Surprised by Hope

Early one morning, a writer begins to grow feathers and wings, and may eventually be able to zoom off to work without taking the executive jet. A traveller visiting Porto, in northern Portugal, notices an angel in mid-air, high above. A newcomer to Berlin sits in an airport cafe and reflects on predictions about the future made nearly 50 years ago. After a trip to Docklands, Melbourne, a visitor is haunted by the dockside jellyfish ‘Opening and closing themselves like sinister/ white umbrellas’. And when a man wakes on a beach, memories are revived and he is summoned back to childhood, and to ‘something loved,/ something full of the promise of salty air, as if/ he were a lost and circling seagull, or a lump/ of flying paper whirled up in a glassy tide of wind’.