Search Results

“... The government department is deserted But all the lights are on. It lies below The pavement, rises up, a stump of glass, And all the lights are on, and no one there. It’s Friday night, at nine. And why indeed Should anyone be there? But all the lights are on. Banks of computers sit there, room on room Frozen in rectangles of green on black; And here’s an office where two chairs exchange A dialogue which must have finished when They left at half-past five ...”

“... My dark Brazilian friend, seventy years back In Washington. Both of us were foreign, On the edge of Gordon Junior High. After my English prep-school shine wore off, My grades slid down and I lost interest In most things, except stamps and snakes and sex. We visited the embassies, cadging stamps, And messed about off Massachusetts Avenue Playing the hub-cap trick on passing cars (You threw one into the road and shouted ‘Hub-cap!’ And the car screeched to a halt ...”

“... Down in the creek, snakes: Snakes in the opposite wood. There were snakes everywhere. This was new. This was good. At home in England, snakes Were pets you kept in a cage. Here they slipped free, and swam. This was a golden age. Most folk I knew hated snakes, Shrank if I brought one back And let it run over my arm Or gathered and then lay slack. Whipsnakes, cornsnakes, snakes Swollen, and black, and green, Crept through my days and nights ...”

“... Inheritance These little steps and quivers Remind me of my mother’s, Yet now they are made by me In part-senility – Gestures and postures passed Across the years, not lost But, as if imitated, Put on and animated By limbs, and flesh, and features, With movements and with gestures, So that what was me Becomes this parody, Shuddering and moving on In jerks, till I have gone For something else to inhabit This inherited frame, The same and not the same, Inhabit, inherit, give credit To the little steps and the quiver Linking me to my mother, And all that has passed, And all that is not lost ...”

“... He’s gone with her, and she has gone with him, And two are left behind; and there’s four more – The children, two of each; grandparents, still Alive and well, till now, and taking sides; And neighbours, six close by, and more besides In half a dozen villages ... Until The whole thing multiplies by seven score – Why he went off with her, and she with him ...”

“... The famous poet’s mistress, forty years ago, Now heard five times a week on radio Acting an ageing upper-class virago. ‘The deadbeats of the Caves de France, the suicidal’, The substance of a novelist’s rapt recall, One who escaped the death from alcohol. The ravaged visage of a copywriter Who was an intimate of him and her, Encountered at the funeral of another ...”

“... And there, beneath a bull-nosed Buick Inert in Kensington, the poet lay, Grease smeared on cheek-bones, a fallen god Who rose to greet me, seventeen, with Blake And Langland in the triptych. Stay Yet a little longer, genius of the place, Fitting my footprints in the prints you trod, Letting me see those lineaments, that face. It was apotheosis. It was epiphany ...”

“... The reason for a cockroach in a story must differ from the reason for a cockroach in a kitchen. Leon Wieseltier, TLS It was not home. It was in Tokyo At half-past ten at night or thereabouts. I went into the kitchen, flicked the switch, And saw him crouching on the table’s edge. He was enormous, brown, and very still. His feathery branches waited, so it seemed, For further movement, and for me to move ...”

“... Junichiro Tanizaki (1886-1965) is rightly regarded as one of the handful of 20th-century Japanese novelists whose work has to be seen as of universal and not just Japanese interest. One can, indeed, number them quickly: Tanizaki’s senior, Soseki; his contemporary, Kawabata; his juniors, Endo, Abe and Mishima. This is to leave out too many writers, I know: but the rest can generally be classed under other headings – the pathologically interesting, such as Dazai; the producers of one powerful novel, such as Osaragi (Homecoming) or Ooka (Fires on the Plain); or those who qualify through a sense of potential rather than actual worldwide achievement, such as Oe ...”

“... Candia McWilliam’s first novel, A Case of Knives, won the Betty Trask Award last year. I expect I am wrong in persistently remembering this as a prize for something called Romantic Fiction; I believe I am right in thinking that the rubric was extended to include the words ‘or traditional’. The formidable young McWilliam doesn’t seem to me to fit comfortably under either label ...”

“... The innocent child, eavesdropping on adults and adulteries, puzzled by half-heard conversations and half-understood hints, has a respectable history in fiction: What Maisie knew, The Go-Between, many other novels and stories. Such children are at the centre of William Trevor’s tenth novel and David Profumo’s first; or rather, Trevor seems to have chosen to place young Tom both centrally and peripherally (as children often are, in fiction and in life), while Profumo makes young James the very eyes and ears of his book, though distancing him by telling the tale in the third person ...”

“... unblinking eyes at the whole thing: if Janet Adam Smith at the New Statesman wouldn’t print her, Anthony Powell at Punch would; a lull in Fleet Street somehow brought on a glut in Portland Place; and – ‘hey-ho’ – the villains in one publishing company would be succeeded by the angels at the next. Too much now is made of Stevie’s ‘neglect’: once ...”

“... There’s an Auden sonnet, written in 1938 as part of the ‘In Time of War’ sequence, in which the setting seems to be a country house where great matters are being discussed: Across the lawns and cultured flowers drifted The conversation of the highly trained. The gardeners watched them pass and priced                              their shoes; A chauffeur waited, reading in the drive, For them to finish their exchange of views; It seemed a picture of the private life ...”

“... Writing a BBC Third Programme review of Donald Hall’s Penguin Contemporary American Poetry exactly a month before she killed herself early in 1963, Sylvia Plath praised ‘the inwardness of these images ... the uncanny faculty of melting through the leaves of the wallpaper, through the dark looking-glass, into a world which one can only call surrealist and irrational ...”

“... Alison Lurie’s new novel is, among other things, an anthology of several characters from her earlier novels. Readers unfamiliar with these books need not be apprehensive, however: The Truth about Lorin Jones is perfectly self-contained. Indeed, that self-contained quality helps to account for the powerful, painful oppressiveness of the book, as Polly Alter becomes more and more deeply enmeshed in her quest for the eponymous woman she is pursuing ...”