Essays
-
The Haunted Forties: Wrey Gardiner and Poetry Quarterly
Mark Valentine On the trestle table beneath the balconies and chandeliers of the Winter Gardens in the old spa town there was a run of pocket-sized poetry journals. […]
-
Lunch with Frederick Seidel at Cafe Lux
Miguel Cullen He replied to my email saying: “I would prefer to meet you in Buenos Aires,” where I was then staying. “A distant second, New York.” […]
-
Conceptualising the ‘good death’: Mechanisms of memory & mourning in Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’
Alfred, Lord Tennyson by Samuel Laurence, and Sir Edward Burne-Jones oil on canvas, circa 1840 © National Portrait Gallery, London Lily Searstone Tennyson’s elegiac phenomenon of […]
-
‘No right or wrong, only how I got here’: The Early Poetry of Richie McCaffery
Photo image: © Gerry Cambridge Jonathan Davidson In his second pamphlet, Ballast Flint (Small Press Publishing for Cromarty Arts Trust, 2013, with artwork by Hannah Fry), and […]
-
The Lustre in Dullness: Philip Larkin, Sinéad Morrissey and Balance
© National Portrait Gallery, London Nicola Healey In Sinéad Morrissey’s collection On Balance (2017), Morrissey selectively quotes from Larkin’s ‘Born Yesterday’ (1954) as the epigraph to her […]
-
‘The Terrific-Strange’: some student poets of 1965
Mark Valentine In 1958 a group of tutors and students at the University of North Staffordshire, Keele, published a booklet anthology entitled Universities’ Poetry One. It was […]
-
‘A parent’s age’: on the poetry of Rory Waterman
Matthew Stewart ‘Belonging’ and ‘estrangement’ are key terms when getting to grips with Rory Waterman’s poetry. They played an explicitly pivotal role in his early years, but […]
-
On Claudian’s ‘The Old Man of Verona’
Photo by Henrique Ferreira André Naffis-Sahely Situated halfway between Venice and Milan, recently the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, the city of Verona has had its fair […]
-
On Martin Booth’s ‘The Knotting Poems’
The main part of Knotting in 1884. Courtesy of the Bedfordshire County Archives. John Greening It’s unlikely that many readers will remember the original elegant editions of […]
-
Devilled Almonds and Doomed Boys: some avant-garde poetry of 1920
Portrait of Edith Sitwell by Roger Fry, 1915 Mark Valentine The copy of The Wooden Pegasus (1920) by Edith Sitwell that I have is discarded from Sheffield […]
-
‘But freedom is not so exciting’: Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal
Louis MacNeice by Howard Coster, nitrate negative, 1942. NPG x1624. © National Portrait Gallery, London. (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) Jonathan Hitchens ‘Oppression and war’, writes the philosopher Alain […]
-
Remembering Alexander Hutchison (1943-2015)
Richie McCaffery I told him (hoping to impress him) that I wanted to write an article on his poetry. He rolled his eyes and let out a […]
-
The Importance of Subjectivity in Ekphrastic Poems by Auden and Plath
Pieter Brueghel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c.1560 Rachel Carney What happens when you are asked to review a book or a painting? You will undoubtedly […]
-
‘Mandrake and Scammony’: on the poems of Dorothy Molloy
G.E. Stevens No more wavering… Burn through the parochial states of mind. Cut and burn away to the truth. This is Dorothy Molloy’s credo, found in one […]
-
Poetry, Sublimation, and Integrative Writing
Leonardo da Vinci, portrait of himself as an old man, c. 1510 Dr Emily Bilman In Book X of The Republic, Plato considered poets to be too passionate […]
-
Keith Douglas’s ‘Desert Flowers’ and Repetition
The below essay appears in Jamie McKendrick’s new book The Foreign Connection: Writing on Poetry, Art & Translation, forthcoming from Legenda this spring. Jamie McKendrick Living […]
-
Approaches to Jean Follain
Charles Boyle For a period of several weeks or maybe months in the late 1970s I believed that the world around me was on a lease about to […]
-
‘All the Soul’s Endeavour’: where did the poetry of running go?
Hoplitodromos from an Attic black-figure Panathenaic amphora, 323–322 BC (photograph Marie-Lan Nguyen) Ben Wilkinson Fast-forward to August of 2020 and all eyes will be on Tokyo, […]
-
More Memorable than Sweetness: on Li-Young Lee’s poem ‘Always a Rose’
Zakia Carpenter-Hall A poet must perpetually ask the question, explicitly or implicitly, ‘What is it?’ What are the plants, animals, objects, etc. with which we share and […]
-
‘All the Roads that Lead to Eminescu’: on the great Romanian poet
Andreea Iulia Scridon The name Mihai Eminescu isn’t likely to ring an immediate bell for Anglophone readers, but would certainly deserve to, having circled the globe quite […]