looduskalender.ee

 

 

 

Nature’s measure and weather maker is nothing other than a leaf.

 

In autumn nature becomes four-dimensional. On the forest wall that seemed evenly green in summer red maples, yellow birches step forward, even pines provide some brown. And the time dimension becomes perceptible – tomorrow the forest standing behind the plain will not be the same as it is today. Does it stand at all, it moves over time, signalling it by its colour changes.

 

Snow will come only when the tree leaves deign to drop to the ground. Snow fears the leaves. And when the tree leaves are bored of winter they will again creep out from the branches, snow is frightened by this and goes back into the sky.

 

Jürgen Rooste writes in Maaleht about the Backyard Potterer:

Tiit Kändler’s “Õueonu aasta – Backyard Potterer’s year” is a poetic book. Observing the weather in the sense of observing the world. The Backyard Potterer has an eye for details, he notices tiny creatures, references and allusions and the yard is a space of its own for him, a habitat, as the living room of the world.

 

He does not hide that Karel Capek’s „A gardener’s year“ is a model to some extent but I also notice here a pure Tönu Õnnepalu*-like sense of being present. This, that every step, being, becomes literature. I. e. see as if everything were art.  Caddisfly larva in the mud, ripening sunflower seeds, May-faced hedgehog ...

 

And of course Tiit Kändler cannot supress his scientific eye but here these excursions are rather humorous digressions.

 

The book alternates between general biopoetic descriptions of concrete months and precise diary notes that may dissect a single tiny detail, and with Tiit Kändler’s own drawings that keep in step with the moods.

 

Õueonu aasta

Text and illustrations: Tiit Kändler

Layout: Eerik Kändler

Teaduslugu 2013, 80 pp

 

Like the first early-autumn birch leaf, the brand new book „Õueonu aasta – Backyard Potterer’s Year“ dropped into the yard.

 

 „Õueonu aasta“ expresses pure joy at the yard such as it appears to an open-minded Backyard Potterer.

 

„Oh, what, I poked some fun too,“ the Backyard Potterer comments and goes out into the yard.

 

On sale at Apollo and Rahva Raamat 

 

*Tõnu Õnnepalu, Estonian poet and author, b. 1962.