Notes Made Long Ago
Sun and moonlight scattered in furrows, only red clay remembers turning blade of plough while iron soon forgets…
Unkindness of Ravens
12 February, 1554 In the silence of winter Lady Jane Grey, brittle as a stalk of fern. Rime…
Journeying Souls
The Verandah Poems, Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, Bloodaxe, 2016, £9.95 (paperback) Selected Poems, Michael Symmons Roberts, Cape 2016, £14…
2.6 million hearts
Wars do not have holidays (employers claim they are self-employed) Their job has to be fulfilled, At any cost,…
They Don’t Make Gods For Non-Believers
Poetry Prize 2016 judges Andrew McMillan and Rebecca Perry on ‘They Don’t Make Gods For Non-Believers’: We were instantly…
Indians of South Africa
Into That Heaven of Freedom, Mohamed Keshavjee, Mawenzi House/TSAR Publishers, 2015, 312pp, £35 (hardback) Indians were in Africa long…
Crazy Days, Dog Days
‘He deserves to be hanged,’ Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society ‘He is a person without…
The Truth About Figs
Poetry Prize 2016 judges Andrew McMillan and Rebecca Perry on ‘The Truth About Figs’: It would be easy to…
Muslim Arrivals, Old and New
The Love of Strangers: What Six Muslim Students Learned in Jane Austen’s London, Nile Green, Princeton University Press, 2015, 416pp,…
A Turning Point and Looking Forward
In 2016 Glyndebourne Festival mounted two new productions, as it usually does: Rossini’s The Barber of Seville and Berlioz’s…
Visions From The Rock
‘Zenga! Zenga!’ The Arab teachers were shouting when I arrived. They were gathered around a screen, reading about…
A Brooklyn Blue Moon
Rumbling over Brooklyn Bridge on the M train, Mia spoke of the poet we were visiting for the…
Botticelli’s Annunciation
Gabriel coming down the mountain, Gabriel with his face like wax. Sound of his wings, what does he bring?…
Breathing the World’s Air
Messages from a Lost World, Stefan Zweig, translated by Will Stone, Pushkin Press, 2016, 224pp, (hardback) The Storyteller: Tales…
Barn Owls in Suffolk
I watch them for a long while, the pair rising and courting the field in daylight, the strange…
Occupation
So, I turned to lens cutting for a living. Corrective work, in a time of short- sightedness. ————–An astigmatic…
On the Politics and Poetics of Darjeeling
No milk or lemon, ——love black tea from Amman, ——India. At sea- level, ragged ——monsoons ghost inland, ——millennium…
A Portrait of the Artist and His Young Country: A Joycean Centenary
A couple of summers ago I was visiting the Cotswolds and in one of those attractive villages, Stow-on-the-Wold…
Hell in Arcadia
Stanley Spencer – Of Angel and Dirt, The Hepworth, Wakefield, until 5 October 2016 ‘To be a great artist one…
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