In January, the full moon is known as the Quiet Moon, Wolf Moon, or Cold Moon, depending on the Celtic tribe. The June full moon was known to the ancient Celts as the Mead Moon or the Horse Moon. It was believed that a newly married couple should drink mead for one full moon cycle to promote good health, prosperity and fertility. June is a time to celebrate the longest day of the year with Litha and the Summer Equinox. Spend time outside, enjoying the long days and abundant sunshine. The ancient Celts referred to the September full moon as the Singing Moon, Harvest Moon, or Wine Moon. Singing moon may refer to celtic rituals that included singing, along with other celebrations of the autumn equinox. It is a time to celebrate Mabon and the balance of light and dark. As the Wheel of the Year comes to an end it is also a good time to give thanks for all the blessings in your life.

Coleridge invites us to listen and to think, and think again, about the music of quiet, and the words we use to describe it. Peaceful. Calm. Still. Hush. Dim. Secret. That word “secret” in the very first line of the poem would have suggested quiet to Coleridge’s first readers, since “secret” carried the sense, no longer current, of reticence, of quiet and closeness (keeping something close, keeping it secret). A secret is unsounded. Silent. The frost “performs a secret ministry”. We do not hear the icy patterns forming on the windowpane. Nor do we hear the poem’s first rhyme, between “ministry” and “cry”, it is an eye rhyme, silent. The July full moon was known to the ancient Celts as the Claiming Moon or Horse Moon. Claiming Moon is likely derived from some sort of early legal system, similar to August’s Dispute Moon. July is traditionally the warmest month of the year in the Northern Hemisphere and as such is a good time to relax, meditate and reflect on your life. It is also a good time to think about how you can bring more positive things into your life. It is a strange coincidence that I finished reading Kevin Parr’s The Quiet Moon on a New Moon. It made me think of several conversations in recent weeks about the calendar year, alternative calendars, and the concept of time. Austin Kleon wrote about the difference between experiencing time as linear vs. circular. How almanacs and lunar cycles observe the passage of time as the birth and rebirth of seasons, crops, and life itself. Humankind has needed a linear time structure to record and plan events. It is how the world runs. But simultaneously, the pandemic showed us that experience of time is subjective. It waxes and wanes just like the moon despite what the calendar says. I love how Parr describes ‘time’ in the prologue of this book:In his great poem ‘Frost at Midnight’, written in February 1798, under a new moon, Coleridge is listening. And inviting us to listen with him. To the silence of frost on a windless night. Broken by the call of an owlet. His ear notices that it’s an owlet, rather than an owl. A young owl. Inside the cottage, it is calm. His baby son Hartley slumbers in his arms. The poem that emerges is a listening meditation. Listen. That repeated word “loud”, describing the “owlet’s cry”, primes our ears, or rather, our mind’s ear, or what Robert Frost called the imagining ear, to listen for a certain pitch of sound, heightening the shift into quiet that follows. Through the calm, the “strange and extreme silentness”, a thin blue flame comes into focus. Perfectly still. Not a quiver. Like the string of a lute, silent in stillness. Only the film of soot is moving now, fluttering on the grate, not still as in quiet, but, with a slight adjustment, still fluttering, moving, continuing to move, against the grate of the fire. It is “the sole unquiet thing”. Reflecting on listening in her essay ‘The Universe in time of rain makes the world alive with noise’ (2000), Oswald describes it as a way of forcing a poem open to what lies bodily beyond it. Because the eye is an instrument tuned to surfaces, but the ear tells you about volume, depth, content – like tapping a large iron shape to find if it’s full or not. The ear hears into, not just what surrounds it. And the whole challenge of poetry is to keep language open, so that what we don’t know yet can pass through it.

The sunset in the south-west is impressive, yet the moonrise has brought layers of lavender, rose and saffron that are soft like watercolour and yet dazzle like acrylic. And near the top sits the moon, a neat circle of clotted cream topping a slice of rainbow sponge. The ancient Celts had a rich tradition of associating the cycles of the moon with specific names and meanings. One of our favorite Celtic full moon names is Flower Moon, which is May’s full moon. It is a time to tend to your own life and ensure that the seeds you’ve planted continue to grow. For example, January’s full moon is called the Quiet Moon, Wolf Moon, or Cold Moon, while September’s full moon is named the Singing Moon, Harvest Moon, or Wine Moon. Each month’s full moon has names corresponding to particular themes, rituals, or natural events significant to that time of the year.According to Celtic tradition, the January full moon is known as the Quiet Moon. The name Quiet Moon is likely in reference to the quiet season of rest before the beginning of the harvest season. The January full moon is also known as the Wolf Moon or the Cold Moon in other cultures. The Quiet Moon is a good time for connecting with your higher spiritual power and reflecting inward. Now is the time to rest and save your energy for the busy seasons ahead. Each chapter title is a traditional Celtic full moon name like the Quiet Moon for January and the Harvest Moon for October. The author delves deep into the etymological origins of the lunar months introducing the reader to the Coligny calendar- the oldest lunisolar calendar made in Roman Gaul perhaps in the second century CE. Physically, the Coligny is a fragmented bronze plaque written in Latin inscriptional capitals and numerals, but the terms are in the Gaulish language. There are twelve lunar months and an intercalary month is inserted before every 2.5 years- titled the Blue Moon in this book’s epilogue. Oswald creates dynamic shifts of scale in other ways too, moving between linguistic registers, from the close domestic familiarity of the candle and its faint whisper, to the exotic names of faraway stars, those stars that rise “and give themselves airs”:

The August full moon was known to the ancient Celts as the Grain Moon or the Dispute Moon. August was the time of the first harvest of the year, the Celtic and to celebrate the occasion with feasts and festivals. It was also a time to resolve disputes between neighbors. This tradition of summertime legalese continued well into the 19th Century in different parts of Britain, where August 1st (aka Lughnasadh & Lammas) was a traditional time to collect rent and pay workers. Today the August Full Moon is a time to celebrate all your work and progress during the year, knowing that you are also prepared for the months ahead. The specific names and meanings associated with each full moon were related to particular events, such as the harvest season, and were used to set intentions, celebrate new beginnings, and reflect on personal growth and positivity.These practices underline the significant role that the moon and stars played in Celtic culture, both practically and symbolically. Star sound carried across vast distances, amplified by the poet’s imagining ear, to the intimacy of a whisper, “a faint thing”, a candle’s gentle sputter, “too faint to read by”. Moving between eye and ear, light and sound, the poem explores what it means to perceive stars, shifting scale and register, oscillating between far away and intimate. ‘A Star Here and a Star There’ is the first of the concluding sequence of poems in Oswald’s third collection Woods etc. (2005) that explore the further reaches of our skies, from moon to the deep silence of space, including ‘Moon Hymn’, ‘Various Portents’, ‘Excursion to the Planet Mercury’, and ‘Sonnet’, the final poem in the collection, which describes “Spacecraft Voyager 1 boldly gone / into Deep Silence”.

The ancient Celts lived by and worshipped the moon. While modern, digital life is often at odds with nature – rubbing against it rather than working in harmony with it – is there something to be said for embracing this ancient way of being and reconnecting to the moon’s natural calendar?*The stars were particularly important to the Celts during their travels as they were used to navigate during the night.