Homage to Dufu’s Cottage
Translated by Kailan 1. Thirty years ——- I walked from this side to the other side of summer thirty…
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…
Haunting Parallels
The Face of the Buddha, William Empson, edited and introduced by Rupert Arrowsmith, Oxford University Press, 2016, 224 pp,…
The Korean Wave
The Story of Hong Gildong, Anonymous, trans. Minsoo Kang, Penguin Classics, 2016, £9.99 (paperback) Thirty minutes north west…
The Selkie
October is dying quickly now. They bring me soup but I have no appetite. My skin is the colour…
Crickadarn
From the top of the slope, among the desire lines of crows, looking down to the house and its…
Wooden Spoon
Not knives or pans. The genius of a kitchen is the wooden spoon, that archaic thing – a dugout…
Two Daughters
There was once a widowed lord with two comely daughters. Though the loss of his wife brought the lord…
André Malraux: The Writer in Politics
André Malraux [1901-75] is a writer whose stature has fallen perhaps now that his time is long gone. His…
The Upper River at Christmas
It is late December, a mild midwinter’s day ——in the week that stumbles ————between Christmas and New Year when…
Making Haste Slowly
The Intimate World of Josef Sudek, Jeu de Paume, Paris, 7 June – 25 September 2016 and The…
The Dreary Steeples Emerging Once Again
Churchill and Ireland, Paul Bew, Oxford University Press, 2016, £16.99, (hardback) Gladstone famously declared that he had a…
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