literature

249d

#OTD in 1892, Vita Sackville-West is born.

"Sackville-West was a successful novelist, poet and journalist, as well as a prolific letter writer and diarist. She published more than a dozen collections of poetry and 13 novels during her life.... She was the inspiration for the protagonist of Orlando: A Biography, by her friend and lover Virginia Woolf."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vita_Sackville-West

Books by Sackville-West at PG:

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/34850

#books #literature

"Sackville-West around 1915, from The Life of V.Sackville-West by Victoria Glendinning" - wikipedia

Edited 249d ago

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249d

How we could ever have come to this pass?
Is all we are asking…

—James Findlay Hendry (1912–1986), “Question & Answer”

With GS Fraser & Henry Treece, the author, poet & translator JF Hendry was a contributor to the “New Apocalyptics” poetic movement of the 1930s & 40s

https://asls.org.uk/publications/books/volumes/from_the_line/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #warpoetry #20thcentury #WW2

J. F. Hendry
Question and Answer

How we could ever have come to this pass?
Is all we are asking. Each of our
Bursts of anti-aircraft fire
Hangs a torn wound of questions in the air.

How we could ever, like cattle at grass,
Drift with shadowless clouds, unaware,
Into this era of lightnings and war?
There is no shelter, now or ever, from that answer.

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249d

How Burns Suppers Became a Global Phenomenon

What if the traditional Burns Night could fuse cultures & challenge traditions? Dr Cleo O'Callaghan Yeoman from the University of Glasgow reveals how this centuries-old tribute to Scotland’s national poet is transforming around the world

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owgUdrm0SmQ

#Scottish #literature #RobertBurns #BurnsNight #cultures

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249d

Responding to Alasdair Gray’s LANARK
15 April, University of Glasgow – free, ticketed

Rachelle Atalla in conversation with Rodge Glass, presented by The Alasdair Gray Archive. Rachelle Atalla will read from her newly commissioned short story, “Waste Management”, which delves into Glasgow’s hidden subterranean layers, drawing inspiration from LANARK & the city’s sanitation infrastructure

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/responding-to-alasdair-grays-lanark-tickets-1984371725248

#Scottish #literature #AlasdairGray #Lanark

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249d

“not only is there no invocation of the free market […Smith] plainly sees that government, not private industry, is the only force capable of effectively ‘erecting and maintaining’ the technically unprofitable but nevertheless indispensable ‘publick works’ and ‘publick institutions’”

—Adam Smith’s THE WEALTH OF NATIONS was published 250 years ago #OTD, 8 March 1776. Evan Gottlieb examines Smith’s “Invisible Hand”

https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2013/05/invisible-hand-over-fist-on-the-development-and-legacy-of-adam-smiths-famous-phrase/

#Scottish #literature #18thcentury #economics #AdamSmith

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237d

you don’t get prose in anapaestic dimeters
nobody publishes their first slim volume of prose
aristotle never wrote The Proses

—Tom Leonard, “100 Differences Between Poetry & Prose”

Today, 21 March, is World Poetry Day!

https://www.tomleonard.co.uk/online-poetry-and-prose/100-differences-between-poetry-and-prose.html

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #WorldPoetryDay

100 Differences Between Poetry and Prose
Tom Leonard

poetry stops before the end of the margin
you can talk about prose without mentioning school
you don’t read poetry to get from Glasgow to Saltcoats without noticing

John Menzies doesn’t stock poetry
whoever heard of war & peace having the line as a unit of semantic yield
you can call a poem what you want and say its poetic licence

poetry is the subliminal history of linguistic shape
ahem
poetry has four wheels, two wings and a pair of false teeth

poetry is the heart and the brain divided by the lungs
poetry is the world’s oldest cock and fanny story

you don’t get prose in anapaestic dimeters
nobody publishes their first slim volume of prose
aristotle never wrote The Proses

if you dribble past five defenders, it isn’t called sheer prose
poets are the unacknowledged thingwaybobs

poetry is quintessentially contrapuntal
the square root of poetry is an ever-evolving quark
whenever Vergil looked in the mirror, he beheld an epic Latin poet

poetry is all the juicy bits in the juiciest order
poetry is jellied religion
pascal: if your labourers complain too much, try taking them to a poetry reading

prose goes scchhpludd
prose goes scchhpludd scchhpludd clomp clomp clomp
are you sitting comfortably

then I’ll end

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237d

It’s for weddings
and funerals
and reading on the train
and for taking a person out of herself
and bringing her back more sane…

—Helena Nelson, “Poetry Forum”
published in DOWN WITH POETRY! (Happenstance, 2016)

https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/poetry-forum/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #WorldPoetryDay

Poetry Forum
by Helena Nelson

What is poetry for? (Maitreyabhandu)

It’s for weddings
and funerals
and reading on the train
and for taking a person out of herself
and bringing her back more sane.

It’s for children
and lunatics
and chimney-sweeps and punks
It’s for teachers
and preachers
and politicians and drunks.

It’s for dinner
and afternoon tea
and marvellous midnight snacks.
It’s for cravings
and ravings
and low-poetry attacks.

It’s for four o’clock
for four of us
and for five o’clock
for five.
It’s for fortitude
and forums
for formalists to survive.

It’s for all we know intelligent
and rarely less than clever.
You can get some
for nothing
and remember it
forever.

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237d

Tha i mar bharaille de sgadan saillte:
chan eil agad ach do chròg
a stobadh ann, agus dòrlach a thoirt a-mach,
reamhar is tiugh leis a’ bhuntàta…

—Aonghas Phàdraig Caimbeul, “Bàrdachd”
published in AIBISIDH, Polygon Books 2011

https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/bardachd/

#Scottish #literature #Gaidhlig #Gaelic #poem #poetry #WorldPoetryDay

Bàrdachd
Aonghas Phàdraig Caimbeul

Tha i mar bharaille de sgadan saillte:
chan eil agad ach do chròg
a stobadh ann, agus dòrlach a thoirt a-mach,
reamhar is tiugh leis a’ bhuntàta.

Stob
an t-ìm na mheasg
agus tha cuirm agad: Eliot is Donnachadh Bàn,
le do làmhan rùisgte. Seachain
forca is sgian: fàg sin aig na sgoilearan.

Nuair a thig thu gu bonn a’ bharaille
sgròb na craicinn ri chèile,
dean ràth chnàimhean,
lìon lannan
’s tilg sin thairis
dìreach mu àm reothairt.

Ma ghlacas tu adag,
thoir leat i: nuair tha an sgadan
gann, nì easgann fraighte fhèin a’ chùis
san acras.

Poetry
Angus Peter Campbell

It’s like a barrel of salt herring:
you only have to stick your paw
in, and lift a handful out,
thick and juicy with the tatties.

Pile
the butter in the middle
and you have a feast: Eliot and Duncan Bàn,
eaten with your bare fingers. Don’t use
a knife and fork: leave that to the scholars.

When you reach the bottom of the barrel
scrape the skins together,
make a raft of bones,
a net of fine filament,
and fling it over the side
just after the spring tide.

If you catch a common haddock,
take it anyway: in the absence
of a fat herring even eels
taste fine when deep-fried.

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237d

a cop in a panda
wound down his window & asked us
what we had in our bags
to which we shouted POETRY!
in unison,
lifted
thick majestic photocopies
and POEMS OF THIRTY YEARS
by Edwin Morgan into the air
as he looked on in horror
and told us to be on our way
and not to do it again…

—Graham Fulton, “Poetry Reaper”

https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/poetry-reaper/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #WorldPoetryDay

The Poetry Reaper
Graham Fulton

sitting in The Scotia
after John McGarrigle who-
was-killed-in-The Clutha’s funeral,
wolfing
triangular tuna sandwiches
and listening to someone singing
We Shall Overcome
into a feedback microphone, I ask
Bobby Christie
if he remembers walking home
twenty-five years ago
from Tom Leonard’s Writers’ Group
in Paisley in the dark
with
towering orange streetlamps
and turning left into Penilee Road
where a cop in a panda
wound down his window and asked us
what we had in our bags
to which we shouted POETRY!
in unison,
lifted
thick majestic photocopies
and POEMS OF THIRTY YEARS
by Edwin Morgan into the air
as he looked on in horror
and told us to be on our way
and not to do it again

and Bobby
disappeared over the hill
as I turned right into Atholl Crescent
to go to a house where I no longer live
to talk to people who
are no longer there,
and Jim Ferguson
is wearing a burning red tie
and brandishing a virtual cigarette, and
We Shall Overcome was sung
by Joan Baez in 1963, it’s really
hard to believe, it feels
as if yesterday
has still to happen, tomorrow
is already gone

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247d

Folklore Material in Ruaraidh Erskine’s Gaelic Magazines
13 March, free online

Dr Petra Poncarová discusses materials on Scottish & other Celtic folklore published in Ruaraidh Erskine of Mar’s Gaelic magazines from 1900 to the 1930s

https://llc.ed.ac.uk/celtic-scottish-studies/css-seminar-series-260313

#Scottish #literature #Gaidhlig #Gaeilc #folklore #CelticStudies #20thcentury

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237d

Poets need not be garlanded;
the poet’s head
should be innocent of the leaves of the sweet bay tree,
twisted. All honour goes to poetry…

—Liz Lochhead, “Poets Need Not”
published in A HANDSEL: New & Collected Poems (Birlinn, 2023)

https://birlinn.co.uk/product/a-handsel/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #WorldPoetryDay

Poets need not
Liz Lochhead

Poets need not be garlanded;
the poet’s head
should be innocent of the leaves of the sweet bay tree,
twisted. All honour goes to poetry.

And poets need no laurels. Why be lauded
for the love of trying to nail the disembodied
image with that one plain word to make it palpable;
for listening in to silence for the rhythm capable
of carrying the thought that’s not thought yet?
The pursuit’s its own reward. So you have to let
the poem come to voice by footering
late in the dark at home, by muttering
syllables of scribbled lines – or what might
be lines, eventually, if you can get it right.

And this, perhaps, in public? The daytime train,
the biro, the back of an envelope, and again
the fun of the wildgoose chase
that goes beyond all this fuss.

Inspiration? Bell rings, penny drops,
the light-bulb goes on and tops
the not-good-enough idea that went before?
No, that’s not how it goes. You write, you score
it out, you write it in again the same
but somehow with a different stress. This is a game
you very seldom win
and most of your efforts end up in the bin.

There’s one hunched and gloomy
heron haunts that nearby stretch of River Kelvin
and it wouldn’t if there were no fish.
If it never in all that greyness passing caught a flash,
a gleam of something, made that quick stab.
That’s how a poem is after a long nothingness, you grab
at that anything and this is food to you.
It comes through, as leaves do.

All praise to poetry, the way it has
of attaching itself to a familiar phrase
in a new way, insisting it be heard and seen.
Poets need no laurels, surely?
their poems, when they can make them happen – even rarely –
crown them with green.

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247d

Does culture make emotion?

Franz Boas helps us solve the puzzle of where our emotional lives originate: in our selves or in the cultures around us

by Noga Arikha

https://aeon.co/essays/who-am-i-when-i-care-emotion-through-the-lens-of-franz-boas?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=6f4e4a3692-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2026_02_24_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-4ef8a26106-72664972

Franz Boas at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/40195

#books #literature #antropology

The Indian Tribes on Vancouver Island and on the Coast of British Columbia Based on his own research, Dr. Franz Boas

Boas, Dr. Franz - Boas, Dr. Franz (1887). Zur Ethnologie Britisch-Kolumbiens [Monograph]. Dr.A.PETERMANN'S MITTEILUNGEN AUS JUSTUS PERTHES' GEOGR.ANSTALT 1887, 33, 129–133, 161

The main map uses colour-coded shading to delineate tribal territories — yellow for Kwakiutl tribes, pink for Salish tribes, and green for West Vancouver tribes — with dotted lines marking sub-group boundaries. Three inset maps (Karton A, B, and C) provide detail of northern and eastern areas. Tribal names are densely labelled across the coastal and inland regions. A legend (Erklärung) and scale bar appear at lower centre.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwakwaka%CA%BCwakw#/media/File:DIE_INDIANERST%C3%84MME_von_VANCOUVER_I%E1%B4%B0%CC%A3_und_an_der_K%C3%9CSTE_von_BRITISCH-COLUMBIA.jpg

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247d

A filth of leaves, she said, a froth, she said
Of sudsy flowers, and there’s your mawkish Spring.
Oh, barebone tree, what has it done to you?
Black field, you’re gone but for remembering…

—Norman MacCaig, “Green stain”
published in THE POEMS OF NORMAN MacCAIG (Birlinn, 2009)

https://birlinn.co.uk/product/the-poems-of-norman-maccaig/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #NormanMacCaig #20thcentury #Spring

Green stain
Norman MacCaig

A filth of leaves, she said, a froth, she said
Of sudsy flowers, and there’s your mawkish Spring.
Oh, barebone tree, what has it done to you?
Black field, you’re gone but for remembering.

I keep my winter where my heart should be.
– I’d rather bear it in its blackest moods
Than see those frilly leaves and blossoms make
A haberdashery of wholesome woods.

A mish-mash green, a sickly groping, such
A fumbling into light! How could they surpass
The icy shapes of darling winter hidden
In luckless trees and ill-starred meadow grass?

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247d

Paisley Book Festival 2026
15–17 May

The Paisley Book Festival is a platform for celebrating books, reading and writing in Paisley over the course of three days.

Now entering its seventh year, the theme for the 2026 Paisley Book Festival is “Everyday Heroes, Everlasting Icons”.

For the full programme of events, visit the PBF website:

https://paisleybookfestival.com/programme-full/

#Scottish #literature #Paisley #books #bookfestival

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236d

What we can learn from scientific analysis of Renaissance recipes

Multispectral imaging, proteomics, historical texts yield new insights into 16th-century medical manuals.

by Jennifer Ouellette

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/03/renaissance-diy-science-people-tested-tweaked-home-remedy-recipes/

The Pleasures of the Table by George H. Ellwanger at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/bookshelf/419

#books #literature #cooking

LE LIVRE DE TAILLEVENT

Facsimile of the title-page of the edition of 1545

The blackletter text reads:

Title: "Le livre de Taillevent grant cuysinier du Roy de France" — "The book of Taillevent, great cook to the King of France"
Colophon below: notes it was sold at Lyon, freshly printed, at the house of the late Barnabé Chaussard

The central illustration shows a royal banquet scene — elegantly dressed figures seated at a draped table, being served, in a style typical of 15th–16th century French woodcut illustration.

"Taillevent" was the nickname of Guillaume Tirel (c.1310–1395), master cook to several French kings including Charles V and Charles VI. His cookbook Le Viandier is one of the oldest and most important culinary texts in French history, covering medieval court cuisine — sauces, roasts, potages, and spiced dishes.

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/62354/pg62354-images.html#Page_49

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236d

A revolution in time

Once local and irregular, time-keeping became universal and linear in 311 BCE. History would never be the same again

by Paul J Kosmin

https://aeon.co/essays/when-time-became-regular-and-universal-it-changed-history?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=b51aa80020-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2026_03_19&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-4ef8a26106-72664972

Cosmology at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/subject/7398

#books #literature #cosmology

La Materia della Divina Commedia di Dante Alighieri Dichiarata in VI Tavole, 1872.

By Michelangelo Caetani, Monte Cassino Abbey.

The diagram depicts across six tables:
The conical structure of Hell (Inferno), descending in nine concentric circles toward Satan at the centre of the Earth
The terraces of Purgatory, rising as a mountain on the opposite side of the globe
The concentric celestial spheres of Paradise (Paradiso), ascending through the planetary heavens to the Empyrean
The moral and theological categories of souls assigned to each level
Precise spatial and numerical relationships reflecting Dante's Scholastic cosmology

https://pdimagearchive.org/images/710def6c-ff0f-49d6-9c77-dbded91bbc13/

Edited 236d ago

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246d

In the Film Death in Venice, Music Is the Narrator

A haunting score shapes the rise and fall of a writer consumed by infatuation.

By: Angelica Frey

https://daily.jstor.org/in-the-film-death-in-venice-music-is-the-narrator/

Death in Venice at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/66073

#books #literature #movie #music

Thomas Mann, Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1929.

A black-and-white portrait photograph of Thomas Mann in three-quarter view, his right hand raised to his temple in a thoughtful pose. He has neatly combed dark hair, a short moustache, and deep-set eyes with a serious, somewhat intense expression. He wears a dark jacket, white shirt, and tie. A ring is visible on his finger.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Mann#/media/Datei:Thomas_Mann_1929.jpg

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246d

How Women Researchers Changed Our Understanding of Women’s Economic Lives

How can better data drive economic change? ‘We Do Declare’ uses oral histories to reveal how women collected evidence, reframed the conversation about money, and shaped lasting policy and economic opportunity.

by Rachel F. Seidman

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/smithsonian-american-womens-history-museum/2026/03/09/we-do-declare-collect-new-data-and-ask-new-questions-about-money/?utm_source=smithsoniandaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=editorial&lctg=93133550

Women’s Economic Lives & Women economy at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/68759
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=women+economy
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/57913

#books #literature #womenhistoryMonth

Cover image of the book Women and Economics

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

A plain dark burgundy cloth book cover with centred text in gold or cream lettering reading: Women and Economics / A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution / By Charlotte Perkins Stetson. No illustration or decoration, just typography on a solid ground.

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/57913/pg57913-images.html

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236d

Literary Celebrity, Mussolini’s Mouthpiece, AND American Traitor: Who Was Ezra Pound?

Stephen Harding on the Modernist Poet and His Fascist Politics

https://lithub.com/literary-celebrity-mussolinis-mouthpiece-and-american-traitor-who-was-ezra-pound/

Books by Pound at PG:

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/2637

#books #literature

"Black-and-white United States passport photograph of American writer Ezra Pound" - picryl.com

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246d

In limbo, on a still March day, the streets
are gritty and the sun papered over
and the great-tits in bare trees are keening
Weegie Weegie Weegie…

—Carol McKay, “Keening”
published in Poetry Scotland 102 (Autumn 2021)

https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/keening/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #Spring #March

Keening
Carol McKay

In limbo, on a still March day, the streets
are gritty and the sun papered over
and the great-tits in bare trees are keening
Weegie Weegie Weegie.

A man is blocking a hole in the soffit
under the dentist’s roof where the jackdaws
last year raised their chicks.
But he might not know.

My thoughts are moths. They rise up, powdery grey,
and fly off, leaving dusty residue.
In this isolation, far from my chicks,
I don’t know where I am, or how, or who.

Above my head a great gull ululates.
I lean into this old stone wall with its
sugaring of mica and its silvery trails
and my chest and throat spasm soundless in our unifying loss.

Then jackdaws, black against wallpaper cloud,
stratify into six pairs, giddy with love,
in tune with spring’s ever-renewing surge,
and I centre. Ground.

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246d

WayWORD Spring Programme 2026
Aberdeen, 12–22 May

A series of events bringing together literature, ecology, sound and live research. Events include

Publishing in Scotland Today
Tapsalteerie Poetry Showcase
Ekphrastic Poetry Workshop
Women in Nature
Douglas Stuart: John of John Book Launch
Geothermal Soundwalk

https://waywordfestival.com

#Scottish #literature #ecology #sound #science #Aberdeen #Wayword

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236d

You’d know her house by the drawn blinds –
by the cormorants pitched on the boundary wall,
the black crosses of their wings hung out to dry…

—Robin Robertson, “At Roane Head”
in the London Review of Books, 14 August 2008

Today, 22 March, is International Seal Day 🦭

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n16/robin-robertson/at-roane-head

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #folklore #seal #seals #selkie #InternationalSealDay

At Roane Head
Robin Robertson

for John Burnside

You’d know her house by the drawn blinds –
by the cormorants pitched on the boundary wall,
the black crosses of their wings hung out to dry.
You’d tell it by the quicken and the pine that hid it
from the sea and from the brief light of the sun,
and by Aonghas the collie, lying at the door
where he died: a rack of bones like a sprung trap.

A fork of barnacle geese came over, with that slow
squeak of rusty saws. The bitter sea’s complaining pull
and roll; a whicker of pigeons, lifting in the wood.

She’d had four sons, I knew that well enough,
and each one wrong. All born blind, they say,
slack-jawed and simple, web-footed,
rickety as sticks. Beautiful faces, I’m told,
though blank as air.
Someone saw them once, outside, hirpling
down to the shore, chittering like rats,
and said they were fine swimmers,
but I would have guessed at that.

Her husband left her: said
they couldn’t be his, they were more
fish than human;
he said they were beglamoured,
and searched their skin for the showing marks.

For years she tended each difficult flame:
their tight, flickering bodies.
Each night she closed
the scales of their eyes to smoor the fire.

Until he came again,
that last time,
thick with drink, saying
he’d had enough of this,
all this witchery,
and made them stand
in a row by their beds,
twitching. Their hands
flapped; herring-eyes
rolled in their heads.
He went along the line
relaxing them
one after another
with a small knife.

They say she goes out every night to lay
blankets on the graves to keep them warm.
It would put the heart across you, all that grief.

There was an otter worrying in the leaves, a heron
loping slow over the water when I came
at scraich of day, back to her door.

She’d hung four stones in a necklace, wore
four rings on the hand that led me past the room
with four small candles burning
which she called ‘the room of rain’.
Milky smoke poured up from the grate
like a waterfall in reverse
and she said my name,
and it was the only thing
and the last thing that she said.

She gave me a skylark’s egg in a bed of frost;
gave me twists of my four sons’ hair; gave me
her husband’s head in a wooden box.
Then she gave me the sealskin, and I put it on.

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236d

My son has birds in his head.

I know them now. I catch
the pitch of their calls, their shrill
cacophonies, their chitterings, their coos…

—“Daedalus”, by Alastair Reid (1926–2014) – born 100 years ago #OTD, 22 March
published in WEATHERING, @canongatebooks 1978

1/4

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #20thcentury

Daedalus
Alastair Reid

My son has birds in his head.

I know them now. I catch
the pitch of their calls, their shrill
cacophonies, their chitterings, their coos.
They hover behind his eyes and come to rest
on a branch, on a book, grow still,
claws curled, wings furled.
His is a bird world.

I learn the flutter of his moods,
his moments of swoop and soar.
From the ground I feel him try
the limits of the air –
sudden lift, sudden terror –
and move in time to cradle
his quivering, feathered fear.

At evening, in the tower,
I see him to sleep and see
the hooding-over of eyes,
the slow folding of wings.
I wake to his morning twitterings,
to the croomb of his becoming.

He chooses his selves – wren, hawk,
swallow or owl – to explore
the trees and rooftops of his heady wishing.
Tomtit, birdwit.
Am I to call him down, to give him
a grounding, teach him gravity?
Gently, gently.
Time tells us what we weigh, and soon enough
his feet will reach the ground.
Age, like a cage, will enclose him.
So the wise men said.

My son has birds in his head.

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‘The Tibetan Book of the Dead’ is actually not just about death

The Tibetan Book of the Dead,” arguably is the most well-known Tibetan Buddhist text outside Tibet.

by Jue Liang

https://theconversation.com/the-tibetan-book-of-the-dead-is-actually-not-just-about-death-247174

Buddhist literature at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/subject/37455

#books #literature #buddhism

Tibetan Thanka of Bardo. Vision of Serene Deities, 19th century, Guimet Museum

A Tibetan thangka painting on a dark background. At the centre, a large black Buddha figure sits in meditation lotus posture within a luminous white and gold mandorla. Surrounding this central figure, arranged in concentric circular bands, are numerous smaller deity figures — Buddhas and bodhisattvas — each seated within individual oval or circular aureoles, rendered in warm reds, golds, whites, and greens. Two larger figures appear at the top in cloud-like settings. At the bottom, a more complex terrestrial or narrative scene is depicted with smaller figures, architectural elements, and landscape details.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e8/Bardo._Vision_des_divinit%C3%A9s_sereines.jpg/330px-Bardo._Vision_des_divinit%C3%A9s_sereines.jpg

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The Dante Map: Mary Hensman’s Masterpiece

Posted by: Cynthia Smith

"In celebration of Women’s History Month, I am featuring the map below. It was designed by the 19th century scholar and mapmaker Mary Hensman. The map is a detailed guide to the places that the Italian poet Dante Alighieri visited as well as the locations mentioned in his literary works."

https://blogs.loc.gov/maps/2026/03/the-dante-map-mary-hensmans-masterpiece/

Books by Dante at PG:

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=Dante+Alighieri

#books #literature #cartography #womenshistorymonth

Dante Map. It shows Italy and other places in the Mediterranean associated with Dante

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