Sinner Saved by Grace

Alune, Alune Alune, the phantom and companion of an idle gardener, his private tune a dream of this ghostess: Alune, no less an idulum than eidolon, but more: the gardener had let her grow, soft seedhead hairgrass on hard rock: the very she of natural felicity. But more alone Alune. An idle gardener spent years of afternoons observing stones behave like garden gnomes. His panes of greenhouse glass grow algal with a cracked, absent, or obscure nostalgia. They fell out. The moss roots in the frame that rots. The biggin's shot. Since she reseeded the rush pasture grass respread across the ghostbed by itself. Wilt pales the leaf. Dry off the paste. Death's misbelief transferred. Her flowers wake but have no ears. They may be deaf unlike her birds. She takes what strength of wind you heard. The title, "A Sinner saved by Grace", comes from the inscription on a lonely and isolated gravestone the poet came across while walking on the moors above his home in the Calder Valley. And indeed, the whole collection is a reaffirmation of the powers of nature, language, and music by which the poet finds himself surrounded in his Pennine home.