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Nothing nasty in the woodshed

John Bayley, 25 October 1990

Yours, Plum: The Letters of P.G. Wodehouse 
edited by Frances Donaldson.
Hutchinson, 269 pp., £16.99, September 1990, 0 09 174639 6
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... of it all would be like asking St Francis if he was really so attached to brother mouse and sister sparrow. The act of devotion is what counts. My war history has been a simple one. I have just sat in my chair and written all the time. When the Germans occupied Le Touquet I was in the middle of a Jeeves novel, Joy in the Morning. I continued plugging away at ...

On Paul Muldoon

Clair Wills, 6 February 2020

... his tink tink, tink tinkbespeaking a familiarity with the science of iron-carbon alloysthe Chinese developed alongside the Dao,he’s believed to anticipate the licethat will infest his nest by stitching intoits brush-pile the egg sacs of lice-eating spiders.This ‘time-release packet’ is just one example of what Muldoon describes elsewhere in the collection as ‘future-proofing’ (‘Once we relied on a hoard//of seed that had been sacked/and saved ...

Doctor, Doctor

D.A.N. Jones, 19 April 1984

The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea 
by Randolph Stow.
Secker, 276 pp., £8.95, April 1984, 0 436 49734 4
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The Suburbs of Hell 
by Randolph Stow.
Secker, 165 pp., £7.95, April 1984, 0 436 49735 2
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Kingsley’s Touch 
by John Collee.
Allen Lane, 206 pp., £6.95, March 1984, 0 7139 1633 8
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A Suitable Case for Corruption 
by Norman Lewis.
Hamish Hamilton, 185 pp., £8.95, April 1984, 0 241 11178 1
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... statesmen in Egypt and Libya, with evil American agents blackmailing honest Britishers. John Collee tells of a wonder cure for cancer devised by a Hindu mystic in a Scottish city where surgeons’ knives are used too readily and callously. Randolph Stow’s The Suburbs of Hell deals with ‘juicy murders’ committed in a Suffolk seaside town ...

Smoking big cigars

David Herd, 23 July 1992

Goodstone 
by Fred Voss.
Bloodaxe, 180 pp., £7.95, November 1991, 1 85224 198 5
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... institutionalised in the area’s many small magazines which, like his publishing-house Black Sparrow Press, have been nourished by his success. Through these magazines he enjoys direct access to an attentive audience, with whom he is characteristically to be found in conversation. Witness a recent issue of Wormwood Review: this is a thank you ...

We shall not be moved

John Bayley, 2 February 1984

Come aboard and sail away 
by John Fuller.
Salamander, 48 pp., £6, October 1983, 0 907540 37 6
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Children in Exile 
by James Fenton.
Salamander, 24 pp., £5, October 1983, 0 907540 39 2
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‘The Memory of War’ and ‘Children in Exile’: Poems 1968-1983 
by James Fenton.
Penguin, 110 pp., £1.95, October 1983, 0 14 006812 0
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Some Contemporary Poets of Britain and Ireland: An Anthology 
edited by Michael Schmidt.
Carcanet, 184 pp., £9.95, November 1983, 0 85635 469 4
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Nights in the Iron Hotel 
by Michael Hofmann.
Faber, 48 pp., £4, November 1983, 0 571 13116 6
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The Irish Lights 
by Charles Johnston and Kyril Fitzlyon.
Bodley Head, 77 pp., £4.50, September 1983, 0 370 30557 4
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Fifteen to Infinity 
by Ruth Fainlight.
Hutchinson, 62 pp., £5.95, September 1983, 0 09 152471 7
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Donald Davie and the Responsibilities of Literature 
edited by George Dekker.
Carcanet, 153 pp., £9.95, November 1983, 9780856354663
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... thing, start doing poetry and prose that is nothing but ‘poetry’ and ‘prose’. This is what John Fuller’s new rhymes for children are: they announce their literariness and children can no doubt admire it, for in this context they know, like older readers on the poetry scene, what is proper to it. But Walter de la Mare’s line ‘Who said, “Peacock ...

Whose Justice?

Stephen Sedley, 23 September 1993

The Report of the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice 
HMSO, 261 pp., £21.50, July 1993, 0 10 122632 2Show More
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... 1989, of the convictions of the Guildford Four and the Maguires resulted in the appointment of Sir John May’s inquiry, which was in part stalled by the prosecution of four of the police officers involved in the case. But when in 1991, piling Pelion on Ossa, the Court of Appeal overturned the convictions of the Birmingham Six, the Government was ready the ...

His One Eye Glittering

August Kleinzahler: Creeley’s Chatter, 20 May 2021

The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley 
edited by Rod Smith, Peter Baker and Kaplan Harris.
California, 467 pp., £25, March 2020, 978 0 520 32483 1
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... given to jokes, even if his poems are often wry:As I sd to myfriend, because I amalways talking, John, Isd, which was not hisname, the darkness sur-rounds us, whatcan we do againstit or else, shall wewhy not, buy a goddamn big car,drive, he sd, forchrist’s sake, lookout where yr going.‘I Know a Man’ was included in Creeley’s first major ...

Love, Lucia

Lucia Berlin: Letters to August Kleinzahler, 4 August 2005

... 68th birthday. Almost all of her short stories can be found in three volumes published by Black Sparrow Press: ‘Homesick: New and Selected Stories’ (1990), ‘So Long: Stories 1987-92’ (1993) and ‘Where I Live Now: Stories 1993-98’ (1999). The earliest of the stories dates from 1977. She was born in Alaska and raised in military camps in ...

Living on Apple Crumble

August Kleinzahler: James Schuyler, 17 November 2005

Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler 1951-91 
edited by William Corbett.
Turtle Point, 470 pp., £13.99, May 2005, 1 885586 30 2
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... it still Connecticut, the dear deer, the steady lay, the unprivate walls?’ His correspondent, John Hohnsbeen, an art-dealer friend, was having an affair with the architect Philip Johnson, and the ‘unprivate walls’ are those of Johnson’s famous Glass House. Schuyler was 28 and this was his first serious mental breakdown. He had only recently arrived ...

Diary

Christopher Nicholson: Rare Birds, 22 November 2018

... called Animals, and in one edition, I think in 1968, a thrilling article by the ornithologist John Gooders described how he’d seen two hundred species of birds in Britain in a single calendar year. I never got anywhere close. There were so many more birds that I hadn’t seen than I had. I often tried to turn common birds into uncommon birds. Those ...

It’s me you gotta make happy

Andrea Brady: John Wieners, 29 July 2021

Yours Presently: The Selected Letters of John Wieners 
edited by Michael Seth Stewart.
New Mexico, 333 pp., £60, December 2020, 978 0 8263 6204 9
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... John Wieners​ once told his nephew he had met the Virgin Mary. ‘Did she say anything to you?’ Walter asked. ‘No,’ John said, ‘she doesn’t know how to speak.’ He paused. ‘But she’s learning.’ Wieners was born to a working-class family outside Boston in 1934, educated by Jesuits, and spent formative periods of his youth in New York, San Francisco and Black Mountain, North Carolina ...

Underlinings

Ruth Scurr: A.S. Byatt, 10 August 2000

The Biographer's Tale 
by A.S. Byatt.
Chatto, 224 pp., £14.99, June 2000, 0 7011 6945 1
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... New Writing 8, 1999), the extract was called ‘Brief Lives’. So a good starting point might be John Aubrey, but perhaps it would be better to begin with Anthony Powell, the standard biographer of the first great English biographer. In his introduction to Aubrey’s Brief lives, Powell points out a significant difference between his approach to biographical ...

Jabs

Richard Horton, 8 October 1992

Edward Jenner 1749-1823 
by Richard Fisher.
Deutsch, 361 pp., £20, July 1991, 0 233 98681 2
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... local surgeon. At 21 he moved to London to continue his medical studies as anatomical assistant to John Hunter at St George’s Hospital. Although Jenner returned to his Berkeley medical practice in 1773, Hunter had recognised Jenner’s scientific prowess and encouraged him in his research. ‘Why think – why not try the experiment,’ he wrote in ...

Poet at the Automat

Eliot Weinberger: Charles Reznikoff, 22 January 2015

... And Reznikoff was with them. There were readings, interviews, a prize or two. In 1974, the Black Sparrow Press began a programme of bringing all of Reznikoff’s poetry back into print. He died in 1976, at the age of 81, having just revised the proofs of a two-volume Collected Poems. There was the legend of Reznikoff, the invisible poet, walking twenty miles ...

O Wyoming Whipporwill

Claire Harman: George Barker, 3 October 2002

The Chameleon Poet: A Life of George Barker 
by Robert Fraser.
Cape, 573 pp., £25, February 2002, 0 224 06242 5
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... of life.’ Barker’s precocity was impressive, and attracted the attention and patronage of John Middleton Murry, T.S. Eliot and Edwin Muir. Murry gave the 19-year-old poet two books to review for the Adelphi on the strength of some pages of diary (later worked up into the first novel) and Barker had published in New Verse, Criterion and the Listener at ...

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