Features
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The Enchantment of Disenchantment: Wallace Stevens’ ‘Sunday Morning’ & Ecopoetic Potential
Rebecca Tamás Wallace Stevens is not a poet one necessarily associates with environmental thought or eco-poetics; his poetry is perceived as flamboyant, abstract and arch, far away from the […]
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‘Life beyond the glass’: Darwin: A Life in Poems by Ruth Padel
Released in 2009 to celebrate Darwin’s bicentenary, Darwin: A Life in Poems is a selection of snapshots of the naturalist’s life, using quotations from his journals, papers, autobiography and letters. […]
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Andrew Elliott – Only Disconnect
Julian Stannard Part of the pleasure of reading Mortality Rate is knowing so little about the man who wrote it. Some official data: Andrew Elliott was born in Northern Ireland […]
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If you believe that you’ll believe anything – Robinson Jeffers: Poet and Prophet
André Naffis-Sahely Exactly a year prior to Nazi Germany’s surrender, while Allied planes were busy carpet-bombing the old continent in preparation for the D-Day landings, Robinson Jeffers wrote a poem […]
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Back to the crisis of living – time and trauma in Alice Oswald
Lucy Mercer “Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up […] now try to imagine what it was like to wake up […]
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‘The Woman I Met’ – Thomas Hardy
This is an extract from Mark Ford’s ‘Thomas Hardy – Half a Londoner’ which will be published in November 2016 by Harvard University Press Hardy’s longest London poem opens with […]
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Eroding the harmful binaries – Male homosocial bonding in the poetry of Michael Longley
Dave Coates The Helmet When shiny Hector reached out for his son, the wean Squirmed and buried his head between his nurse’s breasts And howled, terrorised by his father, […]
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R.F. Langley: Poetry of a Landscape
Chris Larkin ‘One needs to be a botanist, a physical geographer, and a naturalist, as well as an historian, to be able to feel certain that one has all the […]
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‘…in that the Soul standeth’: Randall Jarrell’s 90 North and John Berryman’s A Prayer for the Self
Toby Martinez de las Rivas The quote in the title of this short article is taken from Of Heaven and Hell by Jakob Boehme, a German shoemaker, mystic and theologian […]
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Marie Antoinette’s mock-peasant hamlet – the charges against Les Murray
John Clegg Les Murray is Teflon to generalisation. Ages ago in Areté, Jeremy Noel-Tod made an overview of his poetry which was acerbic and funny and rigorous and contained only […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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, […]
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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?’ […]
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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, […]
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Inside and Out – The force of nature in poems by Ted Hughes (’Wind’); Seamus Heaney (‘Storm on the Island); Ian Hamilton (‘The Storm’) & Brian Jones (‘The Measure of the Need’).
Paul McLoughlin: Ted Hughes’s poem ‘Wind’ plays (its exaggeration is wilful) on the familiar mismatch between human consciousness and unthinking nature. It is an obsessive interest. In ‘Thrushes’ (Lupercal, 1960) […]