This must be a brave letter. No exotic quotations; no miserable, ignominious echoes of Swinburne, no trace of silvery, erotic decadence; no Musset; no motif of Delius – nothing but lucidity...
After the flood, among the bogs and swamps that were spread out to dry like linen, the animals appeared, some familiar, some entirely unknown; it was like the banks of the Nile when the river...
Mr Exocet She dreamed he made a scape ship from a grandfather clock, bone soap, and the certainty that human’ll breed true. Refuse the transhuman, he’d thunder in his sleep to the...
In a letter dated 22 January 1934 to his protégé James Laughlin, Pound makes passing reference to R.P. Blackmur, who had written a long unflattering essay, ‘Masks of Ezra...
‘And so,’ Bréhal said, ‘love would be time become available to the senses.’ Julia Kristeva, Les Samouraïs The genuine charm and considerable strength of Julia...
Perhaps only new countries can have a real past, peopled with genuine ghosts and filled with authentic records. Or it is countries other than one’s own that are so endowed? Any place that...
‘What are we going to write about now?’ one of Ulster’s more engagé poets half-jokingly inquired soon after the IRA’s ceasefire was announced. One would imagine that...
As blank as scripture to a ruling class Discussed in hells they do not think exist, Cracked and abandoned to the slicing grass And disabusing dust, A movie...
When the painter died the people in her painting stiffened a little in their oils: my sister’s two friends from art school, dressing in her bedroom. An oval mirror caught in the arms of a...
About Auden’s Juvenilia He knew he would be great And told his tutor so But lots of second-rate Ramshackle lines ‘to go’ Like pizzas on a plate...
Towards the end of Radclyffe Hall’s The Unlit Lamp (1924), the heroine, Joan Ogden, who has grown miserably old in a small provincial town, overhears two young women discussing her. She...
If language speaks us, as Lacan claimed, and as Aron – the young protagonist of The Book of Intimate Grammar – senses intuitively, then our thoughts are trapped in hand-me-down forms...
Unbearably buoyant the night before My return to Blairs, I’d be brought back down To earth by Dad’s Polonius routine. He’d been there in the black and white Forties, And had to...
As one thinks of Harold Bloom, Auden’s description of Wyndham Lewis as a lonely old volcano comes to mind. Though not, like Lewis, ‘of the Right’, or indeed claiming any...
If I drummed on the long Dahomey tambour, I’d be bumbling, blind in ludicrous Western clothes, that tambour’s wooden tubes stepped at the foot like a half-closed sea captain’s...
Baroness James, making a rare visitation to a blighted metropolitan zone, downriver of Tower Bridge, has written a very useful book, a book on which I will be happy to draw for years to come....
What should a man famous for having wished the Author dead wish for himself once he becomes a dead author? To leave no trace behind would seem right. But if Roland Barthes was hostile to the...
To Umberto Eco for his 60th birthday run! Umberto riverrun: dagli apografi intercatattici alle filles goleuses: dai differipetizomi delle lettrici castrottiche e fabulose che godono solitarie...