V. A Homecoming

My father still reads the dictionary every day. He says your life depends on your power to master words.

Arthur Scargill, Sunday Times, 10 January 1982

Next millennium you’ll have to...

In memoriam Emmanuel Stratas, born Crete 1903, died Toronto 1987

After I’ve lit the fire and looked outside and found us snowbound and the roads all blocked, anxious to prove my...

We may be that generation that sees Armageddon.Ronald Reagan, 1980

My brother, my bright twin, Prochorus, I think his bright future’s been wrecked. When we’ve both got our lives...

I’ve noticed Donny’s bridal gownshop’s lights are only on, in winter, Saturday nights. Though window shopping for white wedding gear ’s not done this coldest, darkest time...

Why is it, Lord, although I’m right I find it hard to sleep at night? I often wake up in a sweat they’ve not found WMDs yet! The thought that preys most on my mind, is maybe the only...

This ladder creaks. Take that ring off I bought for you in Gdansk, first token of my growing love, with the 40-million-year-old fly embalmed in its amber, resin oozed before Man, not to bruise...

1.

So much black ink expended and still speared!

From here, where I’ve been happiest, and my most down, I can see the last place you’d been happy in. Down from Apollo’s wrecked...

I’ve always been aware one day I’ll die but I feel my real mortality begin when this year, for the first time, I’ve filled in the ‘in case of emergency please notify:’

Chersonesos, Crimea. Archaeologists reassemble miscellaneous pebbles to restore Aphrodite found on the Black Sea the year of my birth, 1937, by Kiev’s Prof. Belov. An Aphrodite of pebbles...

Dionysius of Halicarnassus once likened Aeschylus’ poetry to this Cyclopean wall beneath Apollo’s temple before us, this wall I always gaze on whenever in Delphi, blocks shaped like...

There are grounds for thinking Tony Harrison the first genuine working-class poet England has produced this century. Of course, poets from D.H. Lawrence to Craig Raine can boast a proletarian...

A year or two ago, Geoffrey Hartman urged literary critics to declare their independence. They should not regard criticism as an activity secondary to the literature it addressed, but as an art...

The first literary appearance of the mythical figure of Prometheus (whose name means ‘foresight’) is in the writings of Hesiod. Hesiod’s Titan is something of a trickster, of...

One of the great pleasures of reading Tony Harrison is the sense of quick passage between worlds, the sudden switch from the local to the international and back. At one moment he immerses us in a...

If​ his English teacher hadn’t been so snootily discouraging, it’s unlikely that Tony Harrison would have gone on to write as much as he has: by my calculation, 13 plays, 11 films...