Christopher Reid’s poetry is published by Faber. Katerina Brac is out in paperback.
Neddy Bumwhistle jolts awake in the dark. Insomnia’s big comic-strip exclamation mark twitches like defective neon above his head. At least he’s in the familiar slum of his own bed: no body beside him; nobody, perhaps, for miles around . . . But hang about, what’s that weird, squeaky-bedspring sound? He’s heard it before....
You’ve zoomed through it often enough on the long grind north, the grim dash south – why not take a break? Slip off the motorway at any one of ten tangled junctions and poke your nose, without compunction, into the unknown. Get systematically lost. At the first absence of a signpost, opt for the least...
After Machado
Dear common flies, ubiquitous and greedy, how well you conjure up those times that have gone.
Old flies guzzling like bees in April, old flies launching raids on my new-born head.
Flies of my early homebound boredoms, those summer afternoons when I first learned to dream.
And in the hated classroom, flies that whizzed past as we hit out at them for love of their flight –
...
As Seamus Heaney’s fame grew, and ‘the N-word’ (Nobel) added lustre, he attracted intrusive commentary. There were ‘feminist uppercuts’ and ‘Marxist flesh wounds’ from the academics. The...
Between leaving school and going to Cambridge, Ted Hughes did his National Service in the RAF. Writing from RAF West Kirby, in the Wirral, to a friend, Edna Wholey, in 1949 –...
Born at the end of the Seventies and in decline at the beginning of the Eighties, Martianism, as a movement in British poetry, was shortlived, and as a descriptive term, misleading. Largely the...
‘Dates, dates are of the essence; and it will be found that I date quite exactly the breakdown of the imaginative exploit of the Cantos: between the completion of the late sequence called...
Poetry written in dialect seems to be undergoing a resurgence. Tony Harrison has made extensive use of Northern idioms. Tom Paulin has been busy raiding Ulster (and, I suspect, Scottish)...
Decoration in poetry traditionally has a purpose: to embellish the story of the Faerie Queene or of Venus and Adonis, to ornament with appropriate curlicues the exposition of order and harmony in...
Craig Raine’s second collection follows swiftly upon his first, The Onion, Memory (1978). It is as if the poet had been waiting impatiently over us, while we picked ourselves up off the...
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