Douglas Oliver

If I drummed on the long Dahomey tambour, I’d be bumbling, blind in ludicrous Western clothes, that tambour’s wooden tubes stepped at the foot like a half-closed sea captain’s telescope; I’d be

drumming of old things I can half-see: of bamboo- stilted houses elongated by water reflections as if I were paddling to the floating market of Ganvié while fishermen cast...

Chotsa chipewa! Choka!

Take off your hat to me! Now scram!

Say you’ve never heard of John Chilembwe,or of his mission church at MbombweHQ for his First War Risingfirst salvo for the Malawi nation.Yet as surely as my mother livedon the tracer-path planetleft behind in our world’s world lineso surely my memory discovers hernot in chemical coding but alive there stilland so surely John...

after Kenneth Koch

Agence France-Presse took my girls to the winter circus – that’s Paris’s Cirque d’hiver – 1970 or 71, having already given them a clockwork train set in breakable plastic as part of the exploitation of its collaborateurs. I could mention the usual football-playing poodles nodding balloons into goals but I suppose we journalists were a bit like...

Last time I wrote of Parisian loaves newly baking because the yeast was in my nostrils from the rue Lepic bakery beneath. Now I’m lost in Scotland, my grain of truth.

Across bare floorboards of this home in Paris the thistle of Scotland’s nationhood crosses like a swift stain. Never to know Scotland perfect/imperfect wanting to bring Scotland to Paris in my work.

In England I grew...

Grey cloud roof sliding backwards lifts blue sky into the notch between hill-lines green au gratin. Pom-pommed, the slopes barge trees into valley turbulence. Along the summits, sunlit topknots. down to mid-distance, puffs, explosions, uprisings, striking tall, and achieved stature, horizontal shadow-flows running along the sides, mists of green dreaming scabbed with blackened precipices, as...