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A Bronx Childhood
I return every four or five years to my old neighbourhood and home borough, the Bronx, out of a sense of curiosity and a...
Love and Friendship
Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995 Edited by Avril Horner and Anne Rowe, Chatto and Windus, 2015, 666pp, £25 (hardback)
Letters figure prominently...
My London
I have lived all over the world, from Kenya and New York to Florence and the Cotswolds, with the romantic traveller’s notion that there...
An Exploding Goldmine
From Bow to Biennale: Artists of the East London Group, David Buckman, Francis Boutle Publishers, 2012, 382pp, £30 (paperback)
When David Buckman’s From Bow to...
Cliché as ‘Responsible speech’: Geoffrey Hill
Geoffrey Hill, who died on 20th June 2016, was a great poet, a major poet. To celebrate him, we have pulled from our archive an essay...
Through the Witch Window
Soon I’ll be lucent, at your witch window,
hand raised ready to knock. There are no lies
hidden between my toes; I am true
down to the...
Chevening
This is the real England, I say, so what do you think?
It’s a place of trees; of apple, pear, cherry and plum.
In the gaps...
Here Because We’re Here (again)
Poetry of the Second World War: An International Anthology, edited and introduced by Desmond Graham, Vintage, 2011, 320pp., £12.99 (paperback)
When A Beau Goes In
When...
Sibelius
It’s January. A swan’s wing overhead
reminds you of his fifth
but also of his death, that skein
breaking away to circle him
as if to announce what...
Pwyll and Rhiannon, from The Mabinogi
It’s little more than a bump in the land, a footnote
in the catalogue of hills, crags and ridges,
felt as an ache in the thighs,...
The Shopping Trolley
The kids fought over pushing it to the top of the hill, to their ‘launch pad’ above the shopping centre carpark. It was a...
An Everyday Story of Hydrography
‘No one’s interested so I gave it to Pete the Gardener’. As my grandmother aged, Pete the gardener gained the contents of what would...
Low Altitude
Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure.
--------------------------------------- — Rumi
I fly at a delicately-low altitude
You feel it viscerally in your soul
------and your...
Second Sight
He’s come to see me off.
Limps up the platform after me.
I lose sight of him while I find my seat
opposite the young boy who’ll...
Kintsukuroi
--The cracked bowl that I mean to repair everyday
keeps getting neglected by my secret awe for bone china
----------and its story of unbreaking.
--There were happier...
The Real Thing
Derek Hill: A Centenary Exhibition, The Redfern Gallery, London, 9 – 16 May 2016
In 1961 Bryan Robertson, the innovative and dynamic director of the...
The Whales
Any day now, they will rise again
through their cauldron of green bubbles –
the gulls lifting off and banking
before the black humps of their backs
slice...
From a Hotel Lobby
The Hotel Years, Joseph Roth, translated by Michael Hofmann, Granta, 2016, 288pp, £16.99 (hardback)
For Joseph Roth, the twenty years after 1919, until his death...
Lieutenant Schmidt’s Ideal Lady
The Lady at the Kiev Racecourse
A new century not long begun:
a young man, unhappily married
and between trains, is at a loose end
on a...
On St Cecilia’s Day
Stop listening to that music
and hear instead
what the dead are saying
who were buried on this day
seven years or sixteen or,
if you insist on entering
the...
The Death of the Literary Patron
During a recent drive-by of the Saatchi Gallery, in Duke of York Square, I found myself pondering the good fortune of such artists as...
Hell is Other Irish People
The Dirty Dust, Mártín Ó’Cadhain, translated by Alan Titley, Yale University Press, 2015, 328pp., £16.99 (hardcover)
‘Unless the clay is in the mouth the singer’s...
The Abstract and the Concrete
The operas of Pietro Mascagni have enjoyed a revival in recent years at the festivals of Britain and Ireland. Alongside the inevitable productions of...