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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 clear waters of these streams are my mirrors; and to the trees and waters I reveal my beauty.” You chose this, this loneliness and green…
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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 life, that both thou and thy seed may live. (Deuteronomy 30:19) Her name a scar on every tree: “Marcela,” “Marcela” again, hard cut to the…
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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 entitled ‘Invasion’: “Europe has run its course,” he began, “and whether to fall by its own sickness or ours is not/Extremely important […] it was…
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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 having never gone to sleep.” — Alan Watts Alan Watts’ invocation to wake up ‘without sleep’ perhaps encapsulates the transition the extraordinary Alice Oswald has…
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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 an archetypal urban crowd scene – ‘A stranger, I threaded sunken-hearted / A lamp-lit crowd; / And anon there passed me a soul departed, /…
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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, by flashing bronze And the nightmarish nodding of the horse-hair crest. His daddy laughed, his mammy laughed, and his daddy Took off the helmet and…
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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 facts right before allowing the imagination to play over the small details of a scene. For unless the facts are right there is no pleasure…
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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 who lived in the latter part of the sixteenth and first part of the seventeenth centuries. Here is the extract in which it appears: …
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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 one wildly unfair sentence: after quoting a complaint of Murray’s against the expectations of an ‘enforced [literary] style’: In these times of stylistic poly-tolerance,…
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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 are three poems from the anthology, which launches at King’s on 5 May 2016 with readings from contributors including Frances Leviston, Paul Batchelor and Ruth…
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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 on a conversation the two of us had, at a POETRY AND event, in King’s College Chapel, on St Patrick’s Day 2016. Thaddeus O’Sullivan is…
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‘I’m not sitting next to you’: On Poetry by Glyn Maxwell
Ellen Cranitch I once had to interview Glyn Maxwell. I’d just read this in his book On Poetry: ‘I think a poem you read has to meet the same criteria as a person you meet: did it mean anything to you, matter to you, affect you? If it didn’t do those things you won’t remember…
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‘I dared speak my mind’: War Poetry, or the struggle to connect
James Nixon There is something very modern about Alun Lewis’s poem ‘All day it has rained …’ It is a poem that bares the isolation and boredom of the soldier’s life for readers in as poignant and stark a manner as the feature film Jarhead did for noughties cinemagoers. Lewis himself was for a time…
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Ahren Warner – Three Poems – PDF download
Ahren Warner Three Poems
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Iain McGilchrist – The Master and his Emissary
Iain McGilchrist’s book The Master and his Emissary argues that the division of the brain into two hemispheres is essential to human existence, making possible incompatible versions of the world, with quite different priorities and values. Most scientists long ago abandoned the attempt to understand why nature has so carefully segregated the hemispheres, or how to…
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The Edge of Thought: On Michael Symmons Roberts
Aviva Dautch Michael Symmons Roberts’s first collection, published in 1993, is Soft Keys and its title poem could be read as an ars poetica not just for this book but for his entire oeuvre. His punning wordplay encompasses islands in Florida, piano music, Biblical keys to ‘heaven and hell’, metaphysical keys that ‘open up the…
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Black Lagoon – Abigail Parry
Black Lagoon ‘Even I, Lucas, have heard the legend of a man-fish.’ But what did they tell you, Lucas? Out of the murk and mystery – was I all pleats and webbing, spats and pipes, my wet heart thrashing for lovely Julia Adams? I live here all alone. The water looks like screens look…
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Seersucker – Will Burns
Seersucker The seersucker suit turns down a drink. I’ve seen you drinking wine before though, someone says. Chicken and onions, talk of his Soho… receding, recession. It’s a plain dinner we receive, but good all the same.
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Kindness I Suppose – Will Burns
Kindness I Suppose These were the days pitched from morning straight into night, the days of vodka 7s in the shower, of you bringing the first good guitar any of us owned over and playing all day long— those broken songs it was, and lives too hard for us to have fully understood. A…
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Translation – Sean O’Brien
Translation No, we were never introduced, Yet she and I were long acquainted. I know all her ways and all The tunes this pale usurper sings To those she has seduced Beneath the blanching mays And left, like her, demented. So eminently natural That even nature must defer Before her instinct to conserve, In…