James Lasdun

The​ Tenth International Congress of Coptic Studies was held in September 2012 at the headquarters of the Order of St Augustine in Rome. Among the speakers was Karen King, the first woman to hold the Hollis Professorship of Divinity, Harvard’s oldest endowed chair. King had made her name as an interpreter and champion of early Christian texts that asserted the spiritual authority of...

Beyond​ a few tabloid stories, the Westboro Baptist Church didn’t really hit the news until 2005, when its members started picketing funerals of soldiers killed in the Iraq War, with signs declaring GOD HATES FAGS, THANK GOD FOR DEAD SOLDIERS, THANK GOD FOR IED’S and THANK GOD FOR AIDS. The combination of homophobia and anti-military sentiment was puzzling, but once you learned...

In August 1970​ Mary Lou Maxwell, a seamstress married to a Reverend Willie Maxwell, was found beaten and strangled to death in her Ford Fairlane on a quiet road near her home outside Alexander City, Alabama. The reverend, who had purchased several life insurance policies on his wife, was tried for her murder but acquitted after their neighbour, Dorcas Anderson, recanted some earlier...

I’ve often fantasised about writing a police procedural series. Sometimes the fantasy gets to the point where I start sketching out ideas, but invariably I come up against the double problem of my ignorance of how the police actually proceed and my private veto against fiction requiring serious research. So I stop. But something made me try again, and a few months ago I came home from...

The alternative career fantasies of writers would make an interesting study: James Joyce dreaming of becoming the agent for Irish tweeds in Trieste, Thomas Mann musing that he would have made a good banker, Samuel Beckett contemplating a career as a pilot. ‘I hope I am not too old to take it up seriously nor too stupid about machines to qualify as a commercial pilot,’ Beckett wrote to Thomas MacGreevy at the age of 29, having just published More Pricks than Kicks. ‘I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read. It was not as though I wanted to write them.’ The spurs to fantasy in his case were failure and rejection, which he suffered on a grand scale – one of the reasons his biography makes such consoling reading for struggling writers.

It is rent collection day in the buildings my neighbour Fernando owns in the nearby town of Kingston, New York. For some time Fernando has been urging me to join him on his rounds. He takes a protective but also frankly spectatorial interest in the lives of his tenants, following their dramas with the fascination of a soap opera addict. Most of them are on Welfare or Disability or Social...

My old friend Chris, who works for Channel Five, has invited me to go with him to Las Vegas, where he is attending the Natpe TV marketing convention. We’re staying at the Mirage, a tropical-themed hotel with its own rainforest and volcano on the main Vegas Strip. The long back wall of the lobby is a coral reef aquarium with sharks, moray eels and clownfish. To get to your room you have...

Not that bloodlines – family or otherwise – have ever meant much to me, but at forty one wants forebears almost as much as heirs, and even though the oblivion we’re headed for is doubtless total, it feels somewhat lonely heading there orphaned, or lonelier than not.

Of course every poet appoints his own ancestors but that’s one thing if you’re Auden enlisting...

“Ovid’s chain reactions of transformation emit a liberating energy like nothing else in literature. Occurring always at some limit of human capacity or tolerance, they have something of death in them, something of birth, something of sex, but something else, too: a mysterious reverse flow, whereby the things people turn into – tree, rock, flower, fountain, bird, beast – miraculously release their own potentialities back into the human universe of the poem.”

Their town’s the quaint one: the board won’t let it sprawl more than a half-mile from the green’s little pool-table of grass and shiny tulips where Santa lands in winter and the teens play hackysack all summer. There’s no mall,

no motel either, which is just what they want; they voted for the good life there; they can afford it: no fast-food chain, no sixplex,...

for Nicholas Jenkins

For my birthday my wife gives me a chainsaw; a shiny blue Makita, big as our child, heavy

as an impacted planet. On every part of its body the makers have slapped red warning stickers: Stop! Danger of Death! Do Not Operate

Unless Experienced! The manual elaborates: kickback, where the blade bucks back through your neck; blinding by woodchip or exploding fuel,

death by...

for Pia

Five months; five cords of hardwood; ash mostly, hickory, oak; greying in the weather, by April starting to rot, outsides sodden by May, too crumbly even to splinter.

But then to uncover the first layer; white birch, bright with the whiteness that whitens your hands like chalk; flesh-coloured wood still firm in its sheath of papery bands, flaw-lined like...

Pride, questioner, and pride’s obverse, fear; Fear of failure. The Times of London Noted my Air of Success. Our grand Potomac army loved me as I’d planned. I was Napoleon. I snubbed Lincoln. Think if I’d obeyed him: one swift strike, Rebellion over, slavery intact, Oneself in office ... I couldn’t act. What if I should fail? My ranks Glistened like...

Mid-October, our Blackjack oak Peppers the tar-paper roof with its ripened acorns; Day and night, two weeks of it, Priapic Scattershot clattering down With every gust of wind from the mountain; I stare outside. Impossible to sleep, think, work;

Into my mind a memory comes: Another oak, the King Charles oak That stood in our garden at home; Survivor of summer lightning and winter storms, The...

After Ovid

I

The scene: a town under mountains; Clapboard, shingle and brick, the usual Straggle of shopping malls, post-colonial Factory outlets and fast-food chains Thinning upward through scant Cattle pastures then woods Where the hulk of a disused chemical plant

Drips and leaks. This was built by one Erisychthon, who as it happens Also built the malls and the fast-food chains, Outlets too...

A small man thumbed us down and sidled in Dusting the seat with a quick flick first, his wrist Thin enough to snap like a candy bar; Runt-of-the-litter frame, mid-twenties, shivering, A little drunk, ‘You folks Headed for Cromer’s Hatch?’ We weren’t, But the day being cold, and this good turn so easy, We said we’d take him just the same. He thanked us, then with...