The poet, Alice Oswald, often places walking at the centre of her writing. She walks the distance of the rivers she has written about – the Rover Dart, the Severn – and she walks in the lanes around her Devon home. Last week, when asked what she had been doing during this time of enforced isolation, she said that she had been using a magnifying glass.
Rather than leaving the house and covering miles, she has looked through the magnifying glass to see the worlds of her garden. She has been able to see the details of the insects she finds there, the tiny bumps on the leaves of goosegrass, the teensy black beetle nestled amongst marigold petals.
Alice Oswald has written a collection of poems about wild flowers and who knows what she is writing now, as she peers through her magnifying glass. See if you can find one, and choose a patch of garden, a part of tree, a moth settled on the wall and look through the glass. Make a list of what you see. You may well have a poem.
If not a poem, then you will have a naturalist’s record of your observations. Even if you don’t have a magnifying glass, you can choose to look closely. Find that small patch and see how it opens up into being a big world. Note down what you see.
Writing Box 