Manifestos deify this antithesis dialysis hysteria – Dadaist premed dictation is [Dada] in July After dinnership is re-gales with [Dadada-iste] laughter which duly persists – saddest...
What with all those Henrys being succeeded by all those other Henrys in the histories, and all those worryingly ghostly patriarchs looming over the tragedies – Julius Caesar, Old Hamlet,...
If we speak of ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, we mean a collection with this name first published in 1609, when Shakespeare was 45 and most of his plays had been staged; he died only...
The low tide brings her in, scouring the surf-line for dogweed and jellies, stones coughed from the sea. What interests her more is the take of wood that she gathers for the fire. She knows how...
Thirty years ago, the campus novels of David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury mythologised a setting that expressed, better than any other, the cultural and ideological chaos of the 1960s and 1970s....
The Antarctic Poetry School Historically, the absence of even one writer has been the least of the Antarctic School’s worries. Is its hallmark cool tone sustainable in today’s...
An old woman leans out of her window and, ‘because of her excessive curiosity’, leans too far: she falls to the ground and shatters to pieces. A second old woman leans out of her...
Dawn darkness is a bare blue light and there’s a sound coming at you, most likely brought on the wind from a hillside forest or nicked off the skim of the sea . . . So...
Nine hours’ drive east of Darwin, where the Northern Territory of Australia and Queensland meet, you will find the Gulf of Carpentaria, the sea that separates the top lip of the continent...
Sami in their tipis (‘Hilpes’?) Finmark in the fifties thick skin patched with thin skin needle holes under flaps pantiled almost a proggy, with the same skill as waterproof as my...
In 1948, Tennessee Williams published a short story (and collection of the same title) called ‘One Arm’. It is about Oliver Winemiller, a magnificent young navy boxer who lost an arm...
The term ‘graphic novel’ is dismissed by most of its practitioners as either an empty euphemism or a marketing ploy. As Marjane Satrapi puts it, graphic novels simply enable...
Yes, another poem about flowers and kids. Our son thinks this one is a ball, or full of balls: like jesters’ caps with bells, one for each...
As any adult can tell you – or any adult not given over entirely to mawkish and convenient notions of innocence – children are born spies. Every parent (previously an independent...
Beneath dark mahogany trees, in the stagnant, Humid air, saturated with flies, hang flowering Lianas coiling up from vine stumps, lulling The splendid and quarrelsome parrot, The yellow-backed...
Sometimes what is left out of a poem or a story creates a more arresting sense of reality than what is left in. Keats’s poetic fragment ‘This Living Hand’ ends with the hand...
O nobly-born, listen. Now thou art experiencing the Radiance of the Clear Light of Pure Reality. Recognise it. O nobly-born, thy present intellect, in real nature void, not formed into anything...
Unless you’re the jealous type, it’s fun to read reviews of Junot Díaz in mainstream American papers. There may not be an American writer alive whose ratio of positive to...