Tag Archives: W.H. Auden

Origins, Grafts, Whispers

(As will hopefully become apparent over the next few weeks, one of my ‘resolutions’ for January 2017 was to get my act together with the backlog of posts for this and my other blogs. At the end of the month … Continue reading

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New Cartographies for Old

(An edited version of this review appeared in the Summer 2015 issue of Poetry London.) Sandeep Parmar, Eidolon (Shearsman); Sam Riviere, Kim Kardashian’s Wedding (Faber & Faber); Tony Williams, The Midlands (Nine Arches Press). These three collections in their different … Continue reading

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From Mere Bellies to the Bad Shaman, 3

(If you felt the previous section jumped around a bit, you’ll love this, which tries to get from Nietzsche to Carol Ann Duffy in as few paragraphs as possible. Again the argument is trying to favour metaphor’s capacity for comparison … Continue reading

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Heroes and Homilies (2)

(This second section is where the homiletic theme appears in relation to Henryson. Parts of this draw on a review of Heaney’s Henryson, reproduced elsewhere on this blog, that I did for The Scottish Review of Books. But, as I’m … Continue reading

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Interview with the Gumpire

(This is the text of an email interview a student conducted with me this April for a project – I didn’t know them and, while they gave permission for their questions to be reproduced here, they preferred not to give … Continue reading

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Once Were Informationists

(This review of Peter McCarey’s collected pamphlets appeared in Edinburgh Review 132, and is a look at what some Scottish poets did post-MacDiarmid and pre-Internet.) Peter McCarey, Collected Contraptions (Carcanet), 173pp, £14.95 Truth is sunk in information (‘Variations for Richard … Continue reading

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The Shock of Liberty

(This review of Hass and Williams appeared in the Summer issue of Poetry Review.) Robert Hass, The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected poems (Bloodaxe), 352pp, £15; C.K. Williams, Wait (Bloodaxe), 125pp, £9.95 There is an exhilaration about reading … Continue reading

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On (and over) The Wall

(An edited version of this talk was broadcast on Radio 3’s ‘The Essay’ as part of their Free-Thinking Festival, 2010. It was recorded at the Sage on November 7th, and, at the moment, is not available on their site, but … Continue reading

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hotching in heteronyms

(This is evidently a review I did, possibly for Poetry Review, certainly back in January 2002. I like Pessoa a lot more than it would appear to suggest, so I was talking more about contemporary lazy smartnesses.) Ah, heteronyms, those … Continue reading

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