When I found I’d lost you – not beside me, nor ahead, nor right nor left not your green jacket moving between the trees anywhere, I waited a long while before wandering on: no wren...
As Louis MacNeice lay dying in 1963, his last major work, a radio play called Persons from Porlock, was broadcast by the BBC. It is about a painter called Hank, who starts well in the 1930s, but...
An eagle once swooped down to catch A rabbit, who made off with due dispatch Towards his lair. It wasn’t near, And he despaired of getting there In time, when going past a beetle’s...
James Meek’s last, bestselling novel, The People’s Act of Love, published in 2005 to great critical acclaim, was set in 1919, in ‘that part of Siberia lying between Omsk and...
Auden more than once explained that his business was poetry and that he wrote prose to earn his keep while pursuing that ill-paid vocation. Luckily he had another powerful reason for writing...
Hi I’m Lois I’m lonely I live near the motorway on Lewis Want to chat with me? I love chatrooms You might have seen me on TV I’m really feral I’m twenty-one I love...
In the title story of Claire Keegan’s second collection, Walk the Blue Fields, a priest is officiating at a wedding in rural Ireland: the bride is late, the organist has to play the Bach...
With the slush pile now going the way of the ice-cap, G.B. Edwards’s miraculous novel The Book of Ebenezer Le Page is one more instance – beyond the usually trotted out Lord of the...
If you want to know what is happening in the mind of the average teenage boy you must follow the action of his thumbs, because the eager digits that might once have flicked through the pages of
Out of the mouths of babes; apple of the eye; fire and brimstone; out of joint; sleep the sleep of death; sweeter than honey and the honeycomb; whiter than snow; oh that I had wings like a dove for...
The Reading If I turn round now I’ll be back at school, arranging the chairs in the Library with Briggs and Napier. Briggs is chair monitor for readings. He’s flicking through a copy...
Patience has been the matter of Annie Dillard’s writing for thirty years and more: patience and watchfulness and humility, together with a good deal of meditation (some of it conducted...
from the cadaver beginning to show through the skin of the day. The future without...
I first read Letter to Patience in a mud-walled bar a few hundred miles away from the mud-walled bar near Zaria, in northern Nigeria, where John Haynes’s poem is set. It opens with an...
Baudelaire pretended to be surprised that anyone could think of Balzac as a realist. It had always seemed to him, he said, that the novelist was ‘a passionate visionary’. The only...
The trouble is that the Norse myths, and the literary and artistic clichés derived from them, have become part of the cultural wallpaper, like flying saucers and earth-mothers and ley lines and vampires....
First, a somewhat spittle-laden squawk: how one positively slavers for a good biography of the astonishing French artist known as Claude Cahun (1894-1954). Mention her in conversation and you are...
On the Petaluma Road, in the former Gold Rush territory of Northern California, a man inherits a farm, marries a miner’s daughter called Lydia Mendez and adopts a four-year-old boy from a...