Alan Brownjohn most recent volume of poetry, A Night in the Gazebo, was published in 1980.
She gave him sand from the Tyrrhenian Sea, He sent her a present of sand from the shores of Lake Erie.
He dropped some grains of her sand on the edge of the lake, But kept the others, it helped him remember her. She mingled a bit of his sand with the verge of the sea, But retained some grains in a tiny box because They reminded her of him.
And this was happening everywhere in the world, Whole...
The facing mirrors showed two rooms Which rhymed and balanced beautifully, So everything we wore and ate Shone doubly clear for you and me.
In the next image after that Life seemed the same in every way: Green bottles and white tablecloths And cutlery as clean as day;
But in the third, things looked a mite Less brilliant than in the first two ... A sort of mist was falling on The features of...
(for John Betjeman)
Miss Frith was put on processing; that glue And all those labels. Not seven months there, And Mr Mortimer, who always said ‘Miss Frith’ and never ‘Gill’ or ‘Gillian’, Right through the informal Nineteen-Sixties, Rested one day his two hands on her hips As she sat cross-legged on the high stool At the labelling desk. She did not squirm,...
Of the extraordinary life and activities of Shabbetai Tzevi, or Sabbatai Zebi (1626-76), sage, scholar, mystic, apostate and self-proclaimed Messiah, an important figure in the history of...
Donald Davie has proposed that Eliot’s Quartets are in some sense a work of self-parody, with ‘The Dry Salvages’ in structure and style parodistic of the quartets that preceded...
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.