Arctic Elegies Peter Davidson, Carcanet, 2022, pb., 72pps. £11.99 DEREK TURNER feels impelled to look to the north There are poets associated with particular places, or special states of mind, but Peter Davidson has made a geo-poetical genre of his own, as celebrant of a cardinal point. His interests are wide-ranging, but magnetized in one…
Image: Wikimedia Commons RICHARD DOVE is bedazzled by a phenomenal bassist Being a virtuoso musician presents a fresh set of responsibilities. You can play anything at any tempo, and you do. The results are not always, shall we say, rewarding and affecting. That could not be said for bassist Shri Sriram and his quartet at…
SELBY WHITTINGHAM takes a Proustian and Ruskinian trip through his and France’s past Rouen at last, after an interval of more than twenty-five years! Again it was August, and again the rain was sheeting down upon the glass dome of the railway station. The first time, a gawky ‘teenager’, ...” So began my mother’s account…
Akhenaten, Nefertiti and their children. Image: Wikimedia Commons RICHARD DOVE revels in Akhnaten at the ENO “The thing about Philip Glass is that there’s so much repetition.” A friend pronounces his verdict. Well, yes, but what repetition. The ENO revival in association with LA Opera with the third of Glass’s so-called ‘portrait’ operas, Akhnaten, is…
LIAM GUILAR continues his epic of early Britain The story so far. In the 5th century Vortigern’s attempt to hold the imperial province of Britannia together has been defeated, not by external enemies but by British rebels led by Vortimer, his eldest son. Vortimer is a devout Christian and has invited the Pope to send…
Image: Derek Turner The Waste Land – A Biography of a Poem Matthew 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Spake Zarathustra Friedrich Nietzsche, Michael Hulse (trans.), Notting Hill Editions, 2022, pb., 312pps + xiv, £12.99 Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Thus Spoke Zarathustra Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul S. Loeb, David F. Tinsley (eds., trans.), Stanford University Press, 2022, pb., 576pp + xii, US$30 Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke 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…