Poem Of The Week: A Point of Logic By Kingsley Amis (1922-1995)
A Point of Logic
Love is a finding out:
Our walk to the bedroom
(Hand in hand, eye to eye)
Up a stair of marble
Or decently scrubbed boards,
As much as what we do
In our abandonment,
Teaches us who we are
And what we are, and what
Life itself is.
Therefore put out the light,
Lurch to the bare attic
Over buckets of waste
And labouring bodies;
Leave the door wide open
And fall on each other,
Clothes barely wrenched aside;
Stay only a minute,
Depart separately,
And use no names.
Kingsley Amis’ cold-blooded, misanthropic examination of what ‘coupling’…
Exploring Catalan Literature - Part Two: The Past Defines The Present
Understanding any individual and their weltanschauung requires that we have an objective and truly holistic appreciation of their lived experience and the forces, both historical and contemporary, acting upon them. The same axiomatic truth applies to a country, and its cultural outpourings. Though Catalonia is not a country, but an autonomous state within the borders of modern-day Spain, if we are to understand its literature and those making it, it is imperative that we comprehend its past and the factors…
World Poetry Day: How Poetry Can Help You Learn Another Language
From the great fall of Humpty Dumpty to the beautiful collection of written words by T.S. Eliot, poetry certainly does hold a significant place in the world of English literacy.
To mark World Poetry Day today, Daniele Saccardi, a language expert at Preply, has highlighted five ways of how immersing yourself in poetry can help you learn a new language.
Encourages engagement and self-awareness
With devices such as alliteration and rhyming being used in a typical piece…
An Interview With Barry Jones
Having recently reviewed The Book of Niall for our readers, I had an insatiable desire to delve further into its paradoxical penumbrae. Given that its author is a magician by profession, interviewing Barry Jones was an unmissable opportunity to break The Magic Circle’s most sacred rule …never tell the audience how the trick was done. The legerdemain, or ‘trick’ in this case being his sublimely scintillating debut graphic novel, and therefore not something to trouble the venerated guardians of illusion…
Exploring Catalonian Literature: Introducing A New Seven-Part Series
Honoré de Balzac wrote, ‘Reading brings us unknown friends’. Many of my own such friendships have come about thanks to the beneficence of serendipitous chance, or the imperative urge to engage with minds free from the calcified, culturally normative walls of my own. My book shelves are a heterogenous collection of authors from around the world, echoing Emily Dickinson’s famous quote – ‘There is no frigate like a book to take us lands far away’.
Ann Morgan in her wonderful…
Just Desserts? : The Killing Song By Lesley McEvoy
This is the second in the Dr Jo McCready series and it cements the leading character as a force to be reckoned with. A Forensic Psychologist offers the police invaluable help in identifying and catching killers. Jo McCready is better than most; she has a particular talent - she can study people, yes, but she takes it so much further. She can see what the murderers see. Visiting a crime scene she can think as they do, immersing herself in…
Ribbons Of Song: Swimming Between Islands By Charlotte Eichler
The narrator of many of Charlotte Eichler’s poems could be a small girl. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, she tells stories, and those stories are delivered with an ingenuous disregard for boundaries of metaphorical interpretation. This is fitting: unselfconscious, children do not fear the making of bold connections.
The pyrotechnic brilliance of Eichler’s poetry resides in leap-making, a fearless embracing of the unlimited possibilities of form and style, but most, of figurative suggestion: the gorgeously visual tercets of the opening…
Poem Of The Week: The Dictator And His Wife Watching Guernica By Katrina Dybzynska
The Dictator and His Wife Watching Guernica
We have seen this painting together.
I saw symbols falling apart.
Deformed pigeon, the parody of peace.
Cracks, chaos, avalanche effect beyond a turning point.
He perceived fame beyond death.
A story of power, strength, justification.
A narrative in which victims are believed to be animals.
I looked at their shock: death always seems to come as a surprise.
Amazed that it is happening now, that we did not bribe
our way out, that there are no second chances.
He noticed the military…
'How Do You Embrace A Paradox? You Let It Go!' : The Book Of Niall By Barry Jones
All authors of fiction are magicians of one variety or another, for they conjure up fake worlds and employ deft legerdemain in the form of skilful literary devices conceived with a single intent…to deceive the reader. The pages of a novel are an illusory alternate dimension in which fiction passes for fact. Picasso, a master of optical deception once said, 'Art is the lie that enables us to realise the truth.' Even that most faithful of literary genres, Dirty Realism,…
…A Holiday From Life : Still Lives, By Reshma Ruia
Some things are only ever truly comprehensible when viewed from a highly specific vantage point. Authors, as artists, understand the potency of well executed anamorphic legerdemain as a literary device. Such a technique simultaneously shatters a reader’s subjective cynosure, whilst empowering that of the author’s fictional chief protagonist.
Reshma Ruia’s debut short story collection, Mrs Pinto Drives to Happiness forces her reader to interpret the lived reality of her vividly drawn characters, not through our own censorious normative bias, but…
‘Changeless Elegance’ : The Wonderful World of James Herriot
Alf Wight...know him? Author of ten books which recount his experiences as a vet in the Yorkshire Dales. Of course, I really mean James Herriot, or perhaps I don’t. I really do mean Alf Wight, a modest, unassuming vet, based in Thirsk, who wrote the books under the pseudonym, James Herriot. They have become timeless classics; books which are described in this compilation as capturing ‘a life of endless interest and variety’. Naturally the character of James Herriot is based…
Poem Of The Week: Fish By Louise J. Jones
Fish
I check the oven; fish flesh
is lucent pale.
It’ll cook its way towards brick pink.
Eighteen, on a wharf in Instanbul,
I ate the freshest, whitest fish
I’d ever seen.
Fifty-eight, mourning
my mother in St Ives,
I got the same surprise again;
a piece of hake shone
in the mollusced
harbour light.
I remember Mum, of a weekday night,
cooking us cod in parsley sauce
with mash and Birdseye peas.
I carry in dished-up plates,
set them, wide and warm,
amongst a contented din;
nowadays, it’s trout, dill sauce,
sweet potato, green…
Poem Of The Week: The Displaced Persons Camp By Philip Gross
The Displaced Persons Camp
Lean vigilant faces, sleepless eyes
look up. They sit like children grown
unnaturally, cramped into desks in rows,
and submit to the language of strangers, a stern
new ordering of tenses: is, was,
will be. ‘Repeat now, after me.’ Each voice
lifts towards clarity, and breaks: waves
on a north shore, a dull bafflement of loss.
‘The subtler points - should, might have been -
will come in time.’ The class dismissed,
they are free to sit, or pace the bare
perimeter. Willowherb flares from the dust.
It is…
‘A Kind Of Magic’: The Bullet That Missed By Richard Osman
It’s amazing how things start and how expectations are met or even exceeded. The first of the three novels by Richard Osman was funny and quirky and I loved it.
But now, ‘It had all seemed a bit of a jape.’ Those few words could sum up the trio of books, because The Bullet the Missed, the third opus, is actually far more poignant than you would have ever expected when you read page one of the first. The gang…
Poem Of The Week: Simplex Munditiis By Ben Jonson (1572-1637)
Simplex Munditiis
STILL to be neat, still to be drest,
As you were going to a feast;
Still to be powder'd, still perfumed:
Lady, it is to be presumed,
Though art's hid causes are not found,
All is not sweet, all is not sound.
Give me a look, give me a face
That makes simplicity a grace;
Robes loosely flowing, hair as free:
Such sweet neglect more taketh me
Than all th' adulteries of art;
They strike mine eyes, but not my heart.
The artfulness of…
Cathedrals Chapels Organs Choirs A Personal View By Sarah Macdonald
Like Sarah Macdonald, I used to write a column for an organisation on the other side of the pond: The Society for the Conservation of Anglican Music, titled ‘The View from Overseas’. So, I know how hard it can be to find suitable and relevant columns, not that it seems a problem for Macdonald.
I wrote in my capacity as the founding editor of Cathedral Music, a magazine published for the Friends of Cathedral Music now the Cathedral Music Trust. However,…
Vaseem Khan Named Chair Of The 20th Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival
Harrogate International Festivals has revealed the Festival Programming Chair and Special Guests as the world’s largest and most prestigious celebration of crime fiction, the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2023.
Crime novelist Vaseem Khan will be acting as this year’s Festival Programming Chair, following in the footsteps of Ian Rankin, Elly Griffiths, Denise Mina, and Lee Child.
Vaseem is known for his Baby Ganesh Agency series set in modern Mumbai and the Malabar House historical crime…
Nature Does Abhor A Vacuum: Funeral Song By Robert Edric
The title sets the tone for this, the last novel of the Song Cycle Quartet and the opening pages continue the nostalgic feel with a Raymond Chandler style narration: Philip Marlowe seems to be still alive and kicking, albeit in Hull.
Leo Rivers, a Private Investigator, is employed by local businessman, Ray Dixon, to deliver £10k in used notes, to a blackmailer, in return for ‘the rest of a roll of film’ – photos of his daughter. It is supposed to…
Poem Of The Week: Sneak By Geraldine Mitchell
Sneak
Age comes, and then
infirmity, not beating
on the door with knotty
stick, announcing its
arrival with due pomp
and medication, but
insinuating noxious
vapours into lung and heart,
round knee and hip, curling
through the brain like smoke,
invisible yet choking with
an acrid autumn smell.
Irish poet, Geraldine Mitchell’s poem speaks to those of us of certain years for whom age is gradually withering our physical presence, either in appearance or internal function, or both. The process is cruel: ‘Sneak’ is an apposite term for the slyness of decline,…
Spider Season: I Wanted To Be Close To You By Katie Oliver
It is easy to be misled by the titles of Katie Oliver’s short stories: archly simple, the received effect is diversionary, inclined to blindside the reader towards satisfying conventional expectations. And up to a point they do, like bottles of HP Sauce, describe their contents.
But Oliver’s universe is surreal, fetid, and teeming with organic purpose, as though to reify the intrinsic meaning of the title tenfold, to make an irony of its apparent directness. ‘Together we Grow’, a dark excursion…
Prose Poem Of The Week: At The City Gates By Oz Hardwick
At the City Gates
When the city gates open, dreams flood out, like dockers on
bicycles when the four o’clock siren sings freedom, oiled chains
whirring like bees. It’s been an age since anything worked, but
there are grooves worn in blistered tarmac that you can see if
you kick away the residue from the last high tide, and when you
drop the needle the whole world spins like a charity shop album,
playing a song everyone danced to when you were a teenager,
though not…
Terror Stalks The Streets: The Runaway Family By Diney Costeloe
This novel has found its way to the top of the ever-increasing pile by the bed. I hadn’t even noticed it but when it appeared, it was one of those I couldn’t ignore. I love good historical fiction and this didn't disappoint, although it is not a cosy read for a winter’s night. Much has been written, both fiction and faction, about the persecution of the Jews in the years prior to World War Two, and it was on 27…
Review: The Peregrine By J. A. Baker
In J. A. Baker’s dazzling work of nature writing, The Peregrine (1967), the first encounter with a bird is not, surprisingly, with ‘the peregrine’, rather with a nightjar. Baker compares the nightjar’s song to wine.
Its song is like the sound of a stream of wine spilling from a height into a deep and booming cask. It is an odorous sound, with a bouquet that rises to the quiet sky. In the glare of day it would seem thinner and drier,…
Poem Of The Week: Behind Closed Doors By Jane Draycott
Behind Closed Doors
'This profession requires an unruffled temper…'
Titian, d. 1556 of plague
Night in the nation’s gallery,
an avenue of over-branching canvases
walked only by security:
Andromeda in chains, Callisto
exiled to the silent universe – the gods,
their overworld, their club.
Outside, contagion’s on the streets
again, bent on self-replication. Tomorrow
they’ll let us enter one by one,
insist we keep our distance as Actaeon
might have learned who strayed too near
Diana, perfect android, immortal machine.
Not something he could have imagined,
an afternoon in the forest, his flesh
transformed, his body…
A Message From The Dead: We Are The Weather By Jim McElroy
The title of Irish writer Jim McElroy’s remarkable recent pamphlet for smith|doorstop does much to corroborate that sense of unanimity with the natural world that is a prevailing feature of his poetic métier. As mood darkens in accordance with a rural landscape that is sodden, encloistered in sepulchral light and mostly resistant to aesthetic considerations, our thoughts turn, perhaps too readily, to the black hills of R. S. Thomas’ godless breed of Welsh upland farmer. And if there is thin…
Lemn Sissay OBE Headlines Leeds Lit Fest 2023
Leeds Lit Fest is back! Returning for its fifth year, the city’s award-winning festival of words and thought will take place across a diverse range of the city’s venues and aims to bring together, and help develop, the city’s literary scene, with writers, poets and performers from the UK and beyond. This year’s festival is supported by Leeds 2023, the citywide celebration of culture which launched on Saturday, and will interweave themes of untold stories, radical acts, playful adventures and…
Poem Of The Week: January By R. S. Thomas (1913-2000)
January
The fox drags its wounded belly
Over the snow, the crimson seeds
Of blood burst with a mild explosion
Soft as excrement, bold as roses.
Over the snow that feels no pity,
Whose white hands can give no healing,
The fox drags its wounded belly.
The Anglican priest of the Welsh hills who gave laconic succour to dying farmers and to remote congregations offers little of hope or redemption in this short, powerful poem of winter’s unforgiving and brutal landscape. The poetry of R. S. Thomas…
The Voice Of The Lion: The Attic Child By Lola Jaye
Forgotten histories! Today, much is made of the past, often about the atrocities perpetrated by colonialists. These stories should never be ignored or forgotten although times were different, expectations were different and actions which are thought abhorrent today, were accepted as normal. We cannot change history and should not try to rewrite it but it is my belief that we should learn from these stories and ensure that such maltreatment, such behaviour, is not repeated. The end of The Attic…
Books: Act Of Oblivion – Robert Harris
Whose ‘Oblivion’? Is the ‘Act’ a form of action performed by a person? Is it a euphemism for murder?
We soon find out as Robert Harris’ tale unfolds. He must be so grateful to the Parliament of 1660 for giving him such a theatrical title for his new novel. Perhaps royalties are due.
Just in case you were unaware of events following the English Civil War and the subsequent Restoration, the Act of Oblivion pardoned those who had fought as Republicans, except…
An Interview With Gillian Godden - Author Of Diamond Geezer
Gillian Godden describes herself as ‘an Indie author and a full time NHS Key worker at a local inner city medical centre in East Hull, East Yorkshire’. Her first novel Dangerous Games was published in 2019 and the first two books in her latest Diamond series arrived on the shelves in 2022. The p.ublished group of online newspapers recently caught up with her:
Do you have a particular time and place to write?
Writing usually depends on when the plot comes to…