Image: Derek Turner The Waste Land – A Biography of a Poem Mathew Hollis, Faber & Faber, 2022, 524pps., £20 LIAM GUILAR is disappointed by a would-be biography of the landmark poem If any twentieth century poem deserves a biography, it is T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. First published in 1922, it was, and is,…
Nietzsche, by Edvard Munch Thus Spake Zarathustra Friedrich Nietzsche, Michael Hulse (trans.), Notting Hill Editions, 2022, pb., 312pps + xiv, £12.99 Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Thus Spake Zarathustra Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul S. Loeb, David F. Tinsley (eds., trans.), Stanford University Press, 2022, pb., 576pp + xii, US$30 Nietzsche’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra” Keith Ansell-Pearson,…
Spare Prince Harry, Bantam, 2023, 416pps., £20 KEN BELL finds the Prince’s blockbuster book unexpectedly engaging There can be few people in the English-speaking world who have not read a review of Spare, the memoir written by Prince Harry, and it is a pity that so many of those reviews seem to have been written…
Jacques-Emile Blanche 1861-1942. Portrait of James Joyce MICHAEL YOST explores Joyce’s life, work, and theory of art Homer’s Odyssey begins thus: “ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον…” or, in translation: “The man, to me, sing, O Muse, many-sided. . .”His word “polutropon” has been rendered as referring to a man “of twists and turns,” “of many…
DANIEL GUSTAFSSON has published volumes of poetry in both English and Swedish, most recently Fordings (Marble Poetry, 2020). New poems appear in Temenos Academy Review, Pennine Platform, in several anthologies by Black Bough Poetry, and in Sunken Island: An Anthology of British Poetry (Bournbrook Press, 2022). As an occasional scholar, with a PhD in Philosophy, Daniel has a…
Beer-makers, Clapham Common, 1877. Wikimedia Commons Street Food: Hawkers and the History of London Charlie Taverner, Oxford University Press, 2023, 256pps, £30 KEN BELL remembers the street-traders who fed a burgeoning city The image of London street food is a trendy one, with well-paid hipsters eating what they sweetly tell each other is authentic, usually…
Ravenser Odd Michael Daniels, Poets House Pamphlets, 2022, 26 pps, £7 LIAM GUILAR admires an evocation of the eroding East Riding This is Michael Daniels’ first collection – the traditional slim pamphlet. The publisher, Poets House Pamphlets, of Oxford, has produced a fine object, printed on good paper, with understated, subtle artwork to enhance the…
MARYANN CORBETT is the author of five books, most recently In Code (Able Muse, 2020). Her work has appeared widely in journals on both sides of the Atlantic, including 32 Poems, Rattle, and the Los Angeles Review of Books in the US, and The Dark Horse and PN Review in the UK. Her poetry has…
JOHN BINGHAM has been writing poetry for nearly 20 years, from his first limerick, 'Barry the Snail', to his first competition win with 'I miss you'. John believes poetry is an amazing tool to help with expressing feeling or aiding with mental health issues and hopes his poems can one day help others. My Offer…
Kafka, self portrait. Photo by Ardon Bar-Hama. Wikimedia Commons The Diaries Franz Kafka, Ross Benjamin (trans.), Schocken/Penguin, 2023, hb., 670pp + xxiv, US$45 ALEXANDER ADAMS welcomes an overdue and sensitive English-language edition of Kafka’s journals There could hardly be a better paradigm of existential modern man, locked within his psyche, struggling to making meaning of…