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Don Quixote Ventures Forth – Hugo Williams
Don Quixote Ventures Forth Once long ago at night I was excited by rain lighting the street for murder. Was it too late, I wondered, to do something stupid with […]
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Three Poems by Karen Solie
Lowry at The Sylvia “… he knew how to act, and I how to write: we were destined for each other.” — Don Quixote de La Mancha “Perhaps Don Quixote […]
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Two Poems by Jamie McKendrick
Something More “Thou must take notice, brother Sancho, that this adventure and those like it are not adventures of islands, but of cross-roads, in which nothing is got except a […]
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The Curious Painter – David Shook
The Curious Painter In Mexicali’s evening heat your boards thirst for gesso, acrylics dry in seconds, and no amount of Tramadol will dull the wicked sun. You find your models […]
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Don Quixote and the Arabs – Alberto Manguel
Alberto Manguel In a certain Spanish prison cell, in a town whose name we cannot remember, in Castro del Rio perhaps, or in Seville, a tired scholar and soldier, almost […]
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Extract from Miguel de Cervantes’ novella, El licenciado vidriera (Dr Glasscase) – Translated from the Spanish by Adam Feinstein
Translator’s note: Miguel de Cervantes’ peculiar tale of the man who believes he is made of glass is one of my favourite of his Novelas Ejemplares (Exemplary Novels), published in […]
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Quixote For Real – Deryn Rees Jones
Quixote For Real after Allen Ginsberg Came home, found Quixote in my living room. It’s happened, I said to myself in the silence. The light seemed subtly altered. I have […]
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Loving Don Quixote – Elaine Feinstein
Loving Don Quixote Even now I love you, gentle Knight of the Rueful Countenance, because I have always fallen most deeply in love with vulnerable men — —not losers exactly, […]
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You Do Not Have To Be Mad – Patrick Mackie
You Do Not Have To Be Mad So this is where you are, right at the heart of the wan, crushed summer of the referendum and of blame, of sleek […]
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Marcela Sonnets by Fiona Benson
Marcela Sonnets after Don Quixote i “I was born free, and to live free I chose the solitude of the countryside. The trees of these mountains are my company, the […]
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Grisóstomo’s Suicide – Nicola Nathan
Grisóstomo’s Suicide To David Harsent I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose […]
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If you believe that you’ll believe anything – Robinson Jeffers: Poet and Prophet
André Naffis-Sahely Exactly a year prior to Nazi Germany’s surrender, while Allied planes were busy carpet-bombing the old continent in preparation for the D-Day landings, Robinson Jeffers wrote a poem […]
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Back to the crisis of living – time and trauma in Alice Oswald
Lucy Mercer “Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up […] now try to imagine what it was like to wake up […]
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‘The Woman I Met’ – Thomas Hardy
This is an extract from Mark Ford’s ‘Thomas Hardy – Half a Londoner’ which will be published in November 2016 by Harvard University Press Hardy’s longest London poem opens with […]
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Eroding the harmful binaries – Male homosocial bonding in the poetry of Michael Longley
Dave Coates The Helmet When shiny Hector reached out for his son, the wean Squirmed and buried his head between his nurse’s breasts And howled, terrorised by his father, […]
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R.F. Langley: Poetry of a Landscape
Chris Larkin ‘One needs to be a botanist, a physical geographer, and a naturalist, as well as an historian, to be able to feel certain that one has all the […]
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‘…in that the Soul standeth’: Randall Jarrell’s 90 North and John Berryman’s A Prayer for the Self
Toby Martinez de las Rivas The quote in the title of this short article is taken from Of Heaven and Hell by Jakob Boehme, a German shoemaker, mystic and theologian […]
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Marie Antoinette’s mock-peasant hamlet – the charges against Les Murray
John Clegg Les Murray is Teflon to generalisation. Ages ago in Areté, Jeremy Noel-Tod made an overview of his poetry which was acerbic and funny and rigorous and contained only […]
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Three Poems from Centres of Cataclysm
To celebrate 50 years of Modern Poetry in Translation, Bloodaxe have just published an anthology – Centres of Cataclysm – edited by Sasha Dugdale and David and Helen Constantine. Below […]
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Thaddeus O’Sullivan – ‘The Poetry of Making a Film’
Thaddeus O’Sullivan, edited by Ruth Padel Ruth: This essay sprang from a film-maker’s notes about directing. It has been written up by a poet eager to understand and is based […]