Homage to Dufu’s Cottage
Translated by Kailan 1. Thirty years ——- I walked from this side to the other side of summer thirty…
A Gamble with People and Money
Summer Opera, 2017 (Glyndebourne Festival, The Grange Festival, Grange Park Festival at West Horsley, Garsington Opera at Wormsley, Opera…
The Ribbleway by John Gimlette
Wild horses wouldn’t get me to central Lancashire for a bank holiday–or so I thought. In fact, all it took…
Walking Through London with Sherlock Holmes
If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the…
The Sandman by Holly Howitt
Quiet: the poet is taking the stage. (Well, it’s not a stage, but a circle of bookshop carpet: Shush, we…
Emotions Run Cool
First Love, Gwendoline Riley, Granta, February 2017, £12.99, 176 pp. (hardcover) ‘How many boyfriends are treated like the father…
White Building
For Paul and Maya Between still life and low relief, the squared off, plain, distempered walls of Japanese size,…
Encountering the Unwelcome
Travelling back from Belgium this summer I was inadvertently caught up in the rush of returning holidaymakers, all making for…
The Hardship of the Voyage
Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Ocean Vuong, Jonathan Cape, April 2017, £9.99, 96 pp. (paperback) Kumukanda, Kayo Chingonyi, Chatto…
Pagan Pleasures and Youthful Subjects
On Pagham Beach, Photographs and Collages from the 1930s, Austin/Desmond Fine Art, London, 25 October – 8 December 2017…
Charles Dibdin – Christmas Gambols
Charles Dibdin (1745-1814) has a strong claim to be Britain’s first pop star. He became famous as a performer in…
Posthuman Poetics
Fast, Jorie Graham, Carcanet, June 2017, pp. 96, £12.99 (Paperback) ‘I was very lucky. The end of the world…
The London Road
The summer and autumn of 1651 was make-or-break time for the future Charles II. These were two seasons when his…
Tree Surgeons on the Aberdeen Line
You woke one night to railway tree surgeons giving the trees by the track their yearly trim with their hybrid…
‘Each takes a turn, as one does, south of Market’
Selected Poems, Thom Gunn, Faber and Faber, July 2017, pp.336, £18.99 (hardcover) Proprietary, Randall Mann, Persea, July 2017, pp.80, £12.99…
The Leprechaun by Steven O’Brien
And so it all began with my grandad and the Leprechaun. He was a great man for singing and stories. His…
Crossness Pumping Station
In the summer of 1858, after an exceptional spell of hot weather, with temperatures averaging the mid-30s Celsius (mid-90s Fahrenheit)…
Excitement, Heart in Mouth, to Listen: 50 Years of Poetry International
Amongst the audience for the first Poetry International gathering, which took place in July 1967, was London writer Iain Sinclair.…
Night Train to Athens
He was nineteen and she was twenty and they’d ‘met’ ten minutes earlier, seated opposite each other on the Patras-Athens…
Scottish music in 1983
This is Memorial Device, David Keenan, Faber and Faber, February 2017, pp.304, £14.99 (paperback) News of the death, back in…
The Pity of It
Dad boasted he’d ‘read all of Shakespeare’s plays’. He asked Mum if she’d read any of Shakespeare’s plays, but she…
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