Art: Boré Ivanoff
PINE NUTS AT LUNCHTIME
It was in the way of things
That a casual sighting in a supermarket trolley
In front of me of a packet of nuts
And I was a girl again
Delighting in that lunch-hour of freedom
From sitting straight-backed, blank-eyed
At conjugations, calculations or grammatical explanations
Watching our teacher’s hand slowly scrape
That white stub of chalk across the blackboard
And wincing as it chanced to squeak.
But when the bell sounded our release, we hurried
Out under the wobbling shade of the umbrella pines
And ran and dodged and hid and found until
Flushed and gasping, we came to rest.
We knew how to spot them then
Those slight charcoal-coloured oblongs
Of pine nuts nestled in the grooves of crazy paving
Like they had been dipped in ash.
Slipping off a shoe, heel in hand we’d kneel
And with the deft turn of a schoolgirl’s wrist
We would smash them open, but gently
So as not to injure the pale, delicate-tasting flesh inside
Fresh to the world, and sweeter
Than any pricey, packaged import.
About the author:
Denise O’Hagan is an editor by trade. Born and raised in Italy, she lived in the UK before emigrating to Australia in 1990. She holds an MA in Bibliography and Textual Criticism, and worked in book publishing in London (Collins, Heinemann, Routledge) and Sydney (Harcourt Brace, Cambridge University Press, State Library of NSW). In 2015 she set up her own imprint, Black Quill Press, to assist independent writers.
She has written fiction (short stories, Papyrus Publishing) and poetry. Her published poems include: ‘And the nuns wore lipstick’, ‘Honolulu breakfasts’, ‘I am lucky’ (New Reader Magazine, 2018 (https://www.
Art: Boré Ivanoff
In the artist’s words:
Eastern European- born, contemporary, protean artist, based in Paris since 2001. Since 2012 he paints exclusively Paris. Parisian views, ‘jamais vu’ motives are his special feature, blurring the line between abstraction and realism. For Boré Paris it’s the kind of place that offers the right combination of inspiration and pain and suffering to keep him stimulated and painting. Independent and self-confident, with a remarkable ability to surprise and intrigue the viewer … he prefers the enigmatic, the unconventional, and the unexpected. His work is precise, yet it teeters on the threshold of delirium and chaos. He brings outrageous levels, of pictorial realization to his work. His compositions are a sophisticated exercise in the manipulation of form, keyed-up color, density, illusionism, brushwork, and compression. The interior and the exterior merge to produce a single image whose
complexities are almost impossible to untangle. The result is which the abstract nearly trumps the real. Boré wants to see how far he can push reality to the other side where the “real” is still recognizable, but becoming totally abstract, building that tension until they are just one and the same.
Boré Ivanoff (BG-FR) https://boretzart.wordpress.
