News & Events | Page 344 | The Common | A Modern Sense of Place: Stories, Poems, Essays & Images

Moonscapes

March 1, 2011 Issue 01, Issue 01 Art

From the very dawn of the new technology, photographers sought to capture images of the heavens. In 1839 Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre—inventor of the daguerreotype—attempted to shoot the moon, with little success. As photographic technology developed throughout the nineteenth century, it became an important tool in many branches of scientific inquiry. James Nasmyth’s book, The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite, is one of the most curious examples of Victorian scientific publishing.

The Gods

March 1, 2011 Issue 01, Issue 01 Poetry, Poetry

By MARY JO SALTER

I always seem to have tickets
in the third or fourth balcony
(a perch for irony;
a circle of hell the Brits
tend to call ‘The Gods’),
and peer down from a tier
of that empyrean

From Vandemonian

March 1, 2011 Issue 01, Issue 01 Poetry, Poetry

By CLIFF FORSHAW

Tasmania: fragments from a story

THE MAN

The Governor built his prisons,
but he built his chapels, too.
Now the Lamb of God beams down
in light that’s brightly stained,
right foreleg implausibly curled
around a regimental flag.

The Common Statement

March 1, 2011 Issue 01

When someone tells me a story, even a newspaper headline, I ask, “Where was that? Where did that happen?” From the context—the who, the where, and the when—I construct meaning. I believe I’m not alone. We have a fundamental desire to understand our environments, to understand how they affect who we are and what we care about.

Angkor

March 1, 2011 Issue 01, Issue 01 Poetry, Poetry

By CLIFF FORSHAW

All day those stones have writhed with myth,
roots have snaked necks, have had the cheek
to prod gods and kings, crack armies, cities, ships;
mocked Shiva, made him sprout arthritic wrists.