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About KU’s Trollope Prize.
1. Central Park and three more new poems. By Tim Suermondt
2. The Pleasure of Ferocity. A review of Malika Moustadraf’s short stories. By Michelene Wandor
3. Pastmodern Art. By David Rosenberg
4. What Is Truth? By Alan Macfarlane
5. The Beatles: Yeah x 3. Fab books and films reviewed by Alan Wall
6. Two sequences of poems by David Plante, introduced by Anthony Howell
7. The Marriage by Hart’s Crane of Faustus and Helen by John Matthias
8. Young Wystan by Alan Morrison
9. Nothing Romantic Here. Desmond Egan reviews Donald Gardner
10. Parisian Poems, by César Vallejo, translated by César Eduardo Jumpa Sánchez.
…and much more, below in this column.
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 and Blind Summits
Previously: More below. Scroll down.
New to The Fortnightly Review? Our online series, with more than 2,000 items in its archive, is more than ten years old! So, unless you’re reading this in the state pen, you may never catch up, but YOU CAN START HERE: Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Big Noise in the Night: Film commentary by Simon Collings | Gli Ucelli and two more poems by Michael Anania | Interior and three more prose poems by Linda Black | For Britney (or whoever) by Fran Lock | The wages for reading is rage: Reflections on the Book Revolution in Texas. By Christopher Landrum | Selfies by Rupert M Loydell | The Loves of Marina Tsvetaeva by C.D.C. Reeve | My Mother’s Dress Shop by Jeff Friedman | The Bride’s Story. Grimms’ No. 40. An elaboration by W. D. Jackson | Poetry Notes: Early titles for 2022, by Peter Riley | Short Icelandic Fiction: Fresh Perspective (Nýtt sjónarhorn) by Aðalsteinn Emil Aðalsteinsson and The Face and Kaleidoscope by Gyrðir Elíasson | Exercises of memory: Prose poetry by Adam Kosan | Species of light and seven more poems by Mark Vincenz | Two Micro-fictions by Avital Gad-Cykman | Pictures, with Poems: A two-generation collaboration. Photographs by Laura Matthias Bendoly, with poems by John Matthias | In Famagusta, a revisit by Jonathan Gorvett | Shakespeare’s Merchant by Oscar Mandel | Toughs by Anthony Howell | Holding the desert, a sequence of poems by Richard Berengarten | Two pages by Michael Haslam | Contusion not Rind by Peter Larkin | Four poems by Katie Lehman | Blind summits, a sequence of poems with an audio track, by Peter Robinson | The Censor of Art by Samuel Barlow | Small Magazines, and their discontents (as of 1930) by Ezra Pound | Modern Artiques by Robert McAlmon | Two poems, with an audio track, from Heart Monologues by Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani | Blavatsky in violet: poetry by Alan Morrison | Everything that is the case: A review of John Matthias’s Some of Her Things by Peter Robinson | Khlystovki by Marina Tsvetaeva, newly translated by Inessa B. Fishbeyn and C. D. C. Reeve | A king and not a king, a poem by W. D. Jackson | Violet, an essay by John Wilkinson :: For much more, please consult our partial archive, below on this page.
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Time Out’s New York listings here.
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.
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By Roger Berkowitz, Juliet du Boulay, Denis Boyles, Stan Carey, H.R. Haxton, Allen M. Hornblum, Alan Macfarlane, Anthony O’Hear, Andrew Sinclair, Harry Stein, Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, and many others. Free access.
· James Thomson [B.V.]
Occ. Notes…
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.
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Anthony Howell: The new libertine in exile.
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Kate Hoyland: Inventing Asia, with Joseph Conrad and a Bible for tourists.
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Who is Bruce Springsteen? by Peter Knobler.
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Martin Sorrell on John Ashbery’s illumination of Arthur Rimbaud.
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The beauty of Quantitative Easing.
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Prohibition’s ‘original Progressives’.
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European populism? Departments
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A resumé of Resistance.
A Fortnightly Review.
Curriculum Violette
by Robert Crawford
with a translation in French by Paul Malgrati
Molecular Press 2021 | 88 pp paperback | £8
By IAN SEED.
Violette Szabo’s life is both ordinary and extraordinary. The first section of the book opens with some bare facts:
NAME
Violette Reine Elizabeth Bushell
D.O.B.
26 6 21
ADDRESS
18 Burnley Road
Stockwell,
London SW9
It then moves to offering us its first brushstrokes of a life not untypical of a young woman of that time:
DATE
late July 1938 (time for a dance)
WEATHER
A chance of heat but not as good as France
We are given a list of stations that Violette would have known, along with more poetic detail, such as ‘Stockwell (tobacco smell; the tick and whip of skipping ropes)’. The ‘Assessment’ of her at that time is: ‘Lively, pretty girl; sporty; good French; black hair; no highbrow; devil-may-care’. She is awoken by:
The ‘flora and fauna’ of her life subtly allude to the birth of a romance:
She carries, among other things, a cigarette case and lipstick.
She now has a telephone number: ‘Bayswater 6188’. It is documentary details such as this which can be most poignant of all because they remind us so much of the transitory nature of all our lives.
There is another list of stations, which count amongst their midst: ‘Preston (milkless tea)’, ‘Carstairs Junction (a Polish sergeant’s smile)’, and ‘Crianlarich (red coals on waiting-room fire)’. She is on her way to Scotland for military training.
Violette’s husband is killed near El Alamein, she has a daughter, she joins the Secret Service. More documentary facts, impressionistic details, repeated motifs (‘Address’, ‘Date’, ‘Weather’, ‘Assessment’, ‘Stations’, ‘Things Carried’, ‘Terrain’, and so on), and quotations from prayers and excerpts from literature which will have comforted and inspired Violette, continue to be juxtaposed as we follow her into France (‘swastikas / the Eiffel Tower / the Madeleine’) and eventually to Ravensbrück.
Violette is a unique and ultimately heroic individual but she is also everywoman, showing us what we are all potentially capable of. She did not live to bear witness to her own life, but this haunting and poignant book challenges us to imagine and relive it for ourselves.
♦
Ian Seed’s collections include New York Hotel (2018), nominated by Mark Ford for TLS Book of the Year; Identity Papers (2016), and Makers of Empty Dreams (2014), all from Shearsman. His most recent chapbook is Distances (Red Ceilings, 2018). Translations include Bitter Grass, from the Italian of Gëzim Hajdari (Shearsman, 2020), and The Thief of Talant (Wakefield Press, 2016), the first translation of Pierre Reverdy’s Le voleur de Talan. He is a contributing editor of The Fortnightly Review and teaches Creative Writing at the University of Chester.
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Publication: Sunday, 13 June 2021, at 09:34.
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