October Wood
Some niche: rested in planks with its own electric fingers hovering light to become our hands, caressing a mahogany…
Many Realities
Picasso Portraits, National Portrait Gallery, London, 6 October 2016 – 5 February 2017; Museu Picasso, Barcelona, 17 March –…
A Different Kind of Prison & Philomel by Patricia McCarthy
A Different Kind of Prison They were always there at the window when I awoke, nostrils squashed against the pane,…
Turmoil and Stillness
Paul Nash, Tate Britain, London, until 5 March. When, in his 1943 book British Romantic Artists, John Piper included a…
Hemingway and the Gangsters
Hemingway believed that insults could be crushed and arguments settled, gangland fashion, with menacing threats or physical violence. His…
How’s your eldest? asked Andrew the barber.
Daily unwanted meetings On the underground train His black brush of a moustache glistening (Obviously dyed). He’d told me…
Eduardo Paolozzi and the Borrowing of Art
Walking from his Dovehouse Street studio on to the King’s Road to catch the number 19 bus to the…
Talkin’ ’bout my Generation
Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s, from the Verbund Collection at The Photographers’ Gallery, 7 October to 15 January 2017…
The Man who was Marked for Death
The Rack: The Restored Edition, A.E Ellis, Ashgrove Publishing, 2010, £14.99 (paperback) The Rack is a fugitive classic:…
Modest Modernists
Slakki: New & Neglected Poems, Roy Fisher, Bloodaxe, 2016, £9.95 (paperback) Float, Anne Carson, Jonathan Cape 2016, £16.99 (paperback)…
The Dilemma of Edward Thomas
If a death can be good then the poet Edward Thomas probably had one of the best. A casualty of…
Bear Country
Why had he brought her to this place? She lay on the bed reading, listening to the insistent beat…
Stories from the Camino
Communing on the Way On an icy ridge during a storm, a faithless priest cancelled mass. When a devout…
Poem in which my Mother is Monica Galetti
I am a child. In our yellow kitchen before school she whistles breakfast from the London smog and plates…
The Crossing
‘When any of the fugitives said, “Let me go over”, the men of Gilead said to him…”Say Shibboleth,” and…
Oh, Brother
Brother, Matthew Dickman and Michael Dickman, Faber & Faber, 2016, £10.99 (paperback) Syllabus of Errors, Troy Jollimore, Princeton Series…
Rua Do Olival (Street Point 17)
And if she leant lonesome on the sill, they’re talking by their shops, one of them that is filled…
Publishing the ‘New’
‘It is very good of you to throw a pound into our jaws, when you know nothing of what…
A Literary Landscape
Winter Migrants, Tom Pickard, Carcanet, 2016, 74pp, £9.99 (paperback) Quennets, Philip Terry, Carcanet, 2016, 135pp, £12.99 (paperback) Tom…
I was walking
that bit more quickly then less purposefully down a sunlit road that ran from traffic-lights at the town’s or…
An Old Photograph, dated 1945
My sister has found an old photograph Of me holding a bucket and spade, On a beach fringed by…
Alexander Herzen in London
Decembrist blood! We are taxed for their visions. The earth turns, returns, through cycles of declamation – Geoffrey Hill, ‘Scenes…
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