Imitations
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Two poems by Will Stone after Georg Trakl
De Profundis There is a pine forest on which an acid rain falls. There is a tree of limbs that stands lonely here. There is a nuclear wind that haunts abandoned new homes – How criminal this century. Past the darkening suburb the dazed runaway still begs from a sleeping bag.…
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Conrad at 160: three poems by Steven J Fowler
The year 2017 has been declared ‘The Year of Joseph Conrad’ by the Polish Government to celebrate Conrad’s 160th birthday. To mark this, a poetic celebration of Conrad will take place at the National Poetry Library, Royal Festival Hall, on the evening of Wednesday 1 November. The event is free but booking is required. The…
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Conrad at 160: ‘Notes Towards a Poem’ by Agnieszka Studzinska
The year 2017 has been declared ‘The Year of Joseph Conrad’ by the Polish Government to celebrate Conrad’s 160th birthday. To mark this, a poetic celebration of Conrad will take place at the National Poetry Library, Royal Festival Hall, on the evening of Wednesday 1 November. The event is free but booking is required. The…
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Conrad at 160: ‘How I found Dr Livingstone’, a poem by Robert Hampson
The year 2017 has been declared ‘The Year of Joseph Conrad’ by the Polish Government to celebrate Conrad’s 160th birthday. To mark this, a poetic celebration of Conrad will take place at the National Poetry Library, Royal Festival Hall, on the evening of Wednesday 1 November. The event is free but booking is required. The…
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Don Quixote Ventures Forth – Hugo Williams
Don Quixote Ventures Forth Once long ago at night I was excited by rain lighting the street for murder. Was it too late, I wondered, to do something stupid with my life? Perhaps I was going to die myself one day? Looking into the future was like breaking open a thermometer. I wanted to go…
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Three Poems by Karen Solie
Lowry at The Sylvia “… he knew how to act, and I how to write: we were destined for each other.” — Don Quixote de La Mancha “Perhaps Don Quixote wouldn’t have hesitated so long. . . . A character for whom I’ve the greatest respect by the way.” — The 1940 Under the Volcano…
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Two Poems by Jamie McKendrick
Something More “Thou must take notice, brother Sancho, that this adventure and those like it are not adventures of islands, but of cross-roads, in which nothing is got except a broken head and an ear the less: have patience, for adventures will present themselves from which I may make you not only a governor but…
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The Curious Painter – David Shook
The Curious Painter In Mexicali’s evening heat your boards thirst for gesso, acrylics dry in seconds, and no amount of Tramadol will dull the wicked sun. You find your models framed in motel doorways, eye heels and legs in dingy lobbies, Oaxacan teens with kids back home, deported Cachanillas saving up to try again. God…
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Don Quixote and the Arabs – Alberto Manguel
Alberto Manguel In a certain Spanish prison cell, in a town whose name we cannot remember, in Castro del Rio perhaps, or in Seville, a tired scholar and soldier, almost in his fifties, conceived of a man in his own image, a man more ridiculous and more courageous than himself, a man decided, against all…
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Extract from Miguel de Cervantes’ novella, El licenciado vidriera (Dr Glasscase) – Translated from the Spanish by Adam Feinstein
Translator’s note: Miguel de Cervantes’ peculiar tale of the man who believes he is made of glass is one of my favourite of his Novelas Ejemplares (Exemplary Novels), published in 1613, just three years before he died. In my view, Cervantes may be depicting some of the features of what we would now recognise as…
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Quixote For Real – Deryn Rees Jones
Quixote For Real after Allen Ginsberg Came home, found Quixote in my living room. It’s happened, I said to myself in the silence. The light seemed subtly altered. I have Quixote in my house, and all my eggs are fried. Called my mother on speed-dial. Quixotic! she screamed. I took in his drooping moustaches, his…
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Loving Don Quixote – Elaine Feinstein
Loving Don Quixote Even now I love you, gentle Knight of the Rueful Countenance, because I have always fallen most deeply in love with vulnerable men — —not losers exactly, but dream-led searchers, driven by a mad need to excel— boldly pursuing glory in second hand clothes or— like my father, who left school at…
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You Do Not Have To Be Mad – Patrick Mackie
You Do Not Have To Be Mad So this is where you are, right at the heart of the wan, crushed summer of the referendum and of blame, of sleek resignations and stiff betrayals and gaudy outrage, the summer of hungry or even famished talk and of stuffed, accelerating newsfeeds, the summer of news of…
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Marcela Sonnets by Fiona Benson
Marcela Sonnets after Don Quixote i “I was born free, and to live free I chose the solitude of the countryside. The trees of these mountains are my company, the clear waters of these streams are my mirrors; and to the trees and waters I reveal my beauty.” You chose this, this loneliness and green…
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Grisóstomo’s Suicide – Nicola Nathan
Grisóstomo’s Suicide To David Harsent I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live. (Deuteronomy 30:19) Her name a scar on every tree: “Marcela,” “Marcela” again, hard cut to the…