A Photographic Response to Metro Winds

Why? I hear you ask. Didn’t you just review Metro Winds, giving it 5/5 inky star? Yes, yes, I did and that’s absolutely why this post. My reviewing policy for this blog is quite fixed. I don’t need to love the book or film to bits to review, but it MUST make me think, provoke, bring up complex issues in society, inspire in some way. I know I really like something if it encourages artistic creativity; whether short story, poem or photography. Sometimes even all of those things at once.

As I read Metro Winds, it was the personal element that caught me the most; Isobelle’s focus on travel and metamorphisis, change and growth. My initial reaction was to remember my own special travel memories and apply them to the stories I was reading. This post incorporates relevent quotes from Metro Winds with my own travel photography. Metro Winds is copyright Isobelle Carmody and Allen and Unwin Publishers. Photography copyright InkAshlings 2012. Please do not repost any of these photos without credit. Quotes from Metro Winds should not be republished without author/publisher permission. If you have any concerns about this post please contact me at inkashlings@gmail.com

… this girl who had lived on a remote coast of a remote land in a solitary yellow house listening to the chilly grey sea that rushed straight from the ice pole to pound on the shore beside her bedroom window.

– Metro Winds, p. 8.

Giant’s Causeway, Northern Ireland

“Tell me where you have come from, that you seek audience with the Dove Princess.” 

The Dove Game, p. 79.

Christmas markets and fair, Edinburgh, Scotland

“Then I looked around at the glowing white snow, radiant in the sun whose light reached us but not its heat. The pine trees wore shapeless hoods of glistening snow, and the black-trunked trees were sugar frosted.”

The Girl Who Saw The Wind, p. 144.

Edinburgh, Scotland

“A seed was planted,” she said. “Many seeds were planted, but only one will summon the stranger who will be the way and the gate.”

The Stranger, p. 203.

Inside St Vitus Cathedral, Prague

“Yet few who travel to that city, which is fantasy made real, discover that it is the gateway to this labyrinthine land of islands and canals it merely mirrors imprecisely.”

The Wolf Prince, p. 210

On a gondola in Venice, Italy

“I was a fringe dweller of the most meek and timid ilk, and if someone had accused me of being a shadow in the world, I would have admitted it. But that was before my shadow was lost, and I understood by the gaping void its absence left that it is we who need our shadows, not they us.”

The Man Who lost his Shadow, p. 359.

My flatmate and I skating with shadows outside the Natural History Museum, London.

Intrigued? You should be! You can purchase Metro Winds from Booktopia here: http://www.booktopia.com.au/metro-winds/prod9781865084442.html