In Susan Sontag’s ‘On Photography’ (1977) she quotes Hannah Arendt writing about Walter Benjamin: “nothing was more characteristic of him in the thirties than the little notebooks with black covers which he always carried with him and in which he tirelessly entered in the form of quotations what daily living and reading netted him in … Continue reading ‘The trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry’
Tag: Poetry Nation Review
‘breakers that chuff; long, leaden swells of pewter’
I took this photo a couple of weeks ago, in the Caribbean. It’s Derek Walcott’s childhood home in Castries, St Lucia. I had some Walcott with me; I like to read poets in their own territory. I’ve read Pablo Neruda in Chile, Robert Lowell in Boston, Dylan Thomas on the Gower Peninsular and, to give … Continue reading ‘breakers that chuff; long, leaden swells of pewter’
Most of what we write/time will erase.
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.


