Jamie McKendrick’s Anomaly was published in 2018.
Rosary, pillar, garden, assumption, solitude:the five Marías you and your sisters make,distinguished by the vocations of the Virgin.
Amongst you all resemblance hidesin posture, gesture, hand or voicelike a vein of dusky mauve –
tint of the five figs that Frederic Amat,the Catalan artist as a young man,at home with colour and conjugations,
slyly portrayed the group of you...
Summertime, like the cinemas, I shut up shop. Thought flies off elsewhere and evaporates. Billboards write white, the air’s warm, the table weighted with fruit.
*
The moonlight is a work of art, a substance first outlined then polished till it’s flint stone, mineral flame, but flame that’s enfeebled, dead, like grass grown in the dark, a pale, ritual vetch whose glow has the...
Ciao bella! we’re near this stretch of Emerald Coast, but the sea view’s even better: soon as we landed S whisked us off on his motoscafo Magnum for an eyeful. I see how he got his nickname – small as a jockey, all male, gallantries galore. & fun! Stress-free zone, except for a 3-way phone conf with the Prez – cause for concern being the shrine at Najaf....
I’m up in my watchtower, keeping watch over the beasts of the field, now few enough, the fowls of the air and the crooked ways of men, through binoculars, when the doorbell rings like a tinkling cymbal. Half-dressed, I bound downstairs and find two women who smile at me and ask me what I think of the Bible’s predictions for the future?
Myself, I think it’s safer to...
The entomologist Henri Fabre tells how the cicada’s song is produced by its ‘musical thighs’ and how in Provençal folklore the source of the sound is thought to be the insect’s ‘mirrors’, although he points out that this ‘dry membrane coloured like a soap bubble’ actually dampens the sound. In Provence a singer out of breath or a poet without inspiration is said to have broken mirrors. In ‘Reading Montale’, an essay appended to his translation of the poet’s first three books, Jonathan Galassi considers the old and especially Mediterranean association of poet and cicada and its recurrence in Montale’s poems.‘
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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