Creature Feature (14): Hippo and Echo

A WALLOW IN THE REALMS

OF THE BLUE HIPPOPOTAMUS

Our local students baked hippo biscuits yesterday. This is the one that got away! My 'Echo on the Nile' poem about a faience hippo can now be read online on Professor Lewis Turco's site, 'The Book of Odd and Invented Forms'. If you follow the link, you will need to scroll down to the section on 'Echo Verse' (or do a 'Find' search on a word e.g. 'Nile'). You might like to take a look at my Echo blog here.

Egyptian blue-green faience hippos have long fascinated me. I have even got the T-shirt, as you will see if you click the link here (didn't we look young then?!).

I hope you will enjoy finding out more about these lovely creatures.

• Hippo Conservation
• Year of Biodiversity: Pygmy Hippo
  

Published Poetry (2): The Dawntreader

I blogged about Edward Thomas the other day as part of a challenge set by The Weaver of Grass to write a post about a favourite book. In the course of this post, I mentioned a prose piece I had co-authored with my husband, David, some time ago, published in OUP's 'Notes & Queries' about the poem 'Swedes'. Thomas likens the opening of the swede clamp to the discovery of an Egyptian tomb. He alludes to tomb robbers, and to the array of glittering treasure.

How curious that I should open this morning's post to find my poem, 'Gold', about tombaroli in the Etruscan tombs of Italy, in the latest edition of The Dawntreader, published by Ronnie Goodyer and Dawn Bauling of Indigo Dreams Press.

• Looting Matters