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Index: Notes & Comment

Twin cities.

Saturday, 5 September 2020

Michelene Wandor: ‘There are some wonderful pieces. Ed Vuillamy provides a vivid picture of the kaleidoscope that was Notting Hill in the ’60s, made all the sharper by his personal anecdotes. Tom Dyckhoff’s essay on the O2 (Greenwich) is pointed and illuminating.  ‘

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Just a smack at Auden.

Tuesday, 16 June 2020

Alan Wall: ‘What Sansom discovers in the stanzas of this poem is a fair bit of confusion. Auden didn’t know what would become of the world (who did?) and has become intolerant of his own previous facility in diagnosing the world’s ills.’

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The significance and frailty of Raymond Crump.

Tuesday, 9 June 2020

Nigel Wheale: ‘I must have puzzled over Crump’s poems when I first saw copies of The English Intelligencer in 1968. My teacher, Roger Langley, was intensively coaching me, post-A level, for the Cambridge Entry exams. I was sent a few gratis numbers, having tried to join that tightly corresponding, mimeographed circle, but had been politely declined membership, by Andrew Crozier — I was just a callow sixth-former, after all.’

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Ottomania: three ‘globalist’ Turkish books.

Monday, 25 May 2020

. Generations, Diasporas, and Translations. A Fortnightly Review.   Ayse Papatya Bucak The Trojan War Museum W.W. Norton & Co. | 192pp | £9.99 $15.99 . Kaya Genç The Lion and the Nightingale I.B. Tauris | 208pp | £17.99 $24.95 . Haydar Ergülen Pomegranate Garden Parthian | 100pp |£8.19  $10.99  By MATT A. HANSON. . […]

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On Women.

Monday, 30 March 2020

Natalia Ginzburg: ‘I have met so many women, and now I always find something worthy of commiseration in every single one of them, some kind of trouble, kept more or less secret, and more or less big: the tendency to fall down the well and find there a chance for suffering, which men do not know about — maybe because they have a much stronger health or they are smarter in forgetting about themselves and fully identifying with their jobs, they are more assertive and actual owners of their own body, and of their life, and are freer in general.’ (Nicoletta Asciuto, trans.)

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Irony, ambiguity and London sleaze.

Thursday, 19 March 2020

Anthony Howell: ‘Bathurst is excellent as the gloomy, grieving poet who becomes savagely critical of dates and dining later in the evening. Rebecca Johnson is fascinating as the dying woman who becomes a wraith who is then transformed into the potential flame for an affair which might or might not be reignited by lunch later.’

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Keeping in step.

Sunday, 1 March 2020

Alan Price: ‘Anthony Howell has chosen to write in a deliberately discursive style – he says so on the book’s back cover. Yet I did feel that his own “omelette” contained an excess of ingredients. The book begins to develop itchy feet.’

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Eugene Dubnov, 1949–2019.

Wednesday, 26 February 2020

Anne Stevenson: ‘I suspect it was this personal, Romantic, very un-English sense of an enduring or eternal existence underlying Dubnov’s intense preoccupation with his own life that rendered his work inaccessible to many of his ‘post-modern’ contemporaries. His poems, however, convinced me that our mutual translations deserved an English publisher.’

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The Perturbation of Baruch.

Tuesday, 21 January 2020

Anthony O’Hear: ‘This linking of the cosmic with the temporal, of the elevated with the lowly and the demotic, even the sordid, and of the well-intentioned with the ill-thought out, even the evil, permeates Baruch as it does much of Hill’s later work.’

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The marital subtext.

Tuesday, 29 October 2019

Michelene Wandor: ‘”State of the Union” is on the opposite, more public, side of the marital spectrum: Tom and Louise meet in a dreary, virtually empty, Kentish Town pub before they visit a therapist to discuss their marriage. I watched first because a friend recommended it, and was gripped by the springy, bantering interplay of the dialogue, the marvellously intimate, subtle, nuanced close-up performances and the careful, unob(and unin)trusive direction. End of story? Well, not quite.’

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Rankine’s uncomfortable citizenship.

Tuesday, 24 September 2019

Michelene Wandor: ‘This book does not make for comfortable reading; it may be cathartic for some, because of its passion. It may challenge others to think about their own ethnic place in their world. Some may find it too uncomfortable to confront. One reviewer called it ‘an unsettled hybrid’. It is also unsettling.’

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Freewheeling.

Monday, 2 September 2019

Anthony Howell: ‘This is likely to be a freewheeling article, reviewing books written ages ago and works which have recently come out, and delving into poetry as well as prose, prose by poets, fiction as well as autobiography, and considering publishing houses as well as their books.’

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In Fabric.

Monday, 19 August 2019

Simon Collings: ‘[Peter Strickland’s] new film revolves around a haunted red dress. Sheila works as a bank clerk. She’s a single mum, separated from her husband and raising their teenage son Vince. She’s looking for a new relationship, through the lonely hearts ads in the local paper, and buys a red dress, in a sale at the local department store, to wear on a date. It proves a fatal choice.’

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Sequence, consequence and the random.

Sunday, 18 August 2019

Michelene Wandor: ‘This collection…deserves to be read over time, starting at whatever page, or defying the publishers and reading the first (last) collection first, and the first (last) last. The idea of sequence has consequences and the random cannot solve the conundrum of how to read.’

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T-units and n-grams.

Tuesday, 13 August 2019

Davina Allison: ‘To suggest that academic writing is anything other than syntactically complex and lexically rich is to deny writers access to a proper understanding of the academic sentence. This, in turn, denies them access to the knowledge and skills that correlate to expertise.’

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