Features
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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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On ‘Tiger Girl’ by Pascale Petit
King’s College London’s popular ‘Poetry And..’ series, chaired by Professor of Poetry Ruth Padel, returns on 30th November at 5pm with ‘Poetry And… The Wild in a Time of Coronavirus’, an online event with prize-winning poet Pascale Petit and award-winning wildlife film-maker Shekar Dattatri. More details, including how to book your free ticket, can…
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On Natalie Diaz’s ‘Postcolonial Love Poem’
Holly Loveday Ultimately, ‘you cannot drink poetry’. Diaz precedes this statement in her self-aware second collection, Postcolonial Love Poem, with the prayer of an Elder Mojave woman given at the site of a pipeline protest. The Elder’s words are not a substitute for water, but their cognizance of the relational necessity between…
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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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‘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,…
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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 compose our lives? Like the unnamed child in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass who asked, ‘What is the grass?’ demonstrating that the simplest question can…
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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 a few times. The man unanimously considered Romania’s greatest poet was first translated into German (by the Romanian Queen of the time, Elizabeth, who wrote…
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Pixel Perfect: Stephen Sexton’s ‘If All the World and Love Were Young’
Chris Larkin When I was seven or eight years old, I was desperate to own either a Sega Mega Drive or a Super Nintendo. Much to my frustration I wasn’t allowed either and had to make-do with holing up at various friends’ houses for hours on end watching them play whilst I…
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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 ‘The Messenger’ starts with a question: Is this man turning angel as he stares At one red flower whose name he does not know,…