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The voyage to ‘eternal silence’: Male heroism and the evasion of death in Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’
Ulixes mosaic at the Bardo Museum in Tunis, Tunisia. 2nd century AD. Lily Searstone Tennyson’s nuanced reworking of Homeric epic in his Ulysses (1842) is monumental in its binding of ancient and modernist narratives. The layered intertextuality and multiplicity of Ulysses as a symbol of masculine heroism in decline works to express…
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On ‘Bloom’ by Sarah Westcott
Daniel Bennett The poems in this luminous book, Bloom (Pavilion Press, 2021) are tight, fragmented things, varying in shape and typesetting, in a style both abstract and committed: the world placed firmly underfoot even as the work revels in strangeness and uncertainty. The first poem, ‘Apples’, strains at the edges of form, and…
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Two poems by Caroline Banerjee
Photo by Matt Brown on Unsplash Orpheus’s Awakening That moment Orpheus looked back, He knew what he had lost: Lemon light drifting Through French blinds, Heat rising in an October cool, The feeling of knowing you are exactly Where you are meant to be. Stumbling, stuttering, Eurydice is before…
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‘Window Seat of a Train in the Past’: a poem by Debasis Tripathy
Photo by Parichay Sen on Unsplash Window Seat of a Train in the Past We travel on the train now. I have grabbed the window seat seeing many kinds of my country & characters. My father wants us to note down the names of the stations we cross. Platforms…
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Two poems by Oliver Comins
Photo by Alessandro Bogliari on Unsplash Another XI A cricket tea on a boundary edge in old heat. Trains and cars passed, skirting the park’s rim where sunlight was streaming through poplars. On the surface, at least, we weren’t normal sporting types – sweaty and earnest or urgent. A…
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‘The Penlee Lifeboat Disaster’: a poem by Jennifer Edgecombe
The below poem is taken from Jennifer Edgecombe’s debut pamphlet The Grief of the Sea, published by Broken Sleep Books in June 2020. It also appears in Carcanet’s New Poetries VIII. The poem originally appeared on Wild Court in February 2020 and is republished here to mark the 40th anniversary of the Penlee…
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Two poems by Bersu Doldur
Gypsy moth Taurus Mountains, the fiery air of Mesopotamia; she waits for it to caress her. It doesn’t. The English cousin. But she’s not entirely. Nor Kurdish, or Turkish. A gypsy moth Eurasian belongs in no one’s home with wings that let her fly but she cannot land on the pistachio tree…
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An excerpt from ‘Wendy Cope’ by Rory Waterman: on her ‘Saint Hilda of Whitby’
Rory Waterman writes: This is a slightly edited short excerpt from my recent book Wendy Cope (Liverpool University Press, 2021), reprinted here with thanks to the publisher. In 2018, I was asked to review Cope’s new collection, Anecdotal Evidence, for the Times Literary Supplement, which got me thinking: why has nobody written a book…
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On ‘Corrigenda for Costafine Town’ by Jake Morris-Campbell
Richie McCaffery The first edition of Alasdair Gray’s debut collection of short stories (Unlikely Stories, Mostly) carries with it a little snippet of paper saying ‘Erratum: This slip has been inserted by mistake’. A wee postmodern gimmick, but a funny one nonetheless. Copies of this book are rare nowadays with that original…
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Two poems by Stephanie Powell
Photo by Anton Murygin on Unsplash Foxes In the backstreets the foxes are synchronised swimmers- unaware they are in the same pool, unaware they are doing the same thing. Crossing pot-holed Grasmere Avenue, Poplar Place, Glastonbury Road. Light muzzled, shagged amber fur- thief-footing the pavement. On bin night they…
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Two poems by Mat Riches
Photo by Tim Foster on Unsplash Captain’s Pond I didn’t expect to find myself beside you, swatting flies and leaves to watch fishermen watching you like I watched Dad that summer, his float piercing the fly-busy surface until a tench rose to the bait and yanked his rod clear from…
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On ‘Map of a Plantation’ by Jenny Mitchell
Daniel Bennett The title of Jenny Mitchell’s follow-up collection to 2019’s Her Lost Language begins with a gesture to objectivity. Map of a Plantation (Indigo Dreams, 2021) – we’re offered a sense of distance, a dispassionate realm of depiction, the chart not the territory. In reality, anyone who has ever looked at…
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Two poems by Tuesday Shannon
Photo by Khara Woods on Unsplash Catechism In the vestibule, Mum dips her hand in holy water, blesses each of her wayward flock with the sign of the cross. We are well-practiced in this deception: know when to kneel, stand, and pray, say ‘amen’ in the right places and,…
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‘Ancestors’ – a poem by Alan Buckley
Photo by Eva Wilcock on Unsplash Ancestors Their voices – those we barely remember, those we never knew – urge us to bear witness. A corpse on barbed wire. Nights filled with flames. One hand slipping from another’s grasp. They’ve suffered beyond our knowing. But then they ask us…
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A psycho-geographer slipping the coordinates of time: on Tim Cumming
Julian Stannard ‘You sit/down to put into words your reckoning.’ I don’t read Tim Cumming with any expectation of the anodyne. The title of his latest book (Knuckle, Pitt Street Poetry, 2019) suggests the experience, as ever, will be bracing. ‘The Knuckle End’ – almost the title-poem – considers the poet’s…
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Handbrake turn on a hair-pin bend: Lavinia Greenlaw and poetic feat
This essay was originally published by Wild Court on 1st March 2016. Lavinia Greenlaw will be taking part in the latest online ‘Poetry And…’ event, curated by Ruth Padel, on 2nd November 2021. Details, including how to get your free tickets, can be found here. Rose McLaren I will start where I…
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Discovering George Mackay Brown
John Greening marks the centenary of the birth of George Mackay Brown (1921-1996), which falls this Sunday, 17th October. The June bee Bumps in the pane with a heavy bag of plunder ‘I first got to know George Mackay Brown’s work in 1982 when we were living in North East…
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‘Lapis lazuli’ – a poem by Alexandra Fössinger
Photo by Shifaaz Shamoon on Unsplash Lapis lazuli On a Sardinian beach, the ambulant vendor shifts through white vesicles from lapis lazuli waves straight into my eyes, then stops at the border of my towel, bare feet boiling in sand. A silvery man. The woman-snake on my left hisses…
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Poems of Community and Historical Memory: an interview with Ian Parks
Portrait of Ian Parks by Andrew Farmer Ian Parks was born in 1959 and is the author of eight collections of poems, including Shell Island, The Exile’s House, Love Poems 1979-2009 and Citizens. He is editor of Versions of the North: Contemporary Yorkshire Poetry and the Selected Poems of Harold Massingham, and his…
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Two new poems by Ian Parks
An interview with Ian, in which he discusses themes explored in the following poems, is up concurrently on Wild Court here. Jarrow March Instead of revolution we have rain: it seeps into the English soil and permeates our lives. Some stayed at home and made the pit-wheel turn, some manned…