Search Results

“... In the summer of the year 1792, the author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton ...’ Coleridge At first, there was no cause for suspicion, the gentleman rooted in solitude had taken possession of a small farm, and rarely showed. We’d seen him walk the lane, encumbered by a trunk, on arrival, a scholar, so we heard, and indisposed, given over to verse and reverie: attentive about his despatch of mail, perhaps distracted, but not sinister ...”

“... The first page of Jeremy Reed’s ‘autobiographical exploration of sexuality’ finds him with ‘a red gash of lipstick’ on his mouth, pondering whether to take the ten steps down to a beach where men sunbathe nude. He is androgynous, 16, ‘looking for a new species’. James Kirkup also admits to androgyny and to a passion for make-up, from childhood when he experimented with his mother’s make-up box, through the time when, as head of the English Department at the Bath Academy of Art, he appeared in his own play for children wearing white tights and with gold sequins on his upper eyelids, right into middle age ...”

“... were writing their poems now and in America.’ It remains an attractive blueprint, and one that Jeremy Reed has followed in his own work on Montale: ‘What I have tried to achieve in this book is a series of poems in which the poet’s intentions are placed within a context of late 20th-century values.’ Certainly, disdain for the poor conventional ...”

“... But these are small lapses in a quietly accomplished collection. In Red-Haired Android, Jeremy Reed attacks ‘the poetry world’, which he sees as dominated by ‘exponents of the ordinary, /opponents of the visionary’: Their safety-net is Larkin’s provincial de-sexualised climacteric; the flat sensibility bred by a ...”

“... their occasional grandiloquence and antique turn of phrase, from the busy hurtling fortissimo that Jeremy Reed contrives to sustain through so many of the 63 poems in Nero. Measured by quantity and density, this book is, to say the least, impressive. The most satisfying pieces here are those that cast the poet in the role of naturalist, as keen-eyed and ...”

“... before seven local time. Saturday 5: Invitation from Joe Allard of Essex University to read with Jeremy Reed at the Colchester Arts Festival. Went shopping at local supermarket after lunch. Dull TV. Made asparagus and prawn soufflé for supper. Tuesday 8: Watched first episode of new series Twin Peaks. Who cares who killed Laura Palmer? Monotonous ...”

“... many translators, Arrowsmith and Galassi are more faithful to the original; Robert Lowell and Jeremy Reed take greater licence. Galassi’s translations ‘sound’ better than Arrowsmith’s and have a more reliable sense of what Montale wrote than either Lowell’s or Reed’s. But only Lowell, in the ten ...”

“... to slip on and tumble   Down staircases, down years ... If there is a perennial Romanticism, Jeremy Reed’s poems maintain it. He puts himself, without apology, at the centre of his experience, and regards morality as his promise to pay attention. What he pays attention to, in By the Fisheries, is hailstones, buoys, fishing for mullet, surfers, his ...”

“... twinning the eel with the gleam in somebody’s eye. Of the many English versions (Robert Lowell, Jeremy Reed, Jonathan Galassi, Tom Paulin and so on), McKendrick rightly chooses Paul Muldoon’s. Inseparably inventive and close, his ‘Eel’ is like its namesake: it departs from its origin only as a way of returning to it. At one point, Muldoon sends ...”

“... Herbert Huncke plus any given Beat, all of the New York School, Bob Dylan, Nico, John Cale, Lou Reed, Malcolm McLaren, Patti Smith and Mapplethorpe, William Eggleston, and … hang on, here’s Walker Evans. And there, not exactly flitting past, goes the bulky shadow of Henry James. Tippins has embarked on a compendious venture, as the index suggests. I ...”

“... in the hierarchy of domestic law sources.This looks pretty impregnable until you turn to Lord Reed’s dissenting judgment. Standing by the principle of parliamentary supremacy, Reed argues that what Parliament enacted in and after 1972is inherently conditional … on the UK’s membership of the EU. The Act imposes no ...”

“... Denton Welch was William Burroughs’s main intellectual squeeze. Ferlinghetti had high hopes for Jeremy Reed. The Beats were now heritage fodder, a potential Bloomsbury group. There was even talk of James Ivory optioning a Neal Cassady property. I wondered, thinking of Blake’s formative experiences there, whether Carolyn had caught any of Alan ...”

“... to have a second crack at their father. The diviner went to Rebecca’s grave with a hollow green reed containing potions, which he drove into the soil: the wind, it was explained, would blow through the reed like breath through a flute and ‘call the witch to follow the deceased’. But Luckson survived this ingenuity as ...”

“... to work with the grain of tradition: ‘Better the devil you know,’ they mutter. ‘The reed that stands up to the wind breaks, the reed that bends survives,’ puts in Greer – a nugget from the world reserves of crone wisdom. Proverbs are ‘the instruction of thy father and … the law of thy mother’, the ...”

“... Despite its external appearance, the interior of the old prison had been radial, on the lines of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, maximising surveillance and control. Now something not so explicitly disciplinarian was needed to suit the liberal discourse of women’s rehabilitation. ‘Most women and girls in custody require some form of medical, psychiatric ...”