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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…
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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…