There’s a reason I’m posting about this book on Feb. 14.

It does something that I want to do with my novels.

It takes the feeling that I get when hearing about bog burials, stone circles, cave paintings — and amplifies it.

Did I mention that I love it?

I’ll be posting quotations from this book throughout the month of February. The one I posted two days ago – To The Air – could have been written about the scene in The Long Guest where the family cremates … well, I won’t give it away. It was trying for the same thing as that scene, or vice versa. But I mostly posted it for that evocative last line.

you died horribly but are beautiful,

sleeping face and pointed cap and perfect feet,

a peat cutter’s slash dug into your back

but preserved as none of your captors are —

though what a price for immortality.

–from Tollund Man, p. 39

If you’ve ever seen a picture of Tollund Man, this is exactly it.

I haven’t yet read every poem in Bone Antler Stone. They require close attention, and some of them are not short. But every so often I’ll dip into it, and find gems like this one:

The sun sets into the sea with a hiss

and rises with the sound of a driven wheel,

the creak of speaking stone, metal and wood.

The sun sets into the sea to simmer

and rises with the sound of stretched leather

and the song of the horse’s chain and bit.

ibid, p. 23

The idea of the solar system as a great big machine, perhaps made of hoops or wheels, that is alluded to in that first stanza is actually very close to how some ancient cultures conceived of the cosmos.

The last poem in the collection shows the author leaving Orkney, where he went to view the burials, with a friend who is named Pytheas for some reason. This poem raises the thought that not everyone is going to “get” a book of poems like this one.

The price to pay for a place like that,

the price to pay for poems like these…

our intensity is terrifying or just tiresome,

and so the dead and the damp doubleback

into just another of our silent, stone secrets.

It the compares the book itself to a barrow burial waiting to be discovered at the right moment:

So Pytheas proceeded in reply,

assuring me that for us, and for ours,

there was only the odd look, the old look, the awed look,

but rarely the real look of revelation,

or the consolation of having communicated.

And so the motive was to make meaning and memory

a kind of barrow burial in bloom

a garlanded grave underground

forged with turf and stone and fire and then forgotten,

until a propitious step or a sudden storm

blows open this book’s binding

and lays each line out in the light again,

shells of syllables dotting the sand.

Well, with a propitious step, I have found it.