Poetry
-
Some have argued that Auden was a victim of his own naivety regarding the prospect of impending war. A few days before its declaration and while on a Greyhound bus at the end of that 1939 “honeymoon” with Kallman, he had written home to England: “There is a radio on this coach, so that every hour or so, one has a violent pain in one’s stomach as the news comes on. By the time you get this, I suppose, we shall know one way or the other.”August 29, 2024
16 mins
-
John Thewall is released from prison with his hands damaged from torture. Coleridge and Sara are conflicted as to whether it is safe to let him stay in the country with them and he is asked to leave.August 29, 2024
17 mins
-
Like the soul itself, the imaginal conversation both traverses the boundary of death and intimates enduring mortal realities. The omission of question marks in the interrogatives points towards one locus of pathos in the poem, our awareness of such interactions’ limitations.August 29, 2024
11 mins
The latest
-
Though such irony is not the book’s dominant tone it serves to remind us that O’Brien is not a poet who takes himself too seriously. Humour is a welcome and recurrent element, reminiscent perhaps of the “comic relief” in Macbeth’s “porter” scene.August 25, 2024
6 mins
-
These are interesting and valuable poems to ponder in times when little country churches are put up for sale as bed-and-breakfast investments or to create a capital fund for bishops to do new things, while paying reparations for abusive clergy. Or perhaps it is the last of the nuns’ religious houses, since they are no more.August 25, 2024
9 mins
