I’ve kept a sporadic diary for about ten years. Besides the occasional incident that seems worth recording, I put down gossip and notes on work and reading. These are some extracts from last year....
About thirty miles off the Turkish coast, and just south-east of Nikaria, in the Dodecanese, there is a Greek island locally known as Patmo. I begin with that geomorphic truth in order to...
In the face of a worldwide recession, the literature industry proceeds apace. While the market for trade books grows more enfeebled, academic publishers show no sign of cutting back on their...
There remains a most decided difference – indeed it grows wider every year – between what Philip Larkin calls ‘being a writer’, or ‘being a poet’, and managing...
South of Cervantes, Thirsty Point, wedges Of capstone galling the track, drumming the gut Of the four-wheel drive, we cross a sabre-cut In the scrub. The Namban River, I read. Flows only in...
Andrew Crozier has lately written an exceptionally searching essay about British poetry since 1945,* in which Norman MacCaig is named just once in passing. There is nothing wrong with that;...
When William Laughton Lorimer, formerly Professor of Greek at St Andrews, died in 1967, he left behind him the manuscript of a translation of the New Testament into Scots, on which he had been...
Familiars If you were to look up now you would see The moon, the cars, the ambulance, The elevated road back into town....
Vernon Scannell is not the first British poet to have been keen on boxing and, apparently, quite good at it: we may think of Lord Byron and Robert Graves. But few others, surely, have written and...
For reasons that are not immediately obvious, the question of canons is at present much discussed by literary critics. Their canons are of course so called only by loose analogy with the Biblical...
An inexpert but frequently impressive first novel, Soor Hearts is set in Shetland in the early years of this century. Magnus Doull, having sailed before the mast for ten years, returns to the...
May the Lord have mercy on all those peoples Who suffer from a perversion of religion – Or, to put it in a less equivocating way, Who suffer from an excess of religion – Or, to come...
One gets the impression from Riffaterre’s book that he enjoys playing single-minded hedgehog to the foxy representatives of Parisian post-structuralist fashion. Despite some fairly arcane...
Joyce Johnson was Jack Kerouac’s lover during a brief but crucial period in his career. She met him on a blind date fixed up by Allen Ginsberg in January 1957, nine months before the...
I look at Broadway in the bitter cold, The centre strip benches empty like today, And see St Louis. I am often old Enough to leave my childhood, but I stay. A winter sky as total as repression...
Hearing you were dead, I went out to look at mountains. Forty years we had been friends, writing between cities, meeting in cities, talking of anarchist persons and principles and never climbing...
In the Thirties and Forties English readers – and even English poets – knew surprisingly little about American poets, except for the few, like Pound and Cummings, who set out to make...
Is Robert Lowell Better than Noel Coward, Howard? W.H. Auden’s little poem has passed into the folk memory without, so far as we know, ever having seen print. The editor in question is...