Dave Eva
I’ve been following Ian Brinton’s account (in PNR 256 and 257) of the fortunes of the Grosseteste Press and Review from the late sixties to the mid-eighties. It was one of the wave of small, underfunded, brave poetry ventures of those decades, featuring writers who were of little interest to the larger publishers. Two quotes … Continue reading ‘because it was a good thing to do..’
I very much appreciated the two-page eulogy for Anne Stevenson (1933-2020) by John Lucas in Poetry Nation Review 257. The first Stevenson volume I came across was Minute by Glass Minute (1982), which I liked initially because much of it was about the Black Mountains and the Welsh border country. I was also drawn to … Continue reading Most of what we write/time will erase.
The lines above and below are by John Koethe from his poem ‘The Age of Anxiety’ in ‘The Best American Poetry 2017’: ‘ .... the Limits of the poem that’s never done, the poem Everyone writes in the end. I see myself on a stage, Declaiming, as the golden hour wanes, my long apology For … Continue reading I rehearse these things/Because I want to and I can.
A couple of weeks ago, Kathleen Jamie (whose poetry and prose I love) wrote a really interesting New Statesman review of ‘Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape’ by Cal Flynn. The book is about post-industrial wastes, contaminated landscapes, and how over time they become re-wilded, rich in bio-diversity. They change, in Jamie’s words, … Continue reading On the Dismantling of Millom Ironworks
The choice of Louise Gluck for the Nobel Prize was unexpected, but immediately felt right, to me at least. I find her poems haunting, like lucid dreams, particularly in ‘Faithful and Virtuous Night’ (2014). The New York Review of Books featured her Nobel lecture (undelivered because of Covid) ‘The Poet and the Reader’. She writes … Continue reading ‘Come singly, one by one’
‘This handful of poems is almost arbitrarily drawn from the Borgesian, idiosyncratic anthology that anyone who lives by words will come to carry’. Jane Hirshfield I’m thinking of this blog as a kind of personal anthology, but also as a sort of commonplace book. ‘Commonplaces’ were familiar in the Renaissance and the nineteenth century; scrapbooks … Continue reading Commonplaces
‘Uneasy, lovable man, give me your painting Hand to steady me taking the word-road home’ (W.S.Graham, from ‘The Thermal Stair’, his poem for Peter Lanyon) ‘Had we but World enough and Time’ then those of us who care about poetry would give every poet the attention they deserve. But there are so many poets and … Continue reading A Poetry Reader
the word-road home 