The Creative Moment Part One
Keats and Rimbaud We are perennially fascinated by how poets transcend their early work, fulfill their potential and create…
Field-Weary
At root level Grass sucks the sun green Through its stem The ram-Bull rises Blown into shape Out of…
Mortality and Dream … and a Love of Good Books
I sometimes wonder what book I would read if I knew it were to be my last. Candide would…
The Allure of the Pearl
Read Lana’s review of the Pearl exhibition currently on at the V&A
After the Dance
For Margaret McMahon He will come when the grasses have given up their lights and hogweeds darken against the…
G. M. Hopkins, Inscape and Sprung Rhythm
During his lifetime the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) had a readership of only a handful of his…
Music for the Newer Rite
A review of Thomas Hewitt Jones’s recording ‘Incarnation: Music for Christmas’
Sir Walter – the History Man
Sir Walter Scott’s work is little read nowadays, yet everywhere there are reminders of his former status. In the…
Winter and Summer
I Obeying some fond horrible summons, as of the dead springing under the ice, I pour a kettleful each…
A Generous Correspondent
Remembering Iris Murdoch: Letters and Interviews, Jeffrey Meyers, Palgrave Macmillan 2013, 124pp, £30 (hardback) Jeffrey Meyers met Iris Murdoch…
Professor Heger’s Daughter
The first came in July when the canopy of leaves cooled the garden in the afternoon, she laid the…
My London
Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, Anne Chisholm shares with us what London means to her
The Ironical Gaiety of Isaiah Berlin
Building: Letters 1960-1975, by Isaiah Berlin, Edited by Henry Hardy and Mark Pottle, Chatto and Windus, 704pp, £40, (hardback)…
More Ladbroke Square Poems
I That old tree on the south side of the square is down. In the undergrowth between the path and…
The Rage of Modernism: Self in the Vortex
Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle. Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. But…
A Conventional Rebel
The Pleasure Ground: Poems 1952-2012, Richard Murphy, Bloodaxe Books, 288pp, £12 (paperback) The Pleasure Ground: Poems 1952-2012 is a…
Rabbit Holes
Rabbit-holes that would trip you up In one faltered outpour of breath Wait for me in the woods. Kits…
One Shrug in Particular
Sensible and slightly hapless to the young foreigner’s eye, the teacher’s court shoes had obviously been purchased after much…
Albert Camus and the Pang of Subjectivity
Between the idea And the reality Between the notion And the act Falls the shadow T. S. Eliot, The…
Hellenistic Journey
A Monastery of Light, Sebastian Barker, The Bow-Wow shop, 62pp, £14.99 (hardback) Sebastian Barker is the son of the English…
The Trouble with Poetry
Collected Poems, Ian Hamilton, edited by Alan Jenkins, Faber and Faber, 160pp, £14.99 (paperback) The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry,…
Coetzee in his Castle
The Childhood of Jesus, J. M. Coetzee, Harvill Secker, 288pp, £12.99 (hardback) In the months leading up to the release…
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