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“... Note: ‘Yarak’ is an eastern term for when a hunting bird’s training, weight and mental focus all come together in the field. Three sentences of this poem are adapted from Raptors of California by Hans Peeters and Pam Peeters ...”

“... We are waiting for a Christmas that never came, each species a friend of a friend of some needle-hue. All the years, heights and postures are present like children in a school that no child ever leaves. Each species a friend of a friend of some needle-hue: those adolescent spruces prickle with boredom like children in a school that no child ever leaves ...”

“... Songs of PapuszaI was once besotted with a black-eyed boy. The young menof my kumpania stretched him out in an àshariba. Only thendid Dion´yzy Wajs, ancient Dion´yzy Wajs, pay his coin and court.He possessed harps, bought my mother and stepfather’s heart.All I possessed were secret books. Dion´yzy arranged my bedas we both wished. There will be no children, he had said ...”

“... i. Port Meadow, Oxford, 1983 Walking to Woodstock Road from Wytham where leaf-worlds welled from all the wood’s wands, we talked salmon, midges, flood meadows, the energy system cindering softly under us, slow-cooking the marshlands. ‘The gate ought to be here. The map said so. That map back at my flat . . . Look, there’s a spot somewhere this way where sheep shove through ...”

“... Bears Pawpaw and Paprika, two great bears of the Egyptians of Lancashire, Chohawniskey Tem, the Witches’ County, who, when our camp plucked its tents and pulled out its maps, walked steadily with the wagons, ambling, always ambling, all across the open pages of wet England, footing as far as Pappin-eskey Tem, the flat Duck County; crossing to Curo-mengreskey Gav, the Boxers’ Town; padded on to Paub-pawnugo Tem, Apple-Water County as good for bears as for their gypsy masters, although who is master is moot after much apple-water; then to bide by Bokra-mengreskey Tem, Shepherds’ County, for their collies are trained not to bark at bears, but slyly, gently, slink, big-eyed as children behind their shepherd’s greeting ...”

“... Zhivàkos the Horseman This circle of grass needs to be sited just right – superlevel, softhard, southnorth. Horses are picky. Shires, Shetlands, they’ve attitude just like you and me. Making circus isn’t about our own people’s pleasures, not when there are beasts. Beasts come first and last. On a one to ten the horses are eleven, twelve. We’ve a camel too, scatty skutsome creature, who thinks she’s horse ...”

“... Lesson Three Dad was not dad. Dad was the mad train screaming daily into the station of his home, white-hot brakes shrieking, exploding across the platforms of the rooms. So regular, so on time, you could set your watch. Five hours. Four. Three. Two. The skies were my watch. I saw the evening redden, and I hid. Hiding to nowhere. A phrase I still hate ...”

“... Fraser might have mixed feelings is The Gift: New Writing for the NHS, an anthology edited by David Morley (Stride, £7.95). The shortest contribution is ‘the underfunder’s utopia’ by Tom Leonard, an asthmatic poet: ‘the state hospital/ with one bed/always full/always efficient’. David Morley is the ...”

“... fond of the ‘inscrutability’ of Japanese faces. I fear, then, for this splendid book by John David Morley, based on his three-year stay in Japan during the mid-Seventies, which adopts the approach of assuming the Japanese to be human beings, and rather ordinary ones at that. Pictures from the Water Trade is a mixture of narrative, descriptive ...”

“... about a cyber Pearl Harbor, as techno-Orientalist. Techno-Orientalism is a term invented by David Morley and Kevin Robins to describe the ‘Japan panic’ of the late 1980s. By that time, the Japanese economy, driven by non-stop technological innovation, had become the second largest in the world after the United States. Japan was the leading ...”

“... and Scotland the more deeply felt his writing becomes. His examination of Northern poets such as David Morley, Simon Armitage and Sean O’Brien is marvellously sensitive to their regionalism and to the bitter undertow of history and class politics in some of their work. I have a grouse about both these books: neither has an index. Also, when reading ...”

“... 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 seems, seraphs of a benevolent novelty, somehow singing their good news at once uniquely and in shimmering unison. ‘A multicultural society,’ write the editors in their introduction, ‘challenges the very idea of a centre, and produces pluralism of poetic voice ...”

“... of a historical phenomenon. The occasional cause of the foundation of the BAAS was a letter from David Brewster, in Edinburgh, to Charles Babbage, in London, suggesting this new initiative in their campaign to halt the ‘decline of science’ in Britain. The efficient cause of success was the Reverend William Venables Vernon Harcourt, founder of the York ...”

“... like Angleton in the room. When he wanted someone to understand the Monster Plot – someone like David Blee, for example, who took over as chief of the Soviet Bloc Division in the CIA’s clandestine wing in 1971 – Angleton would schedule time for ‘the briefing’. He didn’t tell Blee what it was all about in twenty minutes: he walked him through ...”

“... Anyone writing a novel about the British intellectual Left, who began by looking around for some exemplary fictional figure to link its various trends and phases, would find themselves spontaneously reinventing Stuart Hall. Since he arrived in Britain from Jamaica in 1951, Hall has been the sort of radical they might have despatched from Central Casting ...”