Essays
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‘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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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‘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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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‘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, […]
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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 […]
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‘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 […]
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Thom Gunn’s carnival: a radical inside job
Thom Gunn, 1986. Photograph by LaVerne Harrell Clark. Courtesy of The University of Arizona Poetry Center. Copyright Arizona Board of Regents Andre Bagoo Thom Gunn’s poem […]
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‘Time a river we swim in freestyle’: Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poetry & prose
Katie Da Cunha Lewin Throughout Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Poetry as Insurgent Art, his manifesto on poetry written in aphorisms published in 2007, he returns to central questions about […]
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Essential fragments: on the poetry of David Harsent
Below is an essay by Lavinia Singer from A Working Model of the Fall from Grace: Essays & Poems for David Harsent, recently published by Offord Road Books in […]
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Try To Be Better: an engagement with the creative practice of W. S. Graham
This week sees the launch of Try To Be Better, a multi-disciplinary engagement with the idiosyncratic creative practice of the late poet W. S. Graham, co-edited by Sam Buchan-Watts […]
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Marratide: William Martin’s Chorography of County Durham
‘Cuthbert’s brief dream / And high resting place / Here before Durham’ (s.16): Warden Law by William Martin, part of ‘Wiramutha Helix’ Jake Morris-Campbell Next year […]
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‘The Poet As Witness’: CD Wright & The Art of Curating the Past
Paul Stephenson How do we look at a difficult past? Carolyn Forché has put forward the notion of ‘poetry of witness’ for a category of poems that ‘bear […]
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Making the Cut: John Greening on editing poems
John Greening I often quote Basil Bunting’s advice to young poets, that you should ‘cut out every word you dare’. Bunting certainly practised what he preached in his […]
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Private Morgan: World War Two & Edwin Morgan’s ‘The New Divan’
© Jessie Ann Matthew, National Galleries Scotland Richie McCaffery While many of Edwin Morgan’s (1920-2010) Scottish near contemporaries in poetry, such as Hamish Henderson and Sorley MacLean, wrote […]
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The Anatomy of Movement: On Georg Trakl’s Poetry
Georg Trakl at Venice lido, 1913 Will Stone I In this essay I have attempted to illuminate what for want of a better phrase one might […]
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‘St Ives Allure’: WS Graham among the artists
Monday 19th November is the late poet WS Graham’s 100th birthday. Below are extracts from David Whittaker’s new book St Ives Allure, a generously-illustrated story of the painters, sculptors […]