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“... Biology The brick ship of Victorian science steamed on, ivy beard, iron beams and stairs, iron paddleboat pillars. A pair of whiskery Germans, father and son, had specialised in fixing in glass some of the degenerative conditions of fruit. A split blue peach, a bough laden with gangrene – all pocked, opaque, Venetian, venereal ... Dry air, manila light, cardboard and silence, anything to stave off the time when the exhibits will revert to silica, parrot feathers and wire ...”

“... Campaign Fever We woke drugged and naked. Did our flowers rob us and beat us over the head while we were asleep? They were competing for the same air as us – the thick, vegetable breath of under the eaves. It seems like several days ago that I went to see you to your train. A cuckoo called and our vision drizzled, though the air was dry. In a place I’d never noticed before, a low siren was sounding alternate notes ...”

“... Old Labour slogans, Venceremos, dates for demonstrations like passed deadlines – they must be disappointed to find they still exist. Half-way down the street, a sign struggles to its feet and says Brent. The surfaces are friable, broken and dirty, a skin unsuitable for chemical treatment. Building, repair and demolition go on simultaneously, indistinguishably ...”

“... for Fred ‘Empiricism’ has been gone far more often than not; I think I originally learned it in my teens. Now I sometimes find it by alphabetising, but most of the time it’s gone and stays gone. I don’t know if I dislike it because I can’t remember it, or I can’t remember it because I dislike it. It’s as though it’s on permanent loan somewhere ...”

“... Ocosingo The crazy zocalo tips at a loco angle. It pours three hundred infant girls, dressed like Christmas tree fairies, down the church’s throat, singing. A thin trickle of demonstrators chant ‘Mexico!’ uphill. Whitewashed against white ants, the yew tree trunks look spindly and phosphorescent, like stalagmites in the cavern of their shade. The birds won’t sing ...”

“... An Education For James, again At the old Tramontana on Tottenham Court Road among the hi-fi shops I learned to order what you ordered, not studenty noodles but sophisticated things like the special. After years of our playing at lunch the faithful waiter shook himself to death with Parkinson’s practically before our eyes. (I remember the rattle and slop of one last saucerful of coffee ...”

“... after Metamorphoses, Book VIII I knew about Helen, they kept selling me Helen, but I never even got to be stolen in the first place. Sieges are boring – did you know. Everything’s fine, just each day’s a little bit worse than the last. And you start thinking how long it is since you saw prawns or a nice pair of earrings or a magazine. I had my townhouse, but I practically lived on the battlements, they even let me use the telescope during the lulls ...”

“... My Father at Fifty Your mysterious economy blows the buttons off your shirts, and permits overdrafts at several foreign banks. – It must cost the earth. Once I thought of you virtually as a savage, atavistic, well-aligned, without frailties. A man of strong appetites, governed by instinct. You never cleaned your teeth, but they were perfect anyway from a diet of undercooked meat; you gnawed the bones; anything sweet you considered frivolous ...”

“... Dearest Mina,       Thank you for yours, my first news of you in ten weeks. Imagine my happiness when I saw my address in your handwriting. But then the postmaster wanted to see my passport, and I didn’t have it on me. I begged him to make an exception, swore that I was Kleist, but it was in vain. Deceived a thousand times, he couldn’t believe there was an honest man left in Paris ...”

“... Phase I live in Berkeleyan hostility With my parents. The fridge bellows Like a young tractor. Very soon I shall Run away and join the Vatican Guard. Back Numbers Carelessly we tore our love Like soft newspapers with feet. Then stooping down, we read With interest some vintage items. Carnal Poem Birds came and pecked at a group of yellow bread crusts scattered on a low roof ...”

“... This​ is the first and only book on bilingualism I have read, but before coming to that there are two other things worthy of mention.* The first is the author’s biographical note. Albert Costa, a research professor at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona who specialised in neurocognition and language processing, died in 2018, at the age of 48. The second is the single modest line on the copyright page, where no one looks, crediting the translation to John W ...”

“... Before​ I embarked on Eley Williams, of whom I had read nothing and knew nothing, I flipped through Attrib., her first book of stories. Even on first flip, I got a sense of something I sometimes find in things I like and that seem good to me, something that subliminally distinguishes writing that is careful and alive: a kind of alphabetical justice, to give this sheepish and probably disreputable thing a name in public ...”

“... If​ it answers to now, if it’s sufficiently fearless and adaptable and capacious, why not write the same poem again and again – in couplets, in slabs, in measured stanzas, in irregular numbered parts, in plump quatrains? Why not saturate the thing with fact, with horror, with beauty, with violence, with throwaway colloquial titles, with smeary cut-up technique? With the poem mirroring a fast walk (in New York City) or a slow drive (in Detroit); a short lyric documentary film with snatches of Motown and inner voiceover; a dustbin full of bundled-up news we’d rather forget, or something even more abstract and uncontrollable (a facility, a medium, a pulse); and the poet a vagrant, a collector, a compulsive notetaker, a Cassandra, a Louis MacNeice for the 21st century?This, I believe, is the case with Lawrence Joseph, whose A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems, is out this month (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28 ...”

“... Do  people ever know their true reason for embarking on a long journey?’ Tété-Michel Kpomassie asks, just as he is setting out for home (où ça?) at the end of a year and a half in the Greenland of his dreams. He was 16 when he first left Togo for Europe; 24 when he reached Greenland, by way of Ghana, Senegal, France, Germany and the colonial power, Denmark; 38 when he wrote those words; 40 when they were published by Flammarion ...”

“... Afemale undergraduate,​ newly arrived at Oxford, sees a man at a party. ‘Immediately there is an aura of difference about him.’ He’s ‘exotic-looking’ and stands out from the crowd in ‘an old-man suit’ and crumpled shirt. ‘He reaches for a fag that someone offers and lights it in the big cup of his hands.’ People like him, but are terrorised by him, as is Jane ...”