Tag Archives: T.S.Eliot

The Great Slowing Down versus Poet MacDiarmid (3)

Posted on April 10, 2022 by Bill Herbert

The interiorising impulse is a normal part of most writers’ cycle of composition and publication, but it became stronger for me with my father’s death, after which I spent a couple of years darting off to any far-off place that … Continue reading →

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Carry On, Leonora: 5

Posted on October 4, 2015 by Bill Herbert

This summer I went to Liverpool to see the large Carrington show in the Tate. I stayed, as is my wont, in a mid-range hotel, part of a chain so, wherever you go, the rooms and the menus are much … Continue reading →

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Heroes and Homilies (3)

Posted on June 4, 2015 by Bill Herbert

(This third section is an attempt to bring the argument a little more up to date by using three contemporary writers as a means of categorising certain ways of working with old texts, what I call ‘diachronic translation’, i.e. within … Continue reading →

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Non-Standard (2)

Posted on June 1, 2015 by Bill Herbert

(This second part is drawn from the lectures I delivered at Newcastle on ‘Modern Scottish Poetry’, a course I taught until it became evident that Creative Writing was where all the effort needed to go, in terms of designing an … Continue reading →

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Four Beginnings

Posted on January 22, 2011 by Bill Herbert

Sarah Broom, Tigers at Awhitu (Carcanet Oxford Poets), £9.95, 73pp; Carolyn Jess-Cooke, Inroads (Seren), £7.99, 64pp; Adam O’Riordan, In the Flesh (Chatto & Windus) ?49pp; Sam Willetts, New Light for the Old Dark (Cape Poetry), £10.00, 55pp There are two … Continue reading →

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The Great Moc Gonagall

Posted on January 22, 2011 by Bill Herbert

Norman Watson, Poet McGonagall: The Biography of William McGonagall (Birlinn) One of the first books of poetry I remember from my childhood is listed in the bibliography to this new life of William McGonagall, the enigmatic purveyor of bad verse … Continue reading →

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A Turbulent Makar

Posted on March 19, 2007 by Bill Herbert

(This piece on Edwin Morgan’s Scottish Laureateship was written in November 2005 for a small magazine the name and a copy of which continues to evade me.) The idea of a poet laureate carries with it some interesting preconceptions. Although … Continue reading →

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