A Bronx Childhood
I return every four or five years to my old neighbourhood and home borough, the Bronx, out of a…
Love and Friendship
Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995 Edited by Avril Horner and Anne Rowe, Chatto and Windus, 2015,…
My London
I have lived all over the world, from Kenya and New York to Florence and the Cotswolds, with the…
An Exploding Goldmine
From Bow to Biennale: Artists of the East London Group, David Buckman, Francis Boutle Publishers, 2012, 382pp, £30 (paperback)…
Essay | Cliché as ‘Responsible speech’: Geoffrey Hill by Christopher Ricks
Geoffrey Hill, who died on 20th June 2016, was a great poet, a major poet. To celebrate him, we have pulled from…
Through the Witch Window
Soon I’ll be lucent, at your witch window, hand raised ready to knock. There are no lies hidden between…
Chevening
This is the real England, I say, so what do you think? It’s a place of trees; of apple,…
Here Because We’re Here (again)
Poetry of the Second World War: An International Anthology, edited and introduced by Desmond Graham, Vintage, 2011, 320pp., £12.99…
Sibelius
It’s January. A swan’s wing overhead reminds you of his fifth but also of his death, that skein breaking…
Pwyll and Rhiannon, from The Mabinogi
It’s little more than a bump in the land, a footnote in the catalogue of hills, crags and ridges,…
The Shopping Trolley
The kids fought over pushing it to the top of the hill, to their ‘launch pad’ above the shopping…
An Everyday Story of Hydrography
‘No one’s interested so I gave it to Pete the Gardener’. As my grandmother aged, Pete the gardener gained…
Low Altitude
Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure. ————————————— — Rumi I fly at a delicately-low…
Second Sight
He’s come to see me off. Limps up the platform after me. I lose sight of him while I…
Kintsukuroi
—The cracked bowl that I mean to repair everyday keeps getting neglected by my secret awe for bone china…
The Real Thing
Derek Hill: A Centenary Exhibition, The Redfern Gallery, London, 9 – 16 May 2016 In 1961 Bryan Robertson, the innovative…
The Whales
Any day now, they will rise again through their cauldron of green bubbles – the gulls lifting off and…
From a Hotel Lobby
The Hotel Years, Joseph Roth, translated by Michael Hofmann, Granta, 2016, 288pp, £16.99 (hardback) For Joseph Roth, the…
Lieutenant Schmidt’s Ideal Lady
The Lady at the Kiev Racecourse A new century not long begun: a young man, unhappily married and between…
On St Cecilia’s Day
Stop listening to that music and hear instead what the dead are saying who were buried on this day…
The Death of the Literary Patron
During a recent drive-by of the Saatchi Gallery, in Duke of York Square, I found myself pondering the good…
Hell is Other Irish People
The Dirty Dust, Mártín Ó’Cadhain, translated by Alan Titley, Yale University Press, 2015, 328pp., £16.99 (hardcover) ‘Unless the clay…
The Abstract and the Concrete
The operas of Pietro Mascagni have enjoyed a revival in recent years at the festivals of Britain and Ireland.…
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