With today’s final instalment, we bring to a close - for now -  Mark Fiddes’ Spring Journal, and it has been an honour to publish this remarkable sequence in The Madrid Review.

Over the past two weeks, Fiddes has offered a poetic witness to events unfolding in the Middle East, writing from Dubai with a clarity, range and humanity that recall Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal. Moving between the intimate and the historical, the local and the global, the sequence has traced the textures of daily life lived under the shadow of conflict.

In this closing piece, the poem turns, characteristically, to an image at once ordinary and strangely luminous: a drifting plastic bag, carried on the wind through cities and across years. As throughout Spring Journal, the fleeting and the everyday are set against the vast movements of history, asking what it means to notice, to feel, and to remain human in such times.

We are grateful to Mark Fiddes for allowing us to share this work and to our readers for following it.you can read the full sequence on our blog and Substack pages. If the project has resonated with you, please share it and help spread the word.

Mark has a new collection coming out soon so be sure to follow him to keep up with all his news. Thanks for reading and stay safe!