I dreamt I was the simple trusting boy who took his wicked teacher’s jealous hand and climbed the mountain. And the teacher said he had to go away, but he’d be back, and if I happened to be hungry, why, all I need do was eat the stones. His eyes were fine strokes of a calligrapher’s brush conveying messages I could not read (though how I longed to learn and understand). I...
Your cool high-ceilinged life is naked as a stage,
as if you’d taken an apartment where the set-designer of your dreams
had recently moved out. It is a theatre after the première,
filled up to emptiness with applause. I think of God the Almighty after the ball,
sitting as you imagined him on the palace steps, asleep in his slippers and topper.
Let there (he mumbles in his slumber,...
Above all else we are concerned, in whatever form we let it take us, with memory. The idea of memory enables us to believe we can grasp the vanished past, historical or personal, and restructure...
Change and decay in all around we see. As one of W.G. Sebald’s epigraphs points out, the rings of Saturn are probably fragments of a moon, broken up by tidal effect when its orbit decayed....
This curious, mesmerising book, a hybrid of fiction and memoir which tells the life stories of four unhappy exiles, is the work of a German writer until now almost unknown in this country. It has...
Poetry anthologies are now expected to make holy war; but what to do with The New Poetry, which strives so earnestly to turn its trumpet-majors into angels? The 55 poets collected here are, it...
‘Aller Moor’, the first poem in Antidotes, begins And now the distance seems to grow Between myself and that I know: It is from a strange land I speak And a far stranger that I...
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