Jamie McKendrick’s Anomaly was published in 2018.
It was rather fun, being lost like this.The roofs our floor, the palms our ventilators.The stag’s antlers serving as a cloudrack.
North was south, being lost like this.It was rather fun to thread the citywith only the sodium glow to steer by.
Fun to think we would never be found.The alleys smelled of resin and leather.The small square with its switched-off fountain
was carding the winds...
Alexander Cornelius mentions a tree called the lion-tree, the timber of which he says was used to build the Argo . . . which cannot be rotted by water or destroyed by fire . . . This tree is, so far as I am aware, unknown to anyone else.
Pliny the Elder
May well be extinct, and our one authority
is terse, but that surely speaks in his favour.No wonder its timber was used on the Argo– the...
After fifty years to revisit the Alhambra and witness the same water spewing from the lion’s maw: I remember wearing a silver short-sleeved shirt adorned with dragons, and for the first time,
on the airport runway, hearing the night alive with the cicadas’ tiny anvils. This time, the metal plate screwed to my femur vibrates to their call, my heart to the...
Others look down on me. As well they might. I look down on myself from a great height: see the tramp’s straggly hair turned white
– the off-white of effluent-polluted sea-foam – the bony shoulders, the incipient bald dome and black wings sprouting that will fly me home.
Cartolinefor Rachel Owen
1.
I keep forgetting if this is Lucerne or Geneva, Geneva...
Milton lost his sight in libertyes defence and I my hearing in oyles pursuit employed by factors who failed to plug our ears with down I was the fuse-and-dynamite boy who blew up bits of Derbyshire with blasts that lunged through the earth’s crust barrelling out below to stun the blind mole in its burrow and bend the funicles of beetles antennae so now alone or in a crowd I hear the...
As a novelist Giorgio Bassani is both allusive and elusive. Allusive, because he makes a habit of writing as if all the objects of his attention, from the topography of Ferrara, his hometown in...
Does an Italian poet need translating even when he writes in English? Two of the poems in Disaffections make you wonder. Pavese addressed them to Constance Dowling, the American actress with whom...
Whole systems of thought have been founded on the French language’s inability to distinguish differing from deferring. Perhaps Napoleon is to blame (‘Not tonight, Josephine’)....
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