The thoughts of the dreaming Daniel, however, turn not to books, but to a different, flimsier kind of printed paper product. She reminds her readers that books (paper ones at least, if not the digital kind) are also brought into being through the folding and stitching together of loose leaves: folia assembled form folios. 2 Smith is activating a venerable pun connecting the natural with the bibliographical. The coat of leaves, a 'green suit,' that Daniel assembles - newly possessed in this dreamt-of afterlife with an ability to sew - recalls, of course, one familiar figure for the codex form. He picks up a layering of leaves, matches an edge to an edge and sews.' 1 He stitches one to the other with a neat, what is it, running stitch? Blanket stitch?.

Hospitality to the uninvited stranger is, as Matthew Hart notes, the Quartet's pervading theme.) In the little wood where the dreaming Daniel takes refuge, he plucks one green leaf after another from the trees that conceal him: 'He puts their edges together. (To launch the Seasonal Quartet, her epic of the present, Smith looks back to the ancient beginnings of Western literature and has Daniel replay the castaway Odysseus's embarrassing plight on the coast of Phaeacia - connecting the ancient past to present-day images of migrant refugees and children trying to reach the shoreline. In the dream of the afterlife that centenarian Daniel dreams while lying unconscious and prostrate in his care home, he suddenly finds himself naked on the seashore and needing to evade the gaze of a nearby girl. Emulating Daniel Gluck in Ali Smith's Autumn, we spent the latter half of the autumn and start of the winter gleaning and gathering loose leaves, scraps, and remnants and stitching our ideas together.

Daniel gluck ali smith