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Poussin’s ‘Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake’ – Ranjit Hoskote
Poussin’s ‘Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake’ Lying there. Just knotted and crushed by speckled coils. A whistling snap and bite. I could have sworn I saw him smile. But wrong, that. That was only his last try, a grabbed breath short of shining back to a table’s warmth, the glow of…
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Black Water – Eduardo C Corral
Black Water I spit his name out & four wolves appear. Black, eyes silvery, ears skinned & tense. They thrash their tails twice then rush toward me. A dark pouring. I stagger back, raise my arms. I’d watch him lather his throat. Once a week, for a year. How the oval mirror held him.…
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Fresco – Fiona Sampson
Fresco Those long-dead painters must have thought it was impossible to remake the world however tender the flowers and birds they left lightly suspended in tempera whose modest visible brushstrokes are like a hand put out to touch the other world they inhabit now or this painted world that they re-enter coming with us…
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Late – Fiona Sampson
Late Not much use saying then I was busy I was asked as if to suggest there were orders I only followed useless afterwards when you find it was your life you murdered your own life that mobile muscled thing so sweet to hold but always slipping out of your arms grasping and letting…
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‘my ties with yous are not unique’: Juliana Spahr’s Lyric in a Global Age
Isabel Galleymore Given that Juliana Spahr’s poetry seeks to establish connection between the individual and the world, there is a certain irony in the way her work has received little attention outside of the United States. Born in Ohio in 1969, Spahr has written eight collections of poetry and is often compared with – and…
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The Historical paw-print: thoughts on Ariana Reines’s The Cow
Daisy Lafarge [Spoiler alert: discusses later scenes of the 1976 adaptation of Stephen King’s novel Carrie] “I’m gonna bash your little head in, and you don’t have to worry about the bomb no more!” This is the character of Billy Nolan, talking to the pig whose blood will be used to prank the…
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Children sing for Alex Chilton – thoughts on Michael Robbins
Hugh Foley To understand where Michael Robbins is coming from (aside from America) it might help to take a detour to Buzzfeed. There you can find a series of interviews with atheists asking them how they ‘found purpose in a meaningless universe’. Most of the interviewees (none of whom were Robbins, who is not an…
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Sushrut Jadhav: Connecting, Belonging and a Clean New Music
Ruth Padel In The Art of Writing, written in the 3rd century AD, the Chinese poet Lu Ji wrote about strategies for finding words which seem “to belong with each other”. In 1942, in a key passage of Little Gidding reflecting his experience as air-raid warden in the London blitz, T.S. Eliot embellishes and embodies…
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Jerry Brotton – A History of the World in Twelve Maps
Jerry Brotton’s A History of the World In Twelve Maps was reviewed by Tom Holland for The Guardian. Holland noted that Brotton’s “idea of tracing within maps the patterns of human thought and civilisation is a wonderful one” Some of the maps discussed include: Aligihiero Boetti, Mappa, 1970s Ptolemy, world map, 14th century Hereford…
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Make us Dance or Christen us – an introduction to Kei Miller
Joey Connolly The first poem in Kei Miller’s first Carcanet book, There Is an Anger that Moves, opens like this: In this country you have an accent; in the pub, a woman mocks it. You want to ignore her but wonder how many hearts is she being bold for? What thematics are we being given…
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A Noble Scruff – an introduction to Daljit Nagra
Richard Scott: It’s been over ten years since Daljit Nagra wrote his poem Look We Have Coming to Dover and it seems more urgent now than ever. In 2004, Nagra’s fantastical invasion of immigrants all ‘stowed in the sea’ but hoping to get ‘blair’d in the cash’ spoke to the slow migration of thousands of…
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Alejandra Pizarnik, remembering
Alberto Manguel: I met Alejandra Pizarnik in Buenos Aires, in 1967, five years before her death. I had asked her to contribute to an anthology of texts that purported to continue an interrupted story begun in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale: “There was a man dwelt by a churchyard.” She agreed and wrote a haunting piece…
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The Hand of Art – Czesław Miłosz: Form, Communication and Reality
Ruth Padel: It was a great pleasure, this May, to go to the 4th Miłosz Festival, in honour of one of the twentieth century’s greatest and most iconic poets, in Kraków, the city to which Czesław Miłosz returned at the end of his life, and an enormous honour to give this lecture there, the very…
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No Pop, Still Fizzy – Michael Hofmann: Corona, Corona
This is a review by Mick Imlah of Michael Hofmann’s collection Corona, Corona, first published in the TLS in 1993 and extracted here from Mick Imlah: Selected Prose, ed. André Naffis-Sahely and Robert Selby, published by Peter Lang in 2015. The death of the German writer Gert Hofmann this summer may seem to…
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Reading as a Writer: Geography III as Transitional Object
Dominic McLoughlin: When I was in my twenties I took a job as a bookseller at Books & Co on Madison Avenue at 74th Street, an independent bookstore in Manhattan, just next door to the Whitney Museum. It was not well paid but one of the perks was a licence to choose volumes to take…
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Caught in the Resin – an introduction to Sarah Howe
Victoria Kennefick: The experience of reading Sarah Howe’s début poetry collection, Loop of Jade, is akin to that of the speaker in ‘Mother’s Jewellery Box,’ the first poem in the book, cracking open ‘the twin lids’ of the ‘black lacquer box’ to discover a cornucopia of minute and significant treasures. From the offset, Howe’s gift…
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‘In every hundred and wapentake’ – an introduction to James Brookes
Robert Selby ‘The loss of imperial power,’ said Seamus Heaney in a Berkeley lecture of 1976, ‘the failure of economic nerve, the diminished influence of Britain inside Europe, all this has [begun to force English poets] to explore not just the matter of England, but what is the matter with England.’ Heaney was…
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A definite thread spun: temporal tantalisation in Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red
Ralf Webb: In the faculty lounge of the University of Buenos Aires, Geryon— the protagonist of Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red— asks a yellow-bearded professor: ‘What is time made of?’ The professor replies, ‘Time isn’t made of anything. It is an abstraction./Just a meaning that we/impose upon motion’. The question of time, and his relationship…
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‘It is a wild fucking Kingdom’ – Toby Martinez de las Rivas’s Terror
Rose McLaren: Which is more complicated, life or poetry? Whatever the case, they are seldom complicated in the same way. Yet Toby Martinez de las Rivas has that rare thing, an ability to fuse verbal and lived experience in complex detail. This offers a sort of succour – if things can’t be solved, they can…
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Christel Wiinblad: My little brother – a morning in heaven, at least in green
Malene Engelund: It troubles me that things must no longer mean anything. Must no longer be real, and that we can no longer be accessible to one another […] It’s strange how people can find the fragility I expose in myself and my little brother shocking. […] I wanted to examine this as accurately as…