Alan Ross is the editor of the London Magazine. The second volume of his autobiography, Coastwise Lights, was published in 1988.
A style suggested by a name, A way of comportment, of playing – In the merging of ‘line’ and ‘glint’ Necessary elusiveness, hint Of mother of pearl, ‘nacreous’, As in the opening, knife-edged, Of two halves of an oyster.
In the music of Satie there is Similar opportunism, echoes And chances taken up, exploited – ‘Striker’ and...
Anticipating our zigzag, as if somehow By information or low
Cunning, she knew our speed And course, she contrived a need
For company. She came at us From all angles, silently, without fuss,
A whine on the asdic, homing in. We readied depth charges, prepared
Our tin fish. She moved away, Out of the sea’s swing and sway,
As if hurt, a rebuffed lover, Whose hide-and-seek was over.
We...
Like lengths of spaghetti or croquet hoops Pipelines stacked on the jetty. Around them, cranes in suspension Claw like dentists’ drills.
Containers are less than their shadows Under sky the colour of putty, And heat, swooning to mirage, Nullifies effort.
Only tankers move in the Gulf, Their wakes unzipping silence, Their crews mute signatories To a war at half-cock.
A Benedictine abbey, the S of a river Feathered by willows. The rural life Placed on a platter, barns, A church spire, cottages.
A farmer drives his cattle Over water-meadows, geese on a playing-field like footballers In 4 – 2 – 4 formation.
An atmosphere of grunt and mud, A liquid greenness.
Mist rises; even now it’s not fanciful To imagine it, laced with cyanide,...
The war is a long way back and young people take little interest in it, or in the feel of what was being said and written at the time. Lawrence, Yeats and Eliot go marching on, attracting...
Derek Walcott is now 50 years old, but there is none of the placidity or mellowing of middle age in The Star-Apple Kingdom. If Naipaul is the great novelist of the colonial experience, Walcott...
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