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A Week of Whales

Posted on | July 18, 2010 | No Comments

Latest blog post for Litro.co.uk…

I’ve been haunted by whales this week. It all started with Dave from my writing group trying to list songs about whales, which spawned an eclectic playlist. Then I turned on the TV to be confronted by a whale being dissected.  (They’d just gouged out something called the glove finger – a bit of the ear shaped like a pointing hand in a glove.) Then the next day I wandered into the brilliant Judd Books in Bloomsbury, picked up a collection of Ted Hughes’s poems for children and found his beautiful Moon-Whales poem. Three whales in a row must be a sign, so I set out on a quest for whales in literature.

I started with Ted Hughes’s whales, which swim across the surface of the moon, ‘lifting the moon’s skin / Like a muscle’. It’s a beautifully visual poem, its whales huge, mysterious and geologically slow. The poem’s repeated ‘oo’ and ‘m’ sounds echo the whales’ calls.

Sometimes they plunge deep
Under the moon’s plains
Making their magnetic way
Through the moon’s interior metals
Sending the astronaut’s instruments scatty.

Next, I went back to an early example of whale-lit: Jonah’s Biblical encounter, which already contains all the motifs of the genre – swallowing, fate, death, rebirth and existential angst….

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