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Index: Poetry & Fiction

from ‘On the Road to Lviv’.

By CHRISTOPHER MERRILL. ◊ he faithful chanting in Armenian At vespers in Ivano-Frankivsk, shaped The way I posed for a photograph outside The church—between a pair of Christmas trees Festooned with lights, which framed a cross or khachkar, Altar, and iconostasis sculpted Out of a block of river ice. Natalya Would add this photograph to […]

A stubble like stars.

(after Jaccottet) By PETER LARKIN. ◊ had been reading Philippe Jaccottet in French and English for many years, so was particularly moved to come across his last published poems (La Clarté Notre-Dame) in the version translated by John Taylor. I wondered whether I could work with these texts in their English form in some way […]

from ‘The Runiad’ books 3 & 4

< from Books 1 & 2 A Fortnightly Serial. By ANTHONY HOWELL. ◊ ANTHONY HOWELL writes: My own romantic notion of myself has encouraged me to attempt an epic. It will have 24 books and be the same length as the Odyssey. Each book will be approximately 24 pages long, with three seven-line verses per page. I […]

from White Ivory, chapters 7 & 8

< chapters 5 & 6    chapters 9 & 10 > A Fortnightly Serial By ALAN WALL. • Chapter Seven Readings he first thing Will did when he got back home was to take his one remaining copy of Kicking Away the Ladder from the shelf. He stood by the window and turned it over […]

Alice B. and Gertrude in their photographs.

and two more new poems. By 3/4KYMBERLY TAYLOR. ♦ Alice B. and Gertrude in Their Photographs ear T, my sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea, into our photographs this hard line of distance, simply! Just between us and all ours. A photographing we will go, Basket along, dear pooch with curlicues. Rue de Fleurus’ garden […]

from White Ivory, chapters 5 & 6

< chapters 3 & 4        chapters 7 & 8 > A Fortnightly Serial By ALAN WALL. • Chapter Five Will’s Lecture E HAD FASTENED up on the wall, as usual, his reproduction of Francis Bacon’s painting of Miss Muriel Belcher. And alongside it his Head VI of 1948, one of those human mouths […]

The goddess of emptiness.

By Jean Frémon. Translated by John Taylor.   E WERE ALONE in the gardens of the hotel, awaiting fruit cocktails that were not arriving. After the many years that I have come to this country, I should know that time is not the same here as elsewhere, that showing one’s impatience is the height of […]

from White Ivory, chapters 3 & 4

< chapters 1 & 2     chapters 5 & 6 > A Fortnightly Serial.   By ALAN WALL. • Chapter Three The Blues Y THE TIME Will’s train was half way to London the following morning, his son Charlie was entering his supervisor’s room in a large concrete block. She had the typescript of the […]

from White Ivory, chapters 1 & 2

chapters 3 & 4 > A Fortnightly Serial. By ALAN WALL. • Chapter One. Attraction WO CARS ARE moving towards each other on a winter night. It is a country road and there is no roadside illumination. Only the carlights. These beams swerve and shudder and prod the tarmac, the grass, the trees. Occasionally they […]

Poems from Prière (1924)

By Pierre Jean Jouve. Translated by Will Stone.   Snows he wind of afternoon on the highest day of the year breath, coldness and warm impetuosity. The snows cannot loosen their dark noose, the pink mountain in peace reveals its rocks, makes known its immensity, informs all of its immortal death. The sky is forbidden […]

Immortal Wreckage

And Four More New Poems By Will Stone.   Immortal Wreckage A souvenir of Old Vézelay hat silence could have once existed, to keep the doves so still in their niches. The wire hum of the cloister bats ushered in the last dark-robed monk who had climbed along decayed walls of fortress towers, massive and […]

Some guts

By SIMON COLLINGS. with collages by John Goodby. ◊ Now how about a night-cap before turning in Mr Greb, it is Greb isn’t it, or perhaps you fancy something stronger? —Ann Quin, Berg So, for example, if I should say, in a letter to a friend, ‘Our brother Tom has just got the piles,’ a […]

The campus novel.

Fortnightly Fiction. By PETER ROBINSON. Some time ago it was the fashion, and perhaps it is so still, to append to the title of a novel the words: a true story. Well, that is a little innocent deception … —Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. UPPOSE YOU’LL be putting us all in your next one,’ I found myself […]

Snapshot, Sachsenhausen

and three more new poems. By Peter Blair. • Snapshot, Sachsenhausen his is me in the execution trench — under the automatic gallows in front of the bullet-stopper, knotting a silk scarf as you shoot, suspend and capture me. In that panopticon, we can’t have missed the concrete obelisk and fractured phial, the hanging-pole that […]

Charlie Boy and Captain Fitz.

A One-Act Play. By ALAN WALL. ♦ Cast Charles Darwin Robert Fitzroy Primate Skull Samuel Wilberforce Thomas Henry Huxley Guide Visitor ♦ The scene is Down House in Kent. Charles Darwin’s study. There is a miscellany of books papers, prints, insects, slides, rocks, samples, a microscope, tweezers and magnifying glasses, as there was in his […]