Peter Robinson: Left here, outside a fitting room,
I’m suddenly aware
that the women swarming round me’…
Peter Robinson: ‘we were following the plough’s tractor tracks
in slushy ice where a salting of snow
here, as it fell, picked them out in white shadow
like dust …’
Peter Riley: ‘Peter engages us with moments and passages of his life, quite ordinary ones for the most part, calmly retailed in a language which can carry extensive implications. He does other things too, but I think these six poems particularly demonstrate his qualities as a poet of domesticity, and how much more than that he becomes as the poems pursue their courses.’
Rabindranath Tagore: ‘The night grows dark and the road lonely Fireflies gleam among the leaves. Who art thou that followest me with stealthy silent steps? Ah, I know; it is thy desire to relieve me of all my gains. I will not disappoint thee! For I still have something to my share and my fate has not cheated me of my all.’
Earthquake Triolet Quakes in China, the seaboard shelf. Whose faults are these? I think I know. Inside the house the windows shake. Some plaster falls. China quakes on the cupboard shelf. Whose faults are these: TV filling up with snow, some false all-clears some decades back. I think I know the hows — but whys… […]
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From ‘burning sage’:
sage brushes blue-grey leaves
once soft leaves, staining my hands moth-wing grey
now waiting, furled, rigid, waiting to flare
into nothing
Thursday, 14 February 2013
Michael Blackburn: ‘Of course, I may be suffering the same illusion as everyone else in the poetry ghetto, that there’s a way out, that we’re not just muttering to ourselves. I’m not bothered any more if that is the case but I still like the idea that someone, somewhere is taking a look at the poems and enjoying what they see. If the only way to make that happen is to use the latest technology and expect no payment, then why not? As Rimbaud said more than a century ago, “Il faut être absolument moderne”, so let us be absolutely modern.’
Tom Lowenstein: ‘This is an extract from a sequence of Notebooks and Fantasias in the voice of a late eighteenth-century poet who had just completed the composition of Kubla Khan. Although the identity of S.T. Coleridge obviously is implied, the work makes no attempt at biography or literary criticism. In the following passages, pseudo-Coleridge, either in person or in imagination, is walking in the Swiss mountains. The book contains many anachronisms.’
M. D. Armstrong: ‘The white dust higher!
The pikes are clustered like harbor-masts,
The chariot-wheels on the pavement thunder,
And the horses leap at the trumpet-blasts.’
Tom Lowenstein: ‘Buried in [John Collinson’s] Preface, Rack’s presence counts for nothing. He’s the ghost in the corpus. Once he has done service, this Norfolk weaver’s son (who’d made his living as a dyer), is penned up in a sentence. The book’s proclaimed author is a Church Patrician. While Rack exits, once he’d briefly entered, like a footman, in a single movement.’
Saturday, 20 October 2012
J. B. Bury: When historical methods of aesthetic have been perfected, there may be some chance of sifting out the Greek ideas in comparative purity; and it may be possible for the imagination, in some measure, to grasp the Greek world. The processes of analysis are slow, and our race shall have seen many generations of historians pass, and shall have celebrated many a grammarian’s funeral, before the most skilful navigator can touch the shores of “Hellas” and behold the smoke curl upwards from the hall of Euphrosyne, even then only in the distance.
Wednesday, 19 September 2012
Anthony Howell: “Prince was a Catholic, but his commitment as a writer was primarily to literature. Having been invited to chair the English department of Kingston University in Jamaica, he grew exasperated when students handed him manuscripts avowing their religious zeal. He said to me once, ‘Literature allows one to become emancipated from oneself.’”
Tuesday, 11 September 2012
James MacGuire: ‘For even as Dennis’ older son waited up at night for his father to appear, the rescue workers found Dennis’ body, on the third day after the attacks, beneath a beam just north of the South Tower. Laying close beside him was his friend, Bob Barnes, both of them identifiable by their Rescue 2 gear and the cladagh rings they wore.’
John Welch: ‘He is always in sight of death / Lifting high each careful unwebbed foot. / I notice – I cannot help it – how / It’s all to one purpose, this killing machine / With its concentrations of stillness.’ – From ‘Heron’.
The ‘infinitely expandable’ minimalism of Anthony Barnett.
Peter Riley: ‘Anthony Barnett’s is a very distinct brand of poetry, only tenuously connected to the work of his contemporaries, and to very few of them. To him the works of British and American poets at large, especially those gaining big sales and official endorsement, are simply contemptible – “lies”. They are lies because they are untrue to the nature of written language as a multiple instrument where sense includes silence and every item of meaning carries a load of echoes and exceptions, and they are untrue to their materials in experience and the world.’