The Transfiguration
There are no adjectives to describe the whiteness of the light emanating from Christ as he levitates above the mountaintop:…
Song of Barbed Wire
I’ve heard the red deer of Eastern Europe climb with their fawns up rocky hills to graze on poor…
The Sanctification of the Audience
Festival O/Modernt, Stockholm, 13-17 June, 2014 Prometheus is the first face of humanism. ‘All arts that mortals have come from…
The State of the Art
Six Bad Poets, Christopher Reid, Faber and Faber, 2013, 88pp, £12.99 (hardback) Oscar and I, Confessions of a Minor Poet,…
Bluebells and Lavender
‘It smells like a public convenience in there,’ said Daniel. Sheila was standing in the hallway still wearing her…
Folk Art Made By Real Folk?
British Folk Art Tate Britain 10 June 2014 – 31 August 2014 Summer Exhibition Royal Academy of Arts 9 June…
Decembrist Without December
‘His forehead was bisected by a lightning bolt scar.’ ‘Mongo’ Stolypin describing Lermontov to Leo Tolstoy, years later. I This…
Three Poems
Two New England Poets Now in my seventies, I spent most of my twenties in New England. I made friends…
Power and Greed and Corruptible Seed
Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012, Geoffrey Hill, edited by Kenneth Haynes, Oxford, 2013, 992pp, £35 (hardback) Geoffrey Hill famously divides opinion…
The Wretched Web
A web of sexual entanglements invisible when soaked in daylight. Silver lace glistening in the moonlight, a life of…
My London
This is the seventh in our series in which writers say what London has meant to them. William is…
Bookending Dylan Thomas
On the centenary of Dylan Thomas’s birth, Karwowski examines Thomas’s ‘Altarwise by owl-light’
Palazzo Vecchio
Watch where compass quivers, pendulum swings as time in its magnificence betrays all things with proof stands aside in shadow,…
The Hanoverian Succession
The Hanoverians on Britain’s Throne 1714-1837 Lower Saxony State Museum and Herrenhausen Palace Museum One Coach and Two Kingdome: Hanover…
‘Beirt daoine uasal’: Two Noble Persons The Irelands of J. M. Synge and Heinrich Böll
The London premiere of Robert J. Flaherty’s film, Man of Aran, was held on the 25th of April, 1934.…
Three Sonnets
These three sonnets are taken from ‘Sketches from the Sierra de Tejeda’ (in Andalusia), a sequence of forty-one sonnets John…
Bilbao’s Other Serras
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; Bilbao Fine Arts Museum Since its completion in 1997 the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, designed by Frank…
Old Men in Jeans
‘This should be our starting place,’ I reckon, said Bill to his old friend Jack. ‘Good choice, looks like.’…
The Colour of Money
Sheaved millions wallow in the vaults, as unreal as the half-brained dreams of humpback whales, in bands of silver, dappled…
Killers of The King by Charles Spencer
Charles Spencer has written an essay on the execution of Charles I
By the Rim of an Ancient Well
(after Georg Trakl) The meaning of water is dark; the night has a broken brow. Footsteps fall in the ancient…
Sebastian Barker: ‘A Glass That’s Rubbed Enough To Sing’
I saw too little of Sebastian Barker. Our paths crossed every so often – at a lecture, a poetry reading…
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