The practice of modelling in negative space, making absent volume perform as part of the dynamism of the whole, is a standard technique in visual arts, in sculpture above all, but there is a...
Milton lost his sight in libertyes defence and I my hearing in oyles pursuit employed by factors who failed to plug our ears with down I was the fuse-and-dynamite boy who blew up bits of...
machine of spring with all your levers thrown to max clouds in ripped clothes and sheep trailing afterbirth where last week’s buds sucked blue juice from the dusk now the branch is...
Heaney was not in any simple sense a ‘Virgilian’ poet, but the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid mattered more to his later writing than any other single text.
Eileen is 24, all ribs, shoulders and hips with ‘lemon-sized’ breasts and nipples ‘like thorns’. She still has acne scars across her cheeks. She wears thick tights and...
Space programs/screwbean mesquite/barrel cactus Ecoregion/section/tract The intricacies of a desert...
James Merrill has in Langdon Hammer the biographer he would have wished for: intelligent, appreciative, sympathetic, thorough, a first-rate reader of the poems, and an excellent writer to...
When Truman Capote was looking for a news story to turn into what he called a ‘non-fiction novel’, he was initially concerned that such an event might date very quickly, that it...
Only those who actively dislike poetry didn’t like him. The others could care less. There were too many other things to worry about, like is my licence expired yet? Fortunately there...
So much in the life and work of Ted Hughes was weird and transgressive that even now, 18 years after his death, it is hard to assess his actions and literary achievement.
On 7 January 1669, Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary that he and his wife had seen ‘a pretty good play’ at the king’s playhouse, with ‘many good things being in it...
Long before electronic media came up with the phrase, literature had been relegated to the status of preferred ‘content provider’ for films. Bestsellers achieve special ontological...
On 18 May 1961, towards the end of Session 45 of the Eichmann trial, Judge Halevi asked State Prosecutor Bar-Or if he’d finished submitting into evidence all the documents relevant to...
Now anything can happen, anything in the world, you just name it, you just think it and it will appear like a father in a hallway who is less an astronaut and more a meteor which reminds me about...
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On 18 July 2003, the body of the weapons inspector David Kelly was found in the woods on Harrowdown Hill in Oxfordshire, two months after he’d revealed that the Blair administration had...
A classic, according to Italo Calvino, is ‘a book that has never finished saying what it has to say’. I have read Sylvia by Leonard Michaels four or five times and I still...
The body as the sum of all nostalgias. Empire of footfalls; Mother as Script and Ideal – and love no chance event, no accidental stir of wings, or blueprint spiked with hospice. What hymn...