Frank Kuppner lives in Glasgow, and it may be possible to read ‘Scotland’ for ‘Albania’ in the ‘Folksongs’ published in this issue. His latest collection of poems, The Intelligent Observation of Naked Women, was published by Carcanet last year.
1.
My mother sits in a chair, beside the tape-deck which is at present playing Kathleen Ferrier singing something by Gluck. By far the most usual something, I suppose. Orpheus’s lament for Eurydice, now dead and beneath the ground. And where is the singer? Where is she even though her voice is among us? And doubtless without the hope which Eurydice had. For Eurydice will return, which...
One foot on the second-top step of the small flight Of stairs which lead to the door of her fine house, The other on the third, the very old lady Stands, staring dead ahead, clutching the railings.
At one point in my tortuous, interrupted walk Linking up all the second-hand bookshops I know of In this city which I visit too rarely, I pass by her, guiltily, without speaking.
2.Where a few...
The family, stuff of novelists as different as Rose Macaulay and James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Lewis Grassic Gibbon, is absent from much great poetry of the early 20th century. T.S....
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