Much reading and writing over the last few weeks, and in amongst it all I’ve been particularly enjoying (and enthusing about) R.F. Langley’s ‘Journals’. He’s a poet, a (far more bucolic and less intense) disciple of Jeremy Prynne’s, bending language in strange and interesting new ways. What’s valuable about his journals is the precision ofContinue reading “The diamond cutter”
Category Archives: Poets
Martians kill Humanism
I finished off a collection of Leigh Brackett’s Martian romances over the weekend – ‘The Coming of the Terrans’. Some great stories in there, but there’s more going on than just pulp mayhem. Brackett’s Martian stories are set on an exotic, faded Mars. In her world, humans arrived there to find an aeon-shadowed (thanks, HPL)Continue reading “Martians kill Humanism”
Flesh eggs, scarlet tracings
Bringing Iain Sinclair’s book of poems, ‘Buried at Sea’, into work this morning made me think about the impact his selected poems ‘Flesh Eggs and Scalp Metal’, and his novel ‘White Chappell Scarlet Tracings’, made on me when I first read them. I was at a very conservative boarding school in Dorset; every so oftenContinue reading “Flesh eggs, scarlet tracings”
Killing the lover
Watching children and their parents on the beach at the weekend, and I was struck by how much care goes into the making of a person. None of just happen; we’re all very carefully supported, built even, over a period of decades. And more generally, there’s a deep sense of nurture in being us. WalkingContinue reading “Killing the lover”
Taking liberties
Mike Harrison very thought provoking today on control, mass trespass and fantasies of childhood in the English countryside: ‘The utter brilliance of the Kinder mass trespasses was that they gave the non-magic kind of children permission to occupy some of those landscapes.’ A forced ceding of control by the controlling classes. This conflict over controlContinue reading “Taking liberties”