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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.
Departments
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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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Words and lies.
A Fortnightly Review
The Liar’s Dictionary
by Eley Williams
Doubleday US | Heinemann UK | 288 pp | £11.55 $19.53
By PAUL COHEN.
ELEY WILLIAMS’ The Liar’s Dictionary manages to do new things with some of the preoccupations of recent innovative novelists. For example, her book joins a surprising number of recent alphabetically arranged novels, such as — to name just examples available in English — Milorad Pavić’s Dictionary of the Khazars, Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, David Levithan’s The Lover’s Dictionary, and the encyclopædic final section of David Grossman’s See Under: Love.
Williams’ plot hinges, in a satisfyingly complex way, upon deliberate false entries in the dictionary, reminiscent of the false passages in the books at the centers of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and José Saramago’s The History of the Siege of Lisbon. One of her protagonists is tasked with eliminating these entries from a dictionary, much as the character Cinoc, in Georges Perec’s Life a User’s Manual, works as a dictionary’s “word-killer,” though Cinoc targets obsolete rather than fake words. Since Williams’ novel, more than these others, is all about, and frequently composed of, rare and unusual words, her employment of these themes is particularly appropriate, and she is able to apply them in distinctive ways.
Though Williams’ chapter headings, starting with “A is for artful (adj.),” stress the alphabetical structure, the novel’s binary structure—alternating chapters set in the present and 1899—is more crucial and highly effective. The counterpointed relationships between the two stories—present/past, female/male, gay/straight, upstairs/downstairs and so on—which take place in the same institution and building, make for an absorbing and moving dual narrative.
Without resorting to supernatural connections, Williams sets up subtle links between her present and past characters. In an old photograph taken outside the building, Mallory, the modern protagonist, notes that her predecessor “must have been looking directly up at my window just as the picture was taken.” Although she is sitting with her romantic partner at the time, Mallory “propped the photograph in the centre of [her] desk, where usually an employee might have a photograph of their partner.” Similarly, her 1899 counterpart presciently imagines that “some poor clerk or printer’s devil” might in “five years? Ten years? A hundred?” be “tasked with winnowing out these entries,” just as Mallory has been.
In addition to the unusual words which appear in the fictional dictionary, the novel itself makes abundant use of a delightfully florid vocabulary. Language lovers will want to keep the OED handy as they learn to use such terms as “zarf,” “vulning,” and “apricide.” As you might expect from her linguistic enthusiasm, Williams has a knack for devising charmingly unexpected turns of phrase, such as “If ever a songbird was designed to glare, Dr. Rochfort-Smith’s specimen was that bird” or “It tasted of soap used by a despot with a secret.”
Nevertheless, The Liar’s Dictionary is not just a showcase for its author’s linguistic ingenuity. Its affecting characterizations, its absorbing plot, and even its vivid evocation of the largely forgotten but deadly 1899 explosion at Barking have much to offer the reader.
♦
Paul Cohen, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Texas State University, has written on literature, art, music, film, computing, pedagogy, and, for The Fortnightly Review, on ‘Pataphysics, Remy de Gourmont, portraiture in fiction and Tom McCarthy.
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Publication: Thursday, 14 January 2021, at 15:21.
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