David Harsent’s pamphlet The Wound: Versions of C.P. Cavafy is out now.
It was pride and nothing else made me lift my head from the spit and sawdust of The Prospect of Oblivion, on my cheek a dark naevus that married
a knobby knot in the planking. How long I’d been down and out was anybody’s guess; I’d guess an hour or more by the state of my suit, a foul rag-bag,
by the state of my hair, a patty-cake, of my own ripe keck, unless it was the keck...
The trick was to keep things normal, or so I thought, and what better than this – the sea on one hand, a hillside of fern and furze on the other, the tumulus on Lowland Point as a marker? Everything there was part of the fair-weather future I’d picked out for myself; I could number the gulls and masts, I’d shifted the wind, and just as you might expect I expected a man in a...
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...
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