Alan Ross is the editor of the London Magazine. The second volume of his autobiography, Coastwise Lights, was published in 1988.
Peering through bougainvillea that sits On their heads like mob caps, Monkeys set up advance posts.
Soon, hands to ears, as if telephoning, They establish links, At pre-arranged signals swarming
In formation. Temples’ bronze domes Attract them. They pick up stones With their tails
Hurling them like cricketers, Wizened businessmen On a company spree.
They take over the place, Noisy...
Entering my father’s old office In Bankshall Street, the cries of paan sellers And Hooghley steamer sirens Drifting through shuttered windows, I feel like a thief –
The desks in the same places, The punkahs revolving, peons on their stations, But the whole room shrunken, As if by his absence, an empire meanwhile And himself come to grief.
SmokingGazing...
The war is a long way back and young people take little interest in it, or in the feel of what was being said and written at the time. Lawrence, Yeats and Eliot go marching on, attracting...
Derek Walcott is now 50 years old, but there is none of the placidity or mellowing of middle age in The Star-Apple Kingdom. If Naipaul is the great novelist of the colonial experience, Walcott...
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