James Lasdun

James Lasdun is writing a book about the Murdaugh murders in South Carolina.

Two Poems

James Lasdun, 4 February 1999

Birch Tree with Chainsaw

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...

Two Poems

James Lasdun, 24 March 1994

General McClellan

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...

Poem: ‘Oxblood’

James Lasdun, 24 February 1994

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...

Poem: ‘Erisychthon’

James Lasdun, 8 July 1993

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...

Poem: ‘The Accomplices’

James Lasdun, 23 May 1991

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...

I’ll have to kill you: ‘The Fall Guy’

J. Robert Lennon, 20 April 2017

It isn’t until​ the halfway point of The Fall Guy, James Lasdun’s thrillerish new novel, that we are treated to its first overtly criminal act: breaking and entering. This book is...

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Internet-Enabled: Stalking James Lasdun

Nick Richardson, 25 April 2013

How do you feel about someone who loves you but wants to ‘ruin’ you; who massages your ego as she damages your career?

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‘A woman threw her glass of wine at me,’ James Lasdun’s second novel begins. At a party held by a wealthy philanthropist in New York, a woman walks up to the narrator and asks:...

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At the beginning of James Lasdun’s novel, Lawrence Miller, a professor of gender studies at a college on the outskirts of New York, is interrupted while reading a book. When he returns to...

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Getting on

Humphrey Carpenter, 18 July 1985

‘My idea of what a novelist should do is an old-fashioned one,’ says a character in the title story in Isabel Colegate’s collection A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory. ‘I...

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