Golgonooza

  It is a challenge for a writer if their setting is in historical time not to allow their own contemporary context to intrude, even if lightly. Can you genuinely depict another world? The best example of success that I would point to is Margaret Yourcenar's remarkable 'Memoirs of Hadrian'. That moment when the Emperor refers obliquely to Christians as a minor irritant across the surface of his attention to be quickly forgotten is a compelling example of the world as then inhabited with no hint, because no awareness, of what is to come. Welch's novel falls into the same category of world-building. In this case, we are with a sub-group of the Blackfeet in Montana in 1870. From its very first sentence, we are in their world, as the main protagonist, White Man's Dog, who will become Fools Crow, sits, restless, on the cusp of Cold Maker bringing winter. What unfolds is the story of his growth into manhood as a warrior, apprentice medicine man, husband, and father amongs

  'The Virgin of St. John of the Cross', 1953, by Patrick Pye Kenosis "In sleep his infant mouth works in and out. He is so new, his silk skin has not yet been roughed by plane and wooden beam nor, so far, has he had to deal with human doubt. He is in a dream of nipple found, of blue-white milk, of curving skin and, pulsing in his inner ear, the inner throb of warm heart's repeated sound. His only memories float from fluid space. So new he has not pounded nails, hung a door broken bread, felt rebuff, bent to the lash, wept for the sad heart of the human race." This poem by Luci Shaw takes us to a figure at once so natural, so truly child - the mouth working in and out - and yet luminous. The child who is God will grow into the man who is God and never once forsake his humanity, will never be anyone other than truly human, transparent in God, as we are all asked to become. Jesus will always be present in that trusting reality that is true of any birth, so beautiful

  I recall going for a walk in Macedonia, early one Spring, and as I turned a corner of a mountainous path, there, a couple of hundred meters in front, was the prominent behind of a bear, wandering onwards, I thought a little drunkenly. It occurred to me later that if these bears hibernate perhaps this one was emerging from sleep, slimmer, still groggy, looking for the bearlike equivalent of one's first coffee. I cautiously reversed my steps and took a path less traveled. My one and only transitory encounter was over in a few seconds.  Nastassja Martin's encounter in Kamchatka, Russia's far eastern peninsula of ice and fire, was of a wholly other dimension. She is a French anthropologist and was engaged in fieldwork with the indigenous communities of the region. A number of whom, in the post-Soviet world, have returned to the forest after their mostly harrowing experience of collectivization.  Her friends amongst the indigenous had already noticed a 'bear affinity'