after the 14th-century Flemish Form and form-giver, light and light-bearer, mistaken for air, for light by the eye, flies wingless, lighter than what it bears Stored in the eye, makes sight...
For a country with one of the oldest book-making traditions in Europe, Ireland was a late arrival on the magazine scene: Tom Clyde’s first example is Swift’s Examiner, started in...
F.T. (Filippo Tommaso) Marinetti liked to describe himself as the ‘caffeine of Europe’. He was undoubtedly the most daring and inventive artistic propagandist of the 20th century, and...
At the tail-end of 2000, Ian Sansom decided to move from London to a small town in County Down. He had half expected friends to dismiss his plan as a backwoods adventure, and was surprised when...
In Padua, on 20 January 1976, a young girl called Margherita Magello was repeatedly stabbed and left for dead. She was discovered by Massimo Carlotto, a 19-year-old student radical and member of...
Sweetest Little candy in death’s candy shop, I gave your sugar a lick When no one was looking, Took you for a ride on my tongue To all the secret places, Trying to appear above suspicion As...
Writers and literary academics have never been closer, and never further apart. Since the New Criticism of the 1950s, there have been two developments that should be contradictory but whose...
In ‘The Building of the Skyscraper’, a short poem which appeared in the Nation in 1964, George Oppen wrote: The steel worker on the girder Learned not to look down, and does his work...
It is to be observed, that straight lines vary only in length, and therefore are least ornamental. That curved lines as they can be varied in their degrees of curvature as well as in their...
La Stanza delle Mosche The room sizzles in the morning sun. A tinnitus of flies throbs at the bright windows, butting and dunting the glass; one dings off the light, to the floor, vibrating...
You’ll remember this. You may not live there anymore, and it might be years since you’ve been there, but you’ll recognise it instantly. Nothing has changed. Not a thing out of...
She watched the sky darken, threatening rain. ‘There’s no light at all these days,’ she said. ‘It’s been the darkest winter. I hate the rain or the cold, but I...
‘Though unmarried I have had six children’ Walt Whitman The first woman I ever got with child wore calico In Carolina. She was hoeing beans; as a languorous breeze I caressed her...
Julian Barnes’s new book of short stories is concerned with old age and death. Barnes – who was born in 1946 – should have a few years to go before he experiences either...
All the Cowboys’ Horses I was trying to remember who shouted out ‘Wakey Wakey!’ Was it Arthur Askey? I couldn’t understand how Kay Kendall and Denholm Elliot slipped...
Stepping outside in the dark, if only to fetch the coal, this December night, I stop in a river of wind on the cellar steps and think of men, no different from me, transforming themselves at will...
For my mother at 75 The sun-room, but there’s only drizzly rain Finessing silly doodles on the view Of what would otherwise be summer grass And blameless lupins blazing at the stake. So all...
The epigraph to Drinking Coffee Elsewhere comes from Alex Haley’s Roots: ‘The histories have been written by the winners.’ The implication is that this collection will give us...