Essays
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Ana Blandiana: Poet, Civic Figure, Woman
Photo: Miguel Ruiz Durán Andreea Iulia Scridon Though her name may only be familiar to relatively few readers globally, Romanian poet, essayist, and translator Ana Blandiana (b.1942) is one of her – mostly male – generation’s (the “60s Generation” or less commonly “Neomodernist Generation”)[1] most acclaimed poets, and arguably the most…
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‘Like walking in the rain’: César Vallejo, Carolyn Forché, and the problem of witness
César Vallejo in 1929; the cover of Carolyn Forché’s The Country Between Us (Harper & Row, 1982) Jonathan Hitchens The very first couplet of A Man Passes with a Loaf of Bread on His Shoulder by Peruvian poet César Vallejo, one of the most influential Spanish-language poets of the 20th century,…
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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. The coats that carried a copy when it had just come out would have also contained an identity card and a ration book, probably a…
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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.” I responded: “It wouldn’t be as comfortable to meet in Buenos Aires!”, almost warning him of the heady, summery, accelerated, keyed-up Buenos Aires I was…
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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 In Memoriam situates itself in nineteenth century literature as one of the first and most profound introspections of the ‘deepest needs and perplexities of humanity’[i].…
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‘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 in his most recent, First Hare (Mariscat Press, 2020), Richie McCaffery mentions the idea of showing one’s working-out in an exam. This display of process…
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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 titular poem, ‘On Balance’.[1] She decontextualises his lines, however, to bolster her poem’s feminist drive, distorting Larkin’s poem and misleading the reader from the outset.…
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‘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 selection from submissions sent from undergraduates across the country. There were already several Oxford- and Cambridge-based poetry journals, some long-standing, but this was one…
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‘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 his work has implicitly carried on worrying away at their connotations, interpretations and ramifications ever since. On the one hand, Waterman’s poems have been gaining…
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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 share of detractors over the years, perhaps none quite as blighting as Byron, who spent some time within its walls shortly after quitting England for…
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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 these two collections by Martin Booth (1944-2004). The Knotting Sequence (1977) and The Cnot Dialogues (1981) appeared from The Elizabeth Press in the USA and,…
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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 City Library. There is a typed sticker on the front free endpaper saying she is the daughter of Sir George Reresby Sitwell of (nearby) Renishaw…
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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 Badiou in his essay ‘Poetry and Communism’, ‘are also the revelation of the fact that men must guard the riches of life’. What should we…
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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 half-hearted ‘Whoopee’… We both laughed, although I was a little miffed, and then forgot all about it. This was sometime in 2013, I was doing…
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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 attempt some kind of objective analysis but, ultimately, your review will be subjective, influenced by your own ideas, values and experiences, perhaps even the mood…
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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 of her late notebooks and published at the start of The Poems of Dorothy Molloy (2019), a collected edition assembled by Faber and Molloy’s widower,…
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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 to be involved in political life. He thought that if poets had an active role in politics, they would disrupt the public affairs of the…
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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 in the wide landscape are the flowers – Rosenberg I only repeat what you were saying – The opening of Douglas’s ‘Desert Flowers’ seems…
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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 expire and the streets I walked along were a film set about to be struck. The story was over – no retakes, no director’s cut,…
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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, as the Games of the 32nd Olympiad kick off with fireworks and fanfare. But among the 33 different sports contested and the 339 medal events,…