain knits the ravelled twine to root;wind braids leaves into a new script. What was discarded reads as pattern:stalks turned brushstroke, burlap turned … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – “Spring in Rags” – Beautiful Detritus, v.2
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s political tragedy is a compact, muscular probe into power, persuasion, and the moral costs of republican action. Read as a study of rhetoric and of the fragile psychology of honour, Julius Caesar refuses simple partisanship: it makes conspirators, orators, and crowds all culpable in a spiralling sequence whose logic is both inevitable and tragic. … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
Revisionist Poetry – “Root-Voices” – Deep Roots, v.4
They came with metal mouths that sang.The trees folded like paper prayers.We waited until the machines slept. Hole-Wood smells of saw and salt.We call the stumps throatstones.We press our ears and the earth answers. deep voice:— we were columns, we held the sky.— we swallowed rain like coins.— we remember the names of every shadow. … Continue reading Revisionist Poetry – “Root-Voices” – Deep Roots, v.4
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging by Jessica J. Lee
In this spare, luminous collection, Jessica J. Lee knits together memoir, archival history, and ecological criticism to ask one persistent question: what do we mean when a living thing is said to be “out of place”? The book’s fourteen interlocking essays—ranging in register from close natural observation to cultural history—treat plants not as background scenery … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging by Jessica J. Lee
The New Renaissance Mindset 