Dave Eva
In a time of Trump, Gaza, Iran, I’ve been reading the 1950s novels of John Wyndham: The Day of the Triffids, The Chrysalids and The Midwich Cuckoos. It seemed apposite, all that post-apocalyptic fear, Cold War angst, the aftermath of a dreadful, unnatural mistake or catastrophe. And I wondered where that feeling went in the … Continue reading Edwin Muir ‘Late in the evening the strange horses came’
’A poem is meant to be read and read again and again, to be run through the mind until it is part of the mind, until the mind recites it as it recites itself.’ C.K.Williams. I’ve started learning poems off by heart. I had to do it a long time ago for exams, and I’ve … Continue reading ‘until the mind recites it as it recites itself’
’Joseph Conrad - A Personal Remembrance’ by Ford Madox Ford, written immediately after Conrad’s death, published 1924. I bought it in a secondhand bookshop at The Guildhall in Lavenham (Suffolk). Ford is always engaging, entertaining and completely unreliable. So these comments may have no basis in fact, but this is what he says Conrad thought … Continue reading ‘an Archangel – a little damaged – igniting the dark firmament with speech’
If a Selected Poems has an introductory note, it’s usually not very instructive, but Lavinia Greenlaw’s comments are genuinely interesting: ‘A poem is sudden and then it is slow. It continues to move between these two states while I try to keep up with its swerves or chip away at each impasse. When a poem … Continue reading ’wherever you get to is not far, still nowhere’
At the beginning of October I was at the LRB bookshop for the launch of Sarah Howe’s new collection ‘Foretokens’. Towards the end a young woman at the front asked a really good question; it came from inexperience but was all the better for it. She said she’d only previously read the kind of poetry … Continue reading ’If I don’t speak to/the darkness it/swallows me.’
Elizabeth-Jane Burnett’s book ‘Twelve Words for Moss’ is not exactly a scientific book, although it contains a lot of botanical information. It’s more a series of meditations on moss and (trying to delay too-glib a rhyme) loss, specifically the loss of her father. Both nature writing and grief memoir, it is also interspersed with Burnett’s … Continue reading ’an ancient, woven, wet, ditch-dance’
’It’s almost impossible to say why certain music attracts me, or interests me, and other things leave me cold. The process of criticism is heavily dependent on a rationalisation of subjectivity. As a critic, you can spend your life prioritising your own tastes with increasingly elaborate intellectual justifications that disallow any alternatives’. That’s David Toop, … Continue reading ’It persists as anomaly, as conscience, as critique and as refuge’
Having devoted the previous post to poets writing about Theodore Roethke, I found yet another poem. Richard Murphy’s ‘The Poet on the Island’ is dedicated to him:‘On a wet night, laden with books for luggage, And stumbling under the burden of himself, He reached the pier, looking for a refuge. ………………. Safety on water, he … Continue reading ‘I am perfectly willing to appear ridiculous, absurd’: Roethke’s prose.
A story of serendipity; of poems that seem to talk to each other across decades. Two weeks ago I bought ‘Modern Poetry’ by Diane Seuss (lovely cover by Fitzcarraldo - the texture of it in the hand) and picked up ‘Conjurors’ by Julian Orde from the Greenwich Oxfam shop. With the Orde I must confess … Continue reading Julian Orde, Theodore Roethke and serendipity
‘What are people waiting for? What is the seed that they will endure hours of boredom to extract?’ That’s from Christopher Middleton’s ‘Jackdaw Jiving: Selected essays on poetry and translation’ (1998 - and I guess the compulsory reading of poetry must refer to the USA, none of that nonsense here..). I think I must be … Continue reading ‘Hours of Boredom’
the word-road home 