Elizabeth Cook

Elizabeth Cook edited Keats’s Major Works for Oxford. Achilles, a work of fiction, is published by Methuen. She lives in East London.

From Pandemonium: Poetry wrested from mud

Elizabeth Cook, 1 September 2005

In June 1914, the 24-year-old Isaac Rosenberg left his home in Stepney, East London, to stay with his married sister Minnie Horvitch in Cape Town in the hope that the climate might improve his health. He was in Cape Town when he heard that war had been declared. He responded in ‘On Receiving News of the War: Cape Town’:

Snow is a strange white word. No ice or frost Have asked of...

Prynne’s Principia

Elizabeth Cook, 16 September 1982

A volume as thick as this, with an index, and a cover of Gallimard plainness, entitled simply Poems, inevitably suggests the accomplished authority of an Opera Omnia. The book includes the contents of 12 volumes previously published by small presses in more or less limited editions, interspersed with clumps of previously uncollected poems. The last poem in the book seems to announce a long ensuing silence:

Letter

Interdisciplinary

18 December 1980

SIR: Nicholas Tyacke, before pointing out what he sees as errors of emphasis and interpretation in Margot Heinemann’s Puritanism and Theatre, makes a general point about ‘a basic difficulty of interdisciplinary studies – namely, keeping up with more than one subject’ (Letters, 5 February). Doesn’t a lot of the difficulty derive from the way in which we conceive of ‘disciplines’ and ‘subjects’...

No One Left to Kill: Achilles

Thomas Jones, 24 May 2001

Two destinies, Thetis said. You can choose. Stay in the fight and be known – for ever – as the greatest warrior on earth, and your life will be short as the beat of that wing. Or...

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