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Mariangela
Ian SeedThree texts
Rupert M LoydellVessel
Melita SchaumSome Guts
Simon Collings (with collages by John Goodby)Three Short Fictions
Meg PokrassThe Campus Novel
Peter RobinsonCharlie Boy and Captain Fitz: A One-Act Play
Alan WallSnapshot, Sachsenhausen and three more poems
Peter BlairSeven short poems
Lucian Staiano-DanielsFour prose poems
Olivia TuckThe Back of Beyond and two more prose poems
Tony KittTwo poems
Moriana Delgadofrom Reverse | Inverse
Lucy HamiltonSix haibun
Sheila E. MurphyKingfishers and cobblestones and five more new poems
Kitty HawkinsZion Offramp 76–78
Mark ScrogginsCome dancing with me and two more new poems
Marc VincenzPlease swipe right
Chloe Phillips‘Three Postcards’ and a prose poem
Linda BlackStill life
Melita SchaumIn memory of
John Taylor with drawings by Sam ForderImmortal wreckage
Will StoneNew in Translation
Snowdrifts
Marina Tsvetaeva, trans. by Belinda CookePoems from Prière (1924)
Pierre Jean Jouve, trans. by Will StoneSix prose poems
Pietro di Marchi, trans. by Peter RobinsonThe goddess of emptiness.
Jean Frémon, trans. by John Taylor -
A new Review of John Matthias’s Some Words on Those Wars by Garin Cycholl.
Anthony Howell’s review, A Clutch of Ingenious Authors: Michelene Wandor Four Times EightyOne: Bespoke Stories | Annabel Dover Florilegia | Sharon Kivland Abécédaire
Essays by Alan Wall
· ‘King of Infinite Space’: The Virtue of Uncertainty
· AI: Signs of the Times
· The Lad from Stratford
· Stanley Kubrick: Sex in the CinemaWill Stone’s Missing in Mechelen and At Risk of Interment
G. Kim Blank’s Civilizing, Selling, and T. S. Eliot Curled Up behind the Encyclopædia Britannica
Tronn Overend’s Samuel Alexander on Beauty
AND Conor Robin Madigan’s Master Singer, Simon Collings’s Robert Desnos, Screenwriter, and Igor Webb’s Never Again
Simon Collings, Carrying the past: The Afterlight by Charlie Shackleton.
New Fortnightly Serials
from The Runiad
Anthony Howellfrom White Ivory
Alan Walland much more below this column.
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Audio archive: Two poems, with an audio track, from Heart Monologues by Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani | Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych | Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | Anthony Howell reads three new poems | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause, Dreamt Affections, Blind Summits and Oblique Lights
Previous Serials
2011: Golden-beak in eight parts. By George Basset (H. R. Haxton).
2012: The Invention of the Modern World in 18 parts. By Alan Macfarlane.
2013: Helen in three long parts. By Oswald Valentine Sickert.
2016: The Survival Manual by Alan Macfarlane. In eight parts.
2018: After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale, by Tom Lowenstein.
LONDON
Readings in The Room: 33 Holcombe Road, Tottenham Hale, London N17 9AS – £5 entry plus donation for refreshments. All enquiries: 0208 801 8577
Poetry London: Current listings here.
Shearsman readings: 7:30pm at Swedenborg Hall, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1. Further details here.NEW YORK
10 reliable poetry venues in NYC.
· The funeral of Isaac Albéniz
· Coleridge, poetry and the ‘rage for disorder’
· Otto Rank
· Patrons and toadying · Rejection before slips
· Cut with a dull blade
· Into the woods, everybody.
· Thought Leaders and Ted Talks
· How Mary Oliver ‘found love in a breathing machine.’
AND read here:
· James Thomson [B.V.]
A dilemma for educators:
Philosophy and the public impact.
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Michelene Wandor on Derek Walcott and the T.S. Eliot Prize.
.Nick Lowe: the true-blue Basher shows up for a friend.
Anthony Howell: The new libertine in exile.
Kate Hoyland: Inventing Asia, with Joseph Conrad and a Bible for tourists.
Who is Bruce Springsteen? by Peter Knobler.
Martin Sorrell on John Ashbery’s illumination of Arthur Rimbaud.
The beauty of Quantitative Easing.
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A Drohobych diptych.
The parallel lives of Bruno Schulz and Stepan Bandera.
By H.A. WILLIS.
MANY OF THE borders have changed. You may wish to consult old maps. Galicia is a region where people are born and die in different countries without ever leaving their village. Ukraine’s Drohobych — in Bruno Schulz’s time the Polish Drohobycz — is now seventy-five kilometres beyond Poland’s eastern frontier.
Populations have changed. In 1939 the ethnic makeup of Drohobycz was 26% Ukrainian, 33% Polish and 40% Jewish. Like Bruno Schulz, many of those Jews identified as Poles. The tides of history, so lethal over those lands, swept away the Jewish identity of Bruno’s enchanted town. By 1959 the town was 70% Ukrainian; most of the rest were Russian, with Poles and Jews together making up about 5%. After Ukrainian Independence in 1991, the Russians were not welcome and moved elsewhere.
Many place names and spellings have changed. Before western Ukraine was part of interwar Poland, the so-called Second Republic, Galicia had been lightly ruled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire since the 1772 partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Austrians called the principal city Lemberg, but it was Lwów to the Poles, L’vov to the Russians and is now the Ukrainian L’viv.
In all the to-ing and fro-ing, it is to be noted that the Russians did not hold sway in western Ukraine until Soviet rule — that is, after WWII. The Ukrainian peasantry of what was then eastern Poland did not suffer the infamous famine inflicted upon those, including many Russians, at the mercy of Stalin’s Soviet administration.
Unlike most other Ukrainians, these people do not owe allegiance to the Orthodox Patriarch of Kiev, let alone the doubly foreign Kirill I of Moscow.
The salient fact of that historical Russian absence meant that, unlike most other Ukrainians, the sense of identity in the old Polish domains evolved in close association with the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, an autonomous Church created at the end of the sixteenth century using Byzantine rites but in full communion with the Pope. These people do not owe allegiance to the Orthodox Patriarch of Kiev, let alone the doubly foreign Kirill I of Moscow.
That Stepan Andriyovych Bandera, the most potent embodiment of western Ukrainian self-determination, was the son of a Ukrainian Greek-Catholic priest, only anointed his sense of destiny—but he was assassinated by the KGB in 1959. Bruno Schulz, the great writer, critic and artist, was the son of a Jewish merchant. He was killed, almost casually, by a Nazi in 1942.
Let me tell you how the posthumous lives of Bruno Schulz and Stepan Bandera came to intersect at a small, pleasant park on a rise above the old town of Drohobych.
Bruno Schulz | Stepan Bandera
♦
Howard Willis is an essayist, critic and editor, who lives in Perth, Western Australia. His best known publication is Bad Blood (1981), an account of the Stanley Graham affair of 1941. He has published a dozen short stories in various literary journals; and contributed to the Australian “History Wars” debate. His interest in the subjects of the present essay was strengthened during a visit to south-eastern Poland in 2013.
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Publication: Thursday, 26 January 2017, at 18:07.
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