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The Most Perfect Thing: the Inside (and Outside) of a Bird’s Egg
‘Poetry And – The Red Egg’, a free talk and poetry reading with two award-winning writers, scientist Tim Birkhead and poet Paul Farley, takes place on Tuesday 28 November at King’s Chapel on the Strand, 7-8.30pm. Curated by Ruth Padel, Tim and Paul will share their passion for birds, birds’ eggs and the mystery of…
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Conrad at 160: three poems by Steven J Fowler
The year 2017 has been declared ‘The Year of Joseph Conrad’ by the Polish Government to celebrate Conrad’s 160th birthday. To mark this, a poetic celebration of Conrad will take place at the National Poetry Library, Royal Festival Hall, on the evening of Wednesday 1 November. The event is free but booking is required. The…
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Judith or Salomé? Ambiguity & inequality in the poetry of Frederick Seidel
Matthew Halliday It is not always easy to distinguish between Judith and Salomé in the Western art tradition. Are we viewing Judith’s faithfulness to God in a state of exaltation or jealous and vindictive Salomé, with the sobering head of John the Baptist staring right back at us? Our appreciation of what is before…
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Conrad at 160: ‘Notes Towards a Poem’ by Agnieszka Studzinska
The year 2017 has been declared ‘The Year of Joseph Conrad’ by the Polish Government to celebrate Conrad’s 160th birthday. To mark this, a poetic celebration of Conrad will take place at the National Poetry Library, Royal Festival Hall, on the evening of Wednesday 1 November. The event is free but booking is required. The…
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Conrad at 160: ‘How I found Dr Livingstone’, a poem by Robert Hampson
The year 2017 has been declared ‘The Year of Joseph Conrad’ by the Polish Government to celebrate Conrad’s 160th birthday. To mark this, a poetic celebration of Conrad will take place at the National Poetry Library, Royal Festival Hall, on the evening of Wednesday 1 November. The event is free but booking is required. The…
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‘Somewhere’: a poem by John Fuller
Somewhere Somewhere I once belonged. Who knows where? But like the map englobed My journey’s clear. I must find out. I must go there. For the past is space That must be crossed, Memory a face That’s not quite lost. Somewhere within me A remembered promise, Hard to misprove, A spoken word That is…
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The Enchantment of Disenchantment: Wallace Stevens’ ‘Sunday Morning’ & Ecopoetic Potential
Rebecca Tamás Wallace Stevens is not a poet one necessarily associates with environmental thought or eco-poetics; his poetry is perceived as flamboyant, abstract and arch, far away from the lyric realism or heartfelt polemic we might think of in relation to ‘nature poetry’. Yet Stevens is, to my mind, an under-considered poet of ‘nature’…
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‘Twickenham Garden’: a poem by Andrew McNeillie
Twickenham Garden We say it still, asking each other how many poems do you know by heart? Meaning how many can you recite from memory and something more implying passion not rote, the stronger with time. We say by heart, because we love – as lovers remember each other – from first sight. And…
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‘Life beyond the glass’: Darwin: A Life in Poems by Ruth Padel
Released in 2009 to celebrate Darwin’s bicentenary, Darwin: A Life in Poems is a selection of snapshots of the naturalist’s life, using quotations from his journals, papers, autobiography and letters. Acting as a miniature biography, Padel (Darwin’s great-great-granddaughter) follows the progress of Darwin’s thought; both in the discovery of evolution to the growing tension in…
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Andrew Elliott – Only Disconnect
Julian Stannard Part of the pleasure of reading Mortality Rate is knowing so little about the man who wrote it. Some official data: Andrew Elliott was born in Northern Ireland in 1961 and is now living – according to the most recent reports – in East London. He is the author of two previous collections,…
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Tidings by Ruth Padel
The Voice of Silence I am the oldest angel, the dark side of the brain. Everything untold, suppressed, unseemly or wild is under my protection. I am Charoum, Angel of Silence. I am the seed of fire in a hearth you thought was cold, the stillness when you step into moonlit snow and who you…
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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 my life? Perhaps I was going to die myself one day? Looking into the future was like breaking open a thermometer. I wanted to go…
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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 wouldn’t have hesitated so long. . . . A character for whom I’ve the greatest respect by the way.” — The 1940 Under the Volcano…
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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 broken head and an ear the less: have patience, for adventures will present themselves from which I may make you not only a governor but…
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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 framed in motel doorways, eye heels and legs in dingy lobbies, Oaxacan teens with kids back home, deported Cachanillas saving up to try again. God…
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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 in his fifties, conceived of a man in his own image, a man more ridiculous and more courageous than himself, a man decided, against all…
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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 1613, just three years before he died. In my view, Cervantes may be depicting some of the features of what we would now recognise as…
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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 Quixote in my house, and all my eggs are fried. Called my mother on speed-dial. Quixotic! she screamed. I took in his drooping moustaches, his…
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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, but dream-led searchers, driven by a mad need to excel— boldly pursuing glory in second hand clothes or— like my father, who left school at…
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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 resignations and stiff betrayals and gaudy outrage, the summer of hungry or even famished talk and of stuffed, accelerating newsfeeds, the summer of news of…