A bower-bird, bric-a-brac nest

I love the poetry of Marianne Moore - acerbic and erudite, she connects the minutiae of everyday life with swooping tides of human history and experience. A recurring theme is her punctuation of that unending ocean with objects both familiar and elevated to pure symbol. Glass bottles, vases, train tracks, palomino ponies, pine cones...somehow the lives of emperors are contained in these dusty poetic antiques.


Nowhere is this more obvious than in her poem 'No Swan So Fine...' in which the swan in question is both the iconoclastic king-slaying power of the common man, but also, literally 'the chintz china one with fawn-/brown eyes and toothed gold/collar on...'


Ted Hughes wrote of visiting Moore in her New York apartment,'her bower-bird bric-a-brac nest'. Ever since reading Moore's poems I cannot pass a junk shop or antiques market in quite the same way. All the objects there seem laden with significance, reverberating with their own and others' stories.


In light of that here are some other images taken at Bermondsey Antiques Market.