Charles Tomlinson Selected Poems 1951-1974 was published last year. An Arts Council exhibition of his poems and graphics can be seen at Brunel University from 19 November.
The offscape, the in-folds, secreted Water-holes in the boles of trees, Abandoned bits, this door of water On the wood’s floor (knock with the breath And enter a world reverted, a catacomb Of branching ways where the roots splay): Edges are centres: once you have found Their lines of force, the least of gossamers...
Their voices rang through the winter trees: they were speaking and yet it seemed they sang, the trunks a hall of victory.
And what is that and where? Though we come to it rarely, the sense of all that we might be conjures the place from air.
Is it the mind, then? It is the mind received, assumed into a season forestial in the absence of all leaves.
Their voices rang through the winter trees...
In a recent radio programme, Simon Armitage and Glyn Maxwell, two of the most prominent of the New Generation poets, retraced the journey undertaken by Auden and MacNeice in Letters From Iceland...
One of the finest things in Donald Davie’s Under Briggflatts is a sustained, learned and densely implicative comparison of two poems about horses: Edwin Muir’s well-known,...
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Landor wrote: ‘Many, although they believe they discover in a contemporary the qualities which elevate him above the rest, yet hesitate to acknowledge it; part, because they are fearful of...
Perhaps all verse translation must begin and end with a version of the Aeneid, or with an essentially Virgilian concept of art’s relation to society? In these islands, the first translator...
The title poem of St Kilda’s Parliament is about a local institution ‘quite unlike Westminster’, a gathering ‘by interested parties to discuss the day’s work and any...
‘It is strange,’ Charles Tomlinson writes, ‘to have met the innovators of one’s time only when age had overtaken them.’ The innovators to whom he refers are those...
John Felstiner’s Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu is an unusual, honest and enterprising book, but ultimately something of a disappointment. Its title suggests a...
The Parisian Surrealists appear to have taken their games-playing very seriously. Ritual imitations of the creative act – involving the practice of automatic writing, a deep faith in the...
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