Postgraduate
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‘Rife with schools of shadow’: on the poetry of James Peake
Lily Searstone Through fragmented visions and memories, James Peake’s second collection, The Star in the Branches (Two Rivers, 2022), seamlessly distils the past, the starkness of contemporary life, and premonitions of the future, to create an introspective – yet also transportive – portrayal of the fractured times we find ourselves living…
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The voyage to ‘eternal silence’: Male heroism and the evasion of death in Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’
Ulixes mosaic at the Bardo Museum in Tunis, Tunisia. 2nd century AD. Lily Searstone Tennyson’s nuanced reworking of Homeric epic in his Ulysses (1842) is monumental in its binding of ancient and modernist narratives. The layered intertextuality and multiplicity of Ulysses as a symbol of masculine heroism in decline works to express…
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Two poems by Caroline Banerjee
Photo by Matt Brown on Unsplash Orpheus’s Awakening That moment Orpheus looked back, He knew what he had lost: Lemon light drifting Through French blinds, Heat rising in an October cool, The feeling of knowing you are exactly Where you are meant to be. Stumbling, stuttering, Eurydice is before…
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Why do we care: Romalyn Ante’s ‘Antiemetic for Homesickness’
Holly Loveday Romalyn Ante’s debut collection Antiemetic for Homesickness (Chatto & Windus, 2020) – flitting between clinical-white, squeaky hospital wards and the tropical abundance of the Philippines – allows us to experience what is it to be pulled in two directions. I write against a backdrop of Covid-19 forcing an entire world…
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Two poems by Nell Prince
The River The river cannot settle where to go. It may go under or it may begin again, it may rise up and change its forward flow. The river can’t decide. It doesn’t know. The sky won’t tell us anything but rain. The sky is just reflection of below. So what…
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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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Two poems by Nick Makoha
Codex 3 We were thirty. Another day was ending as a mosquito landed at the edge of my hand. You ordered two beers, to pour ourselves into, at the airport bar. Each sip a minute of absence as a bird trapped in the atrium flew in the direction of our gate. Flight…
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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…