salt magazine and the healing balm of beauty

Salt Magazine has just been relaunched as an online literary journal; Issue One is online now. I've read only a few poems so far, but John Burnside's poem As Essay Concerning Religion has inspired me to print it out - all four pages of it - and take it with me to the GP surgery, which is where I'm going right now.

The magazine was started by John Kinsella as an Australian print journal, and here's what he has to say about the name (which I've always really liked, and wondered about):

"The name Salt comes out of the salt wastes of the Western Australian wheatbelt, and the intimate connection Kinsella had with them. Yet the magazine’s title is not simply a mnemonic for ecological devastation but also one of renewal. 'My cousins and uncle and I planted many thousands of trees in the wheatbelt in an effort to heal the damaged land. This is the salt that intrigued me. The grotesque and the beautiful, and the question of what — if anything — really separates them.'"

Now, that is something to think about. Lately I've been intrigued - well, in fact, plunged into ennui - by the question of what - if anything - really separates the boring and the less boring, and whether there is in fact anything at all that is not boring.

So far, John Burnside's poem is doing it for me. I also bought a bar of 70% dark chocolate, we'll see if that's as good as the poem.