When I'm looking for a book in the chaos of my front room shelves - only vaguely organised into mostly poetry and half-heartedly in alphabetical order - a card turns up. It's Cyprien Tokoudagba's Azizia, God of the Forest and I imagine I must have bought it at an exhibition years ago. It turned up too at Bonhams but more interesting is Tokoudagba's focus on Vodun, also known as Voodoo or Vodou. He was from Benin where it's an official religion. I put the card back again, determined to find out more about him but never in the same place. So the God of the Forest does his work among the covers of books that remember the languages of the tree.
Searching for more information about Tokoudagba, I was also drawn into the meaning of Vodun, its foundation on the life of the spirit world and ancestors, its rituals designed to maintain balance, focus on the earth.
Tokoudagba's practice of painting directly onto walls reminds me too of the South African artist John Baloyi whose gallery in Venda we visited years ago. Poet Vonani Bila writes beautifully about Baloyi's studio in the New England Review.
I've gone too far from the world of the spirit in the past months. I looked under mum's hut yesterday at the great badger sett which gets bigger and bigger. I saw the young vixen come down the path, the same one who sleeps on mum's rug sometimes in the sun, and who's probably sharing the sett.
I linger at the doors of the spirit world from time to time - the lime leaves on the border of the allotment, the apple tree bowing under the weight of its fruit, plunging into the sea to cool off. On my shelves, so many poems too.
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