As the summer holidays take over I am re-posting the odd blog post from my archive. To celebrate the start of August, here is a found poem from Tove Jansson’s amazing The Summer Book.
—
Every year, the bright
Scandinavian summer nights
fade away without anyone
noticing.
One evening in August
you have an errand outdoors,
and all of a sudden
it’s pitch-black.
A great warm, dark
silence
surrounds the house.
It is still summer,
but summer is no longer
alive.
It has come
to a standstill;
nothing
withers, and autumn
is not ready to begin.
There are no stars yet,
just darkness.
The can of kerosene
is brought up from the cellar
and left in the hall,
and the lamp is hung up
on its peg by the door.
Day by day,
everything
moves closer
to the house.
Tove Jansson, from The Summer Book, p.166
Some found poems
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Published by Anthony Wilson
I am a lecturer, poet and writing tutor. I work in teacher and medical education at the University of Exeter. My anthology Lifesaving Poems was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2015. In 2012 I published Riddance (Worple Press), a collection of poems, and Love for Now (Impress Books), a memoir, about my experience of cancer. My most recent books are Deck Shoes (Impress Books, 2019), a book of prose memoir and criticism, and The Afterlife (Worple Press, 2019). In 2023 I will publish The Wind and the Rain, my sixth collection of poems, with Blue Diode Press. My current research project, with Sue Dymoke from Nottingham Trent University and funded by the Foyle Foundation, is Young Poets' Stories: https://youngpoetsstories.com/. This blog is archived by the British Library.
View all posts by Anthony Wilson
Anthony Wilson 
Beautiful 👩🏻🎓👩🏻🎓👩🏻🎓👩🏻🎓
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Great poem. Thanks.
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love it. In Helsinki at the moment and I can feel winter edging in with the north wind. (despite the Test Match on my beloved’s computer)
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This is how we know in Scandinavia that it is not a summer anymore – when the darkness starts creeping in, first into the night, later into the day…
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