Posted on by Richard Dove

Tang poems in my greenhouse

Inked echoes: Tang verse for young readers

Wenguang Shao, Newsstand, distributed by 300tangpoems.newsstand.co.uk
RICHARD DOVE can hear classical China in his garden

Maybe it was the gentle splutter of rain on the greenhouse roof and the weak rays of sunlight squeezing through the clouds that focused my attention on the Tang poetry book.  Perched on a stool that had probably never seen better days, I took a break from gardening to read Inked Echoes:  Tang verse for Young Readers by Wenguang Shao.  This beautifully produced large format book seemed, at first, to be a little out of place in my well worn greenhouse.  But the poetry did not.

“On a quiet night, with no neighbour in sight.

A yellow-leafed tree in the cold steady rain,

Or a lamp’s dying glow, with grey hairs that remain.”

Tang poetry is widely regarded as China’s golden age of cultural achievement.  The poems were composed during the Tang Dynasty (619-907 AD) when poets were revered and occupied lofty status. In this time of immense political and artistic endeavour, we could do with poets in Parliament now more than ever, I reflected. I had been listening to Radio 4 and needed to escape from Epstein and Mandelson: “Human affairs endure vicissitudes, with turns and twists: / Events, betwixt centuries, emerge like sudden mists. / On sites of history, words of insight are soberly chiselled.”

We need far more words of insight in these turbulent times.  This poem by Men Haoran tells me that “fierce winds take their toll”.  Clearly, politically and physically – Prime Minister Keir Starmer facing calls for his resignation, and this greenhouse has been reassembled two or three times after fierce winds.

Tang poetry embraces what nature offers us and more generally, our emotional response to the world around us.  Being both a Mandarin and English scholar, Dr. Shao captures the nuances in the translation.  A flock of noisy Canadian geese has just flown overhead and what do I read: “Falling leaves compel wild geese to southward flight; / The rivers chill beneath the northern wind’s bite.”

A van pulls up in a lane near the greenhouse and I hear pop music blaring and shouted greetings.  I read on: “The music dances, echoing on tranquil streams, / Carried by sad winds across the Lake of Light. / The final strains dissolve, the player gone in a dream, / Only a few green peaks remain, spellbound in sight.”

Am I reading an account of the here and now?  Tang poetry is clearly both ancient and modern.  It whispers great truths across the centuries. This book is written primarily for young readers but the young at heart should not feel excluded.  I loiter over the elegant calligraphy of the poems (Dr. Shao’s own hand here) and the gardening is set aside for another day.  This is a book for regular dipping and diving.  Take in two or three poems every day and the world will shift a little into the light.

I will leave the last words with Liu Changqing: “The dying sun descends, and dazzles men’s pride. / Birds roam unaware of hills and vales estranged, / Returning at dawn and dusk o’er streams unchanged.”

I close up the greenhouse and head down the garden path.  The garden can wait, the poet told me so.

Posted on by Ethan McGuire

Translations from Yue Fei

ETHAN MCGUIRE is a writer and computer scientist whose essays, poems, short stories, and translations have appeared in Blue Unicorn, The Dispatch, Emerald Coast Review, New Verse News, VoegelinView, and other publications. He is an editor at Tar River Poetry, Literary Matters, and New Verse Review and the author of Songs for Christmas (Harmonia Mundi) and Apocalypse Dance (Wipf & Stock). Ethan lives with his wife and children in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Original author’s bio:

Chinese folk hero YUE FEI (AD 1103-1142) was a warrior poet of the highest order – a master and a founder of multiple martial arts, a dedicated Confucianist, a Taoist student, a great military strategist, a successful Song Dynasty general, and a poet. However, Yue Fei began to experience bouts of depression after the 1127 “Humiliation of Jingkang,” a turning point of the Jin-Song Wars in which Jurchen forces from the Jin Dynasty conquered the northern Song Dynasty capital of Kaifeng, captured two Song emperors, and isolated the remaining emperor and his armies to the South. Yue Fei fought a long campaign against the invading Jurchens to protect the Southern Song people and to recapture their northern Song territory, but just before he retook Kaifeng, the Emperor recalled him, to seek peace with the Jin Dynasty. To prevent a civil war and avoid exile, Yue Fei returned to the southern Song capital of Lin’an, where the Emperor imprisoned him in compliance with Treaty of Shaoxing requirements and eventually had him executed on false charges. Amidst these troubles, Yue Fei wrote some of the Song Dynasty’s most memorable poems, including “Red River” (“Man Jiang Hong”) which is still beloved throughout China today.

A POEM ON THE WALL OF XIAO TEMPLE NEAR QINGNI MARKET

Hear me!

My spirit’s strong—majestic!—

Piercing through the bull in battle.

Great heaven’s gods shall be my witnesses:

Today, I vow I will avenge our faithful emperor

With my straight sword: I—will!—cut down, wipe—out!—

The stubborn wicked, and—

                                              returning from the war

Triumphant in my chariot, ignoring fame—

Restore our temples, and repair

Ten thousand households’ torn-down doors.

A POEM AT THE TEMPLE OF THE EMERALD CLIFF

The harvest winds have halted

       the royal army’s river journey,

Forcing us to slowly march

       toward the emerald mountains.

As clouds descend, I think:

       the righteous loyalty we need!—

To guard clear boundary waters—men

       desiring glory and honor.

There’s no use fleeing to the howling

       mountain forests now.

The desert bandits will wreak havoc

       anyway. Let us, instead,

March back through the three mountain passes,

       to rescue the three sages,

Those golden chieftains—harried, captured—

       returned then to their people.

SENDING OFF MASTER ZHEN TO MOUNT LUSHAN

Where do the sage’s forest paths,

       in clouds, become confused?

The wise ones said, “The trails

       at hand are—the—paths—we—have used!”

Vegetable leaves, from time

       to time, drift with the river’s flow,

Reminding me of all the huts

       near Cui Wei thatched with reeds.

It’s not a waste, with drink in hand,

       to talk till night recedes;

The mist, the rain, the snow—

       these likewise come and, unrushed, go.

Like them, though suddenly,

       in all directions, we set out

Again, into the countless mountains,

       jade dust strewn throughout.

TOURING THE TOWERING ROCK MOUNTAIN TEMPLE

Before the mountain stones, a temple stands,

Hidden amidst the woods, sat by a spring.

The Buddha’s image there is purple and gold;

White snow has gathered on the old monks’ heads.

A pond’s cold water nightly births the moon;

The wind through bands of pines bears Autumn’s chill.

I’ve come this way to share the dragon’s words,

To serve, as rain, to ease this people’s worries.

SEEING OFF MASTER ZHENG OF PURPLE ROCK ON HIS WAY TO THE NORTHERN CAMPAIGN

An exhortation

The commands come on the wind, in thunderclaps—

The orders from the heavens shake the mountains—

The drive is long across the Luo River—

The storm-attack goes to the underworld—

The horses hooves splash through red-trampled blood—

The banners soar like owls o’r chieftains’ heads—

Go give this clear report to our wise ruler—

Keep fighting to restore the ancient realm.

ONE THOUSAND REBUKES FROM THE CLASSIC PAVILION

Three hundred poems from the great Tang masters;

Six hundred verses holding old Han rhymes:

The ancient gods, ghosts, monsters haunt the land;

The mothers, fathers weep and wipe their last tears.

This morning, my own tears wet my cheeks and hand—

I must remind my country of those times. . .

A QUICK POEM AT SHANGZHU TEMPLE

Written impromptu and tacked to a wall at the temple—

When passing by—

While returning to attend to my duties—

Barbarians surged through the golden gate

And only stopped once south of Yangtze River.

One emperor has vanished, two souls vanquished;

Their minister alone fights in a fervor.

Yet even with sword of magic, mind-state of Siddhartha,

He’s only emptied desert plains. . .—

If he restores the rivers and mountains

                    —one day—

That night he’ll let his body fade away.

A POEM AT CHI ZHOU’S JADE TEMPLE

Leaning against this lovely temple’s wall,

I wonder, who might join me? To recall

How, here, fine clouds dance slowly past the sun

And cast light shadows down upon this hill,

How mugwort grows with river island trees

And midday haze obscures a quiet sail.

Like the river, I am strong, yet (still!) I yearn

To join the passing clouds—I will return.

Posted on by Christopher Sandford · 2 Comments

‘The Sentinel’

Defendants at the Nuremberg Trials
CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD relives an extraordinary encounter

“Don’t mention the war,” my grandfather advised me a few minutes before our guest, an old friend from the faculty of the nearby University of Puget Sound, joined us for lunch. This was Tacoma, Washington, about twenty miles south of Seattle in America’s Pacific Northwest, in mid-August 1975 (I was visiting from Cambridge) and thus about ten weeks before John Cleese immortalised the phrase in ‘The Germans’ episode of Fawlty Towers, which I see was first broadcast on 24 October that year. Among other distinctions my grandfather ended up as the US’s oldest active full-time professor, but that aside he was always a man ahead of his time, and I think would have enjoyed the happy coincidence of this use of the line that entered into the shared folklore of my generation of Brits.

Our guest that day in Tacoma was Colonel Burton C. Andrus (US Army, Ret), and, true to his military calling, he arrived with us precisely on time. Or, to be more literally true, he didn’t. About fifteen minutes before the appointed hour, my grandfather called me over to the front window and, with an amused smile, pointed to a large-finned old Cadillac parked directly across the street. I could see a bespectacled, grey-haired man sitting bolt upright in the driver’s seat, reading a newspaper. My grandfather and I then stood waiting for the hands of the living-room clock to reach exactly 12.30pm. During these minutes, the figure in the car continued reading the paper, as though he were in fact sitting unobserved in a chair in his own home, and not parked immediately opposite our front door, ten yards away. Then, precisely at 12.30pm, the man got out of the car, walked briskly to the door, and rang the bell. “Ah, Colonel,” my grandfather greeted him. “Punctual as ever.”

Colonel Burton C. Andrus

Colonel Andrus was then 83, and it was immediately apparent that he retained his decisive, soldierly approach to life. An October 1946 issue of Time, which I’d read in my grandfather’s scrapbook the previous evening, gave a rather unflattering account of our guest. It described him as “a pompous, unimaginative, if thoroughly likeable officer who wasn’t up to his job … Every morning his plump little figure, looking like an inflated pouter pigeon, moved majestically around, impeccably garbed in his uniform and highly shellacked helmet.” Now, thirty years later, Andrus retained the same crispness of dress – I seem to remember a funereally dark suit and tie – but there was little about him that was plump or inflated. He was, if anything, a trim, wiry figure who could have passed for twenty years younger than his real age (and, incidentally, nothing like the actor John Slattery, who impersonated him in the recent film Nuremberg), and I could immediately see how formidable, in fact frightening, a character he once must have been.

When introduced, the colonel eschewed the traditional handshake and instead seized my arm near the elbow for a second in a grip of steel, as if making a sudden arrest. He then gazed fiercely around the room, which he remarked, rightly, if a shade caustically, had ‘a lot of possessions’ in it. His relentlessly critical eye had been trained over the decades to spot weakness, and he could still be abrupt in noting any blemishes or other details that failed to meet his exacting standards. I was glad that I had had a haircut the day before.

Born about 300 miles away in Spokane, Washington, in 1892, Andrus had a successful early career working for Standard Oil. He volunteered for the army on America’s entry into the First World War, and an officer’s report on him even in this youthful period praised both his “iron self-will” and “ability to inspire the fighting man which endear[ed] him to their hearts.” Although not posted overseas, Andrus was to foreshadow his later career when in July 1919 he was promoted and sent to the Presidio in Monterey, California, where he served as Prison and Intelligence Officer. Various staff and administrative posts followed in the inter-war years. In September 1941, then Lt-Col Andrus was sent to Great Britain to study its air-ground operations, and did a “thoroughly conscientious” job there, as even Time acknowledged. His was a world of briefing notes, technical manuals, dockets, manifests and fussily annotated guidelines on military procedure – a gift for detail that did not diminish with age. Andrus returned to Britain in January 1944 to serve as Commanding Officer of the 10th Traffic Regulation Group in the run-up to D-Day. In December of that year, he transferred to Allied field headquarters in liberated France as a Combat Observer. In May 1945, Col. Andrus was appointed governor of the Mondorf-les-Bains facility in Luxemburg, an interrogation centre for Nazi war criminals popularly known by its code name ASHCAN. When the inmates were moved to a new prison built at the back of the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, Andrus joined them there as their Commandant.

Notwithstanding my grandfather’s proverbial words of warning, Col. Andrus, once settled in a chair and fortified by a dynamite-strength martini, positively enjoyed talking about the war. And talk he did. Thrillingly. At length. In a dry, crisp voice he told us how military discipline and morale among the staff on his arrival at Nuremberg had been “a joke”, and that one night early on in his tenure a fellow officer had announced that he was leaving the post with the 200 men of his battalion, as he felt they could be of more service to the Allied cause elsewhere. At that, Col. Andrus quick-marched down to the motor-pool. “I posted guards overlooking it and I said: ‘The first man to drive out of that pool tonight – shoot him.’ No one moved. That particular officer soon found himself transferred out of Nuremberg, and sent to a less desirable posting than he might have wished,”  the Colonel smiled. The two hundred men of his unit remained behind to become the nucleus of the prison staff.

Not long after that, Andrus went to deliver the formal indictments to the men in their cells. “They were a motley crew,” he remembered. “You looked at them and wondered how they could possibly have terrorised so many millions of people.” The colonel came to the conclusion that

…it was largely a matter of image. These gangsters had always strutted about with retinues of boot-licking aides. No one questioned them. They created an impression which, through newspapers, radio, and movie films, became a cult. This cult had to be lived up to. To increase their lustre, the men had to keep going forward – in the end, they so lost track of right and wrong that in prison they felt not guilt but a kind of indignation at their confinement.

The only one of the indicted men who had mildly impressed him was Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, until lately the Head of the German Armed Forces and de facto War Minister. “He at least snapped to attention when receiving the papers I handed him,” Andrus allowed.

Like other prisoners before and after them, some of the inmates at Nuremberg turned to the solace of religion. Hans Frank, the former Governor-General of Poland, and as such thought to be responsible for the deaths of up to two million Polish Jews, “used to pray at all hours of the day, and I have no doubt genuinely felt that the Church had relieved him of guilt,” Andrus said. Several others among the accused preferred the more secular consolation of the law. Keitel and his colleagues Field-Marshal Kesselring and Grand Admiral Doenitz all addressed letters to the Supreme Allied Commander that Andrus felt would almost have been comic but for the circumstances. Many quoted the Geneva Convention, and some asked that their former aides and orderlies be sent to join them in prison. Kesselring had wanted a more comfortable bed and bigger windows in his cell to alleviate his rheumatism, a request that Andrus had felt it within himself to refuse.

The prisoners themselves weren’t the only ones to suffer the particular stress of life at Nuremberg. To my surprise, Andrus told us that when he arrived,

…most of the rest of the jail was already occupied by German civilian prisoners. It would have been easy for any of them to infiltrate our wing, and the prospect kept me awake at night until I finally got permission to erect a barrier. For that matter, the security outside the compound wasn’t any better, and if some fanatical pro-Nazis had taken it on themselves to load a truck with TNT and send it speeding through the outer wall to the cell-block itself, we would all have been blown sky high.

Andrus had also been worried about the morale of the Nuremberg jailers, or ‘sentinels’ as he called them. “These men were often 19 or 20 years old, and they were to stand in shifts in dark concrete walkways watching the prisoners day and night. It wasn’t a job for sissies. Over my whole term of duty, I experienced a 600 per cent turnover in staff,” Andrus remarked, not bothering to hide a faint snort of derision. Adding to the sombre atmosphere, two of the Nuremberg inmates, the so-called Reich Health Leader Leonardo Conti, and head of the Labour Front Robert Ley, committed suicide in captivity, while the Luftwaffe chief and Reichsstatthalter of Prussia (though he acquired offices of state almost at will) Hermann Goering later cheated the hangman by biting down on a cleverly concealed cyanide capsule only hours before his scheduled execution in October 1946.

But by far the most enigmatic – and troublesome – of Col. Andrus’s charges at Nuremberg was the former Deputy Fuhrer, Rudolf Hess. Hess was then 51, and had been in Allied hands since famously flying to Scotland in an apparent solo attempt to broker peace with the United Kingdom in May 1941. Was he mentally unhinged, as his bizarre flight, and subsequent real or feigned amnesia, seemed to suggest?
The colonel’s first encounter with “this beetle-browed little man who arrived in a grey suit and a crumpled felt hat” was far from promising. Hess was being marched down a corridor in the jail when he saw Goering and his guard coming towards him. “Conveniently forgetting to forget, he immediately snapped to attention and threw up his arm in the Nazi salute to greet his old comrade.” The black comedy of the scene struck me, and I asked the colonel what he had done. “I instructed Hess, ‘Do not raise your arm like that again. I consider it a vulgar gesture.’ ‘The Nazi salute is not a vulgar gesture,’ he said. ‘It is now,’ I told him.”

“I knew right away that he was faking it,” the colonel continued. When later questioned about his family, “Hess was able to answer in very great detail about events that had happened 40 years earlier. The fact that he was reading two highbrow books a day while in custody also told me that he must have retained some of the background of his education in order to understand them.” A US Army psychiatrist examined all the Nuremberg prisoners. His report found that Hess was “passive, suggestible and naïve … Like the typical hysterical personality, he was incapable of facing reality and escaped by developing a functional disorder” – in this case, selective amnesia. “I looked him in the eye and told him I knew he was a sham. Hess just glared at me. He was ‘mad’ all right, mad at me for disbelieving him,” the colonel said.

As for Goering himself, ‘he came to me as a 300-pound hophead,’ Andrus remarked, employing the terminology of the day. “He had sixteen suitcases, wore a Cartier watch, and his fingernails were painted bright red.” After several months of the colonel’s regimen, Goering was cured of his morphine addiction, and his weight was down to something approaching normal. Even so, the table in his cell was deliberately built so that it would have collapsed had he tried to use it to reach the small barred window with a sheet or towel as a possible means of suicide. Andrus admitted that he had found Goering “a cunning and not always disagreeable internee, whom you could never turn your back on.” One morning in March 1946, the Nuremberg prisoners were being taken out of their cells to be marched to the nearby courtroom. “Goering took the opportunity to reach out and strike the sentinel several times on his arm and shoulder. The soldier hit him back with his billy-club. Goering then went loco and started screaming in German, and using his hands with incredible speed to lash out at the man. It took four GIs to subdue him.” A few years later, I was uncomfortably reminded of this incident when I sat watching the scene of Hannibal Lecter maniacally attacking his guards in The Silence of the Lambs.

After being condemned to death, Goering had made a request to face a firing squad rather than the gallows. The Allied control commission rejected his petition. “In my mind, that was the moment he took the decision to kill himself,” Andrus said. The colonel would not be drawn on the rumour that a sympathetic GI had palmed the cyanide capsule to his prisoner, and rather stiffly repeated the formal conclusion of the enquiry that “Goering had the poison in his possession when apprehended”, that “he may have hidden it in an obscure recess in the inside of his toilet under the overhanging rim,” and that “no blame for dereliction of duty is ascribed to any prison guard.” The colonel repeated the words verbatim, and I could tell that the matter still rankled all these years later. To have lost three men at Nuremberg by their own hand was the one obvious regret of this proud and supremely capable soldier. Twenty years after the event, the colonel received a letter out of the blue from the National Archives in Washington, DC. It attached a photocopy of the suicide note Goering had personally addressed to him. This, too, concluded: “None of those charged with searching [for the cyanide] is to be blamed, for it was practically impossible to find it. It would have been pure accident. [The army psychiatrist] informed me that the control board has refused the petition to change the method of execution to shooting.”

Given our continued fascination both with the Nazis and with prison dramas, it’s hard to imagine anything that could make the events of the early hours of 16 October 1946 more morbidly compelling. The execution by hanging of ten condemned men at Nuremberg (Goering was to have been the eleventh) had it all: a long walk through a rainswept prison yard into a starkly lit gymnasium, where one by one the condemned men were escorted up the steps (there were thirteen) to the gallows. Colonel Andrus read the formal sentence to each one moments before the end, and even he admitted that “It was a terrible task.” The Reich foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was the first to be dispatched and, like most of the others, he met his fate with a certain dignity. “My last wish is that Germany’s unity shall be preserved and that an understanding be reached between East and West,” he said. As the rope was then tightened around Ribbentrop’s neck, he turned to the army Lutheran chaplain at his side and whispered: “I’ll see you again.”

“The military men went to their deaths impeccably,” Col. Andrus said. When his turn came, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, formerly Chancellor of Austria and later Nazi commissar of the occupied Netherlands, remarked in a level voice: “I hope that this execution is the last act of the tragedy of the Second World War, and I hope that out of this disaster wisdom will inspire the people, which will result in understanding between the nations and that peace on earth will be finally established. I believe in Germany.” Then he, too, was hanged. The only difficulty had come in the case of the former publisher of the rabidly antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer, Julius Streicher – a “very shapeless man in a baggy suit with a large bald head and short legs.” Once at the scaffold, Streicher had screamed “Heil Hitler!”, and then made some further unappreciative remarks about the Jews. As the executioner stepped forward to the lever, the condemned man had hissed at him through his black hood: “The Bolsheviks will hang you one day!” After these blood-chilling events, Andrus insisted that the bodies, including Goering’s, had been taken to Dachau and cremated in the same concentration camp ovens where tens of thousands of Jews and others had met their end, although some historians doubt this detail. The ashes were secretly dispersed in a river. The colonel had nothing to say on the long-standing rumour that the executions had been botched, meaning that some of the men had fallen with insufficient force to snap their necks and had instead slowly suffocated to death.

I was then a remarkably vain and self-absorbed 18-year-old, but even so I like to think I realised how lucky I was to be included at the lunch table that day. The time seemed to fly by. Precisely at 2.30pm, Colonel Andrus stood up, thanked us for our hospitality, and announced that he would now go home for his scheduled nap and a walk. You saw again the rigid self-discipline, and remembered that this was a man who had lived his whole adult life in a world ruled by punctuality, professionalism and unswerving devotion to duty. As he left, the colonel seized my arm once more and looked me hard in the eye. “I hope I haven’t bored you too much,” he said. I assured him he hadn’t.

Colonel Burton Andrus died on 1 February 1977, at the age of 84. It’s said by his son that his last recorded thoughts were of Nuremberg. “I think that it haunted him … ‘Goering has committed suicide. I must report it to the Commission,’ he said. I told him it was the middle of the night, and it could wait until morning. Four hours later, my father died.”

Posted on by Christopher Sandford

Six for 2026

Image: Ralf Roletschek, Wikimedia Commons
CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD anticipates some of this year’s likely literary successes

As I write this it’s the tail end of January, and I sit at home on the edge of a Pacific Northwest rainforest, which means that it’s one of those times when the miseries of the world threaten to engulf us and the precariousness of the human condition, far from appearing a worthwhile and even noble struggle, seems an infinite rebuke.

Meanwhile, we’ve collectively at least survived the traditional blizzard of Christmas review roundups, and no doubt – unless we’re all blown to smithereens in the meantime – we’ll soon have the inevitable Easter reading recommendations and summer beach-book lists in our sights, until before long the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness rolls around once more, and with it yet more critical effusions, and so on, ad infinitum.

If for no other reason than to get a head start on the whole craze, I offer here a brazenly subjective midwinter lineup of half-a-dozen worthy candidates culled from among the many thousands of our publishers’ new or forthcoming titles, any one of which is guaranteed to warm the reader’s heart in these otherwise unremittingly bleak days and nights.

Matt Haig, The Midnight Train

Like several million others around the world, you may know the basic outline of Haig’s breakthrough 2020 novel The Midnight Library. In short: the book’s protagonist, Nora Seed (even great writers sometimes struggle with names), in her mid-thirties, single and childless, feels useless. Her cat is dead, she’s alone, and she’s been fired. Late one night, she tries to kill herself. Unpromising, I know, but this is where Haig lifts the whole thing out of itself and into the sort of energetically sustained parallel universe that C.S. Lewis might not have disowned. Instead of death, what Nora finds is a library in which each volume represents a version of her life where she made different choices. All she has to do to step into that life is to open the book. You may possibly recognise some of the plot ingredients of the 1998 film Sliding Doors, itself a product of the so-called many-worlds theory in which a new universe beckons from our every choice and decision.

The whole enterprise possibly sounds a bit strained, but in Haig’s hands it delivers the goods as a serviceable get-away-from-it-all novel that works both on the level of a good yarn and a speculative rumination on what we’re really doing during our brief tenancy of the planet. What’s the best that can happen in your life, and what’s the worst? Those are the questions. Without spoiling the treat, The Midnight Train is broadly speaking in the same vein as its predecessor, only – as the title rather implies – translated from a library onto, well, a train. I’ve slightly furtively read about three-quarters of the new book in what publishers like to call uncorrected proof form, and I can confirm it’s well up to par with its distinguished prototype; both have interesting things to say about how hard it sometimes is for any of us to completely accept ourselves for what we are – and, like the eponymous train itself, it all rattles along at a brisk clip.

Canongate Books, April 2026, £20

Malcolm Galfe, Near Horizons

The author here knows his technology and he knows his psychology, and the two combine in seven wonderfully engrossing stories which themselves incorporate elements of horror, sci-fi, mystery, dystopia and good old-fashioned (it never seems to go out of style) human drama.

That said, I’m pleased to report that we’re not exactly in Stephen King, let alone Stranger Things country in Near Horizons. Without exception, Galfe’s tales have a rich, understated texture to them, weaving together a patchwork of tropes and allusions to create something that feels consistently exciting and new. He achieves his effects by tweaking our anxieties and using the suggestive power of good dialogue, not by the sudden arrival of a race of invading pod-people or their like. It’s the literary equivalent of the way in which the best Hitchcock films play with cinematic techniques to tease and torment us, and in its way just as delectable.

As a matter of fact, it’s not entirely illogical to review this title in close physical proximity to the aforementioned Matt Haig; both are neatly crafted, elegantly written, sharp, shocking and often mordantly funny. What raises Near Horizons above the pack of lesser tech-themed morality stories is Galfe’s wise and pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, his grasp of the elements of suspense, and the way he weaves fictional characters into recognisably true-to-life crises in consistently gripping ways.

But if Haig’s book stands as a just slightly over-manicured front lawn, complete with reassuringly familiar garden gnomes and even a fluffy household pet or two on hand, Galfe’s has an authentic touch of the jungle to it: it feels exotic and a little dangerous, often disarming the reader with a page or two of seemingly casual exposition before blindsiding them with a sudden plot twist. Or put another way: these are the sort of stories tailor-made for those of us who like to be both entertained and shocked, and perhaps also secretly comforted by the fact that it’s the characters in Near Horizons, not themselves, being manipulated in this way. There’s something inherently reassuring in the notion that nothing here could ever, surely, happen to us – an almost physically soothing sensation, like a welcome descent into a warm bath when the door is firmly locked and bolted against a storm raging outside. I confidently predict that we will be hearing much more of this supremely assured author in the future.

Woodbridge Publishers, November 2025, hardcover £16.12, paperback £13.05

Cheryl Hines. Image: David Torcivia, Wikimedia Commons

Cheryl Hines, Unscripted: A Memoir

This book shouldn’t work. A memoir written by a 60-year-old actress, who, frankly, has never threatened to become a major film star – you may know her best as Larry David’s foil on the TV series Curb Your Enthusiasm – hardly sounds promising. Then there’s the author’s personal baggage. Since 2014, Cheryl Hines has been married to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the raspy-voiced US cabinet minister who served as one of Donald Trump’s chief surrogates during his last presidential campaign. Rarely has a book been written that straddles the worlds of Hollywood and conservative politics, let alone those as embodied by the current administration in Washington DC. Yet, against the odds, Unscripted turns out to be an enthralling read.

Essentially, what’s on offer here is a well-told and often deftly comic account of a working-class Florida girl with dreams of doing something in life other than following in her father’s footsteps as the manager of a local Burger King outlet. In time, Hines goes on to catch the acting bug, makes her way to the Universal Studios in Orlando, and promptly finds herself staffing a sex chatline. Next she’s offered a part in a cable-TV show called Swamp Thing, where the script calls on her to do little more than emerge from a large manmade puddle on the studio floor and stand there for a while, topless. Another time she appears on an episode of American TV’s The Dating Game, but isn’t chosen to go on a date.

Life was a bit like that for Hines in the 1990s. This may have been her nadir as a working actress, but it’s the high point of her book, which passes over the serial rebuffs and setbacks in breezy, vernacular fashion, with none of the professional biographer’s tendency to choke the pages with a flat-footed account of names and dates. Things slow down a bit once we settle into the groove of Hines’s long and apparently blissfully untroubled run on Curb, and her equally happy marriage to RFK Jr., but the first act of the show is itself worth the price of admission.

Skyhorse, March 2026, £21.59

Sir Anthony Hopkins. Image: Elena Torre, Wikimedia Commons

Anthony Hopkins, We Did OK, Kid: A Memoir

According to its publisher, this book is a ‘raw, honest and moving account’ by one of our foremost living actors. It’s certainly raw. Hopkins lays out his early life in unsparing detail, as the son of a tough, hard-headed Port Talbot baker who didn’t have much time or sympathy for a son with an alarming tendency to slap on makeup and hang out with the local amateur dramatics society. ‘My mother and father were both prone to depression and black moods,’ we learn. ‘They fought and wept. My father drank heavily, which only fueled his heightened emotionality.’ Anthony Hopkins himself liked a drop in later life, to put it no stronger than that, and proved a less than stellar National Service recruit as a result, often brought up on charges of brawling with his fellow soldiers. The fractious reputation followed him back into civvy street, first in the world of semi-professional provincial theatre, and then the more refined halls of RADA in London.

Hopkins assesses his talent in these days modestly. ‘I could barely speak, and had the posture of a camel,’ he writes. But he worked hard, and never turned down a job. In time he came to the notice of Laurence Olivier, who made him his understudy in a production of Strindberg’s The Dance of Death. After standing in for the great man one night, Olivier complimented him for having ‘walked away with the part like a cat with a mouse between his teeth.’ Even so, the young Hopkins was soon bored by the repetition of the stage, one of those people who always seem to want to be elsewhere, doing something else. ‘I began to feel that acting was just a by-product,’ he writes. ‘I wanted to find value in the rest of my life.’

As with the aforementioned Cheryl Hines memoir, this book most comes alive when charting the uphill struggles of the author’s early career, and rather settles into a holding pattern once we come to see him triumph in The Silence of the Lambs and all the rest. Anyone hoping for rollicking Hollywood scandal à la Bette Davis or David Niven may be disappointed, although Hopkins does allow himself a few disobliging remarks on the late actor Paul Sorvino, with whom he worked unhappily on Oliver Stone’s Nixon. In the absence of gossip, there’s a good deal of what’s-it-all-about rumination on the author’s part, some bits of it more compelling than others. The takeaway message of the book is of the essential strangeness of the acting profession, which, like any intelligent observer, the author sometimes struggles to take entirely seriously. For all the money and awards, I grew to feel quite sorry for Anthony Hopkins as I finished We Did OK, Kid. But that’s because he knows how to tell a story.

Simon & Schuster, November 2025, £25

Bob Spitz, The Rolling Stones: The Biography

Ah, the Stones. By now there have been almost as many books on the old devils as records and concerts by the lads themselves over the course of their sixty-plus year career. In no particular order, we’ve had the late Stanley Booth’s fly-on-the-wall account of the band’s notorious 1969 tour of the United States, ending with their disastrous concert at Altamont; an enjoyably gossipy romp through the narcotic days of the 70s by their factotum and sometime heroin dealer ‘Spanish’ Tony Sanchez; formidably brainy group biographies by the likes of the journalists Stephen Davis and Philip Norman; and, not least, the necessarily sanitised but still quite lively first-hand accounts by Keith Richards, Bill Wyman and Ronnie Wood themselves, all of them estimable enough in their own right, if perhaps betraying the hand of a ghostwriter. Back in the dark ages, there were even biographies of both Richards and Mick Jagger, and a third book (a glutton for punishment, that author) on the band collectively by a character named Sandford, but we needn’t linger on them.

Now Bob Spitz, an American journalist known for his previous works on pop-cultural figures like the Beatles and several lesser groups, as well as his juvenile nonfiction books (in so far as there can truly be said to be a difference between the two genres), brings us this ‘definitive’ account of rock’s bad boys, which he stretches out to the gatefold triple-album length of 700-plus pages. Does it actually say anything new? Yes and no. The basic story is present and largely correct: an initial eighteen months of struggle, followed by ten years of inspired music and personal debauchery – and in turn by five decades of meticulous decline management – might sum it up. Spitz is at his most engaging when he abandons the weary chronological plod, and instead follows the template of Ian Leslie’s triumphant recent dual-biography John & Paul in putting the Jagger-Richards relationship under the microscope. The author takes on the tired polarities – Mick as the uptight details guy, Keith the agreeably wrecked one – by reframing the story as a volatile bromance: ‘passionate, tender and tempestuous, full of love, riven by jealousy.’ However much they were at odds, seems to be the message, Mick ’n Keef were, or are, still an indivisible twosome, the driving force of the Stones, with the others, even the band’s original wayward genius Brian Jones, mere talented add-ons. The cast and basic plot may be familiar, but Spitz has at least succeeded in giving a recognisably human face to the whole star-crossed saga.

Penguin Press, April 2026, £26.14

1918 – Children play on a captured German field artillery gun exhibited in the Mall, London. Image: Wikimedia Commons

Alwyn Turner, A Shellshocked Nation: Britain Between the Wars

It’s always good to find a readable and well-researched variant on the standard schoolroom account of events, which in this case would have had us see the UK of the years 1918-39 as a uniformly grim place, grey, soupily lit and generally austere, somewhere the Great Depression set in like a chill Channel fog and lifted again just in time for the arrival of the Luftwaffe. What’s most striking about Alwyn Turner’s new book, by contrast, are the similarities between those sepia-toned times, seemingly out of some vanished Jurassic social order, and our own. Consider that, in 1922-24, Britain managed to get through four prime ministers; that politicians as a class were said to be ‘uniquely unpopular’, occupying a place in the nation’s affections only slightly more elevated than that of child molesters; that London itself was a soiled, sad place whose inhabitants habitually murdered, stole, lied and cheated as they slithered around in a sea of immorality; that the UK was drowning in debt while simultaneously undergoing the Spanish Flu epidemic that killed an estimated 40-50 million people worldwide, roughly three times more than Covid; and that ‘tariff reform’ divided the nation much as Brexit did a century later.

For that matter, many of the products and institutions of our current daily lives entered service in the 1920s or early 30s. Among other goodies, Turner lovingly catalogues the new confectionery brands manufactured in Britain: ‘Aero, Black Magic, Chocolate Digestive, Chocolate Orange, Crunchie, Fruit and Nut, Kit-Kat, Maltesers, Mars Bars, Quality Street, Rolos, Roses and Smarties.’ That’s not to mention such establishments as the BBC, Butlin’s holiday camps, British Home Stores, NAAFIs, Wembley Stadium and London Transport, or the last’s iconic diagrammatic tube map and double-decker buses.

Maybe the book as a whole tends to be long on lists of this sort, as opposed to locating the human narrative that generally makes a social history come alive on the page, but, that minor cavil aside, A Shellshocked Nation is still a bracing and well-paced read, set against the ever-louder ticking clock of international events, which reminds us why the author’s devoted fans admiringly refer to him as ‘Page’ Turner. You could do much worse than to treat yourself to a copy this winter.

Profile Books, January 2026, £17.99

Posted on by Stuart Millson

From the sunbaked south to Nordic shores

The Spanish vega from Caceres. Image: Derek Turner

STUART MILLSON enjoys music by Granados and Ginastera, Alfvén and Rautavaara

New from the ever-exploring divine art label comes a collection of often sultry songs by a group of 20th-century Latin composers, beginning with a name that is, perhaps, not at all well-known: Fernando Obradors (1897-1945) a Catalan conductor who, in his relatively short life, does not seem to have strayed far from his native Barcelona.

Six of his short songs, from a large-scale collection – Canciones clásicas españolas – launch the CD, and we are at once in a world of captive hearts, “kisses as unaccountable as the number of hairs on my head”, passionate beating hearts, “rash and painful love”. This is music to mirror a landscape, a climate, a temperament, but also demonstrates the desire of a Spanish national – or nationalist? – composer to establish a lieder/songbook tradition for his country. However, without an equally passionate interpretation of the work, the stories distilled into these intriguing songs would probably not communicate quite as well. That is why we would do well to celebrate the CD’s artists, two US West Coast-based musicians: Esther Rayo, a dramatic soprano voice, accompanied by Sydney-born pianist, Peter Grunberg, who clearly holds the piano part here to be a voice in its own right. Sometimes shimmering, as if in the world of Ravel, or at other times with all the ease of a cabaret song, the piano emerges on this album as belonging to the centre of the stage.

Yet it is Esther Rayo’s voice which leads this CD of seduction – a voice known in the world of opera (Tosca and La Bohème in Italy) and sacred oratorio – an instrument able to switch between the sighs of the song, El majo celeso (“From the lovely person I’m falling for”) to the painful, fatal love of La maja dolorosa (The Sorrowful Woman) by Enrique Granados (1876-1916) – a composer fascinated by the Spain of Francisco Goya. A more modernist vitality informs the music of Xavier Montsalvatge (1912-2022) and two of the South American composers who are also featured on the album, Mexico’s Consuela Velazquez (1916-2005) and Argentina’s Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983) – the latter composer actually having heard the young Peter Grunberg toward the start of his career performing Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

The spirit of Spanish folk-poetry is again to the fore in six songs by Manuel de Falla, possibly the best-known of the composers featured here – a figure often spoken of in the same breath as Stravinsky, Ravel and Debussy, whose earthy ballet suites combine all the energy of The Rite of Spring, yet mixed with the dances and raw emotions of the rural folk of Iberia – at least, the folk who live in our and the composer’s imagination. This journey through a culture and people ends with the song from which the CD takes its name: Estrellita – Little Star – by Mexico’s Manuel Ponce (1883-1948) – in which the singer implores the light shining in the heavens to: “Come down and tell me if he loves me a little, because I cannot live without his love”.

I listened to these works and wrote this review as the snow settled in early January, the weather service announcing the movement of a “cold front across the country”. But closing one’s eyes and sinking into the warm hillsides and dusty village streets of Spain, Mexico, Argentina, it was as if music had the power to take me to another dimension. The CD, a firm recommendation.

Image: Derek Turner

Yet the cold front did come, musically, too, in the form of a release by Chandos Records of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Neeme Jarvi, summoning us on a sleigh ride to the cold Baltic/Nordic coastal areas of Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Cantus arcticus, written in 1972, and involving slow-moving clouds of orchestral sound, occasionally interrupted by the flight of flocks of birds – their calls, recorded, and played over the sound of the Gothenburg orchestra. The composer helpfully demarcates the score with headings such as: The Bog (Think of autumn and of Tchaikovsky) and Swans migrating. Rautavaara seems to bridge the time-span between the world of Sibelius and our own era, responding to the powerful imagery and sounds of Nature in a way which suggests the contemporary preoccupation with ecology, conservation, and an attempt – not to imitate birds – but to make them a living part of music.

Rautavaara’s drifting rhapsody and meditation, though, seems slightly out of place alongside the other two pieces presented by Chandos: the much more 19th-century-sounding ceremonial music of Hugo Alfvén’s Festpel (Festival Play) – all trumpets and courtly pride – and a score to historic derring-do at the time of the Thirty Years War, the Suite to a theatrical production from 1932 of Gustav II Adolf. A sense of national destiny flutters like a battle-standard throughout this telling of the story of the heroism and death of Sweden’s great monarch. The Gothenburg players rise to the occasion, with fervour and brassy pride – but also with some of the clouds and laments of men facing death the next day on the battlefield, but still able to fortify themselves with a tankard and a lively folk-dance.

With orchestral colour and a definite sense of place – and with a cover picture of Northern snows, migrating swans and forests of fire trees – no lover of rich orchestral music would want to be without this excellent Chandos recording.

CD details

Estrellita, Esther Rayo and Peter Grunberg, piano, divine art, ddx 21145

Alfvén, Festpel, Suite from Gustav II Adolf; Rautavaara, Cantus Arcticus, Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Neeme Jarvi. Chandos Super Audio CD: CHSA 5386

Posted on by Rahul Gupta

“Not unless bound with a chain” – an introduction to Dróttkvætt

RAHUL GUPTA explains the history and tradition of a venerable poetic form. This article was first
published in Forgotten Ground Regained, New Series, Issue 8, Fall 2025, focusing on modern English poems imitating Old Norse and Icelandic forms, and is reproduced with permission

Gupta Drottkvaett FGRDownload
Posted on by Michael Yost

The Red Knight of the Red Lands

MICHAEL YOST is a poet and essayist living in rural New Hampshire with his wife and children. His essays and poems have been published in places like Modern Age, First Things, The University Bookman, Dappled Things, The Brazen Head, and others. He substacks at The Weight of Form

The Red Knight of the Red Lands

“I say móre: the just man justices; / Keeps grace”

– G. M. Hopkins, As Kingfishers Catch Fire

Against the sky he saw the sycamore

The girl Lynet had screamed of in the night,

And red the dawn, and red the plain before.

Gareth’s heart quickened as he knew the sight;

For he had journeyed to avenge the dead,

And meet the Red Knight in his Lands of Red.

Old knights whose beards were traced with cunning grey

Hanged with their squires who still were counted boys

And nevermore would snivel, steal, or play,

Nor find in songs of honor short lived joys;

For he had found them, and they died in fear:

The Knight of Red who held the Crimson Spear.

Upon their armor shone the bleeding sun

As, like ripe fruit, they turned in driest wind;

For they had sought him and their prize had won,

Nor could they know how against him they had sinned.

For they had fought, and bled beneath his hands

And met the Red Knight in his own Red Lands.

The tree’s roots were black with relics of their blood

Who fought for Arthur and his royal name

And pled for mercy, kneeling in the mud,

Whom he had hanged to magnify their shame.

For in love’s madness, he had sworn a vow

Who hanged them there upon the leafless bough.

Then Gareth found, beside that tree, a horn

Of ivory, and blew one hard clear note

That broke the humming scarlet of the morn

And sounded deeply from the horn’s pale throat;

For glory drove him with its stern demands

To kill the Red Knight in his own Red Lands.

With groans of ancient wood and rusting steel,

The wide portcullis and the gate began

To open. No surrender, no appeal

Could save him from the sword and hand of man.

Beneath the shadow of his palisade,

The Red Knight rode, in armor all arrayed.

His roan destrier shook its crimson trap.

His shield was crimson, crimson was his helm.

His eyes were shot with red. Each plate and strap

Was crimson, for blood crimson was his realm.

He slew for love, his heart in passion’s chains;

The Red Knight, master of those wasted plains.

“Know, boy, that I have slain both dam and babe;

I have unbodied souls a thousand-fold,

And neither compass, map, nor astrolabe

Can chart my bosom. I am old and old.

It has been long since sleep has closed my eye.

I kill and kill; yet I can never die.”

“Christ mercy” uttered Gareth. Then he set

His spear. He gripped his shield and dug his spur

Into his horse’s flank. God saw him, yet

Their contest had but steel for arbiter.

So joined they in the morning on that plain;

The sun besmirching all in blood-red stain.

Their spears were shattered with a thunderclap,

So they dismounted, drawing each their blades

And striking fast at each and every gap.

Gareth sought vengeance for the hanged men’s shades

Who swung unseeing, knocking knee to knee

Upon the branches of the dying tree.

“Know this;” the Red Knight panted; “I shall grow

In strength until the noon; and then the power

Of seven courses through my frame; and know

That you will hang before that burning hour.”

“Then speak no further. Fight me to end.
Our wounds shall speak, and let our blades contend.”

They fought in sweat; each angry thrust and blow

Drew life’s own blood from each. The grass was wet

And steel rang out on steel, their eyes aglow

Beneath their visors. There they were well met.

Their swords grew hot with blows as fire-brands

As they did battle there in those Red Lands.

Time passed. They drew apart to catch their breath,

Each leaning on his sword, both weak with pain

And in the other’s eyes each saw his death.

They cried aloud; and crossed their blades again.

Three times they joined, three times they fell apart;

Their chests both pounding with a beating heart.

Gareth felt fire burn along his arm;

He dropped his sword and clutched his wounded limb.

The Red Knight pressed him; hot to work his harm;

And blow on vicious blow he dealt to him.

But Gareth would not fall, nor would he yield

And took the sword’s edge hard upon his shield.

Leaping, he reached and clutched again his battered sword

And gave again the strokes he had received.

His wrath was fire. Now his man was gored;

His edge fell fast, and as it fell, it cleaved.

He struck the Red Knight well about the head;

The red helm split. His foe lay like the dead.

Stooping to slay him, Gareth drew his dirk

Unlaced the helm, and pressed his throat, laid bare,

Swelling to catch at breath. The bloody work

Was nearly done. The Red Knight choked; “Christ: spare. . .

Please, spare me; for I can no longer fight.

I yield. . . I yield, myself, at last, to might.”

Then Gareth spoke: “No, murderer. In shame

You die, as you have killed those noble men

Who prayed for mercy in our Savior’s name

And hanged. Now pray. This blade shall say ‘Amen’”

“For love I swore. For war’s own sake I wrought

Evil on innocence. Pray, slay me not.”

“I will repent, and live to pray and fast,

And will to Arthur swear my loyalty.

And when this body meets its death, at last,

From fire my contrite heart shall set me free.”

“I spare. I spare. But much against my will.

Though it is noble to pay ill for ill;

Yet this waste land and others must revive,

And wrath and blood will only clear the weeds

But will not keep the crops and trees alive.

Justice demands your death. Yet mercy pleads;

And I give mercy. Strength must conquer strength;

But mercy lord it over wrath at length.”

Posted on by David Dumouriez · 2 Comments

In Good Company

DAVID DUMOURIEZ wouldn’t be tempted to blow his own trumpet even if (a) he had a trumpet or (b) he knew how to play one

In Good Company

I could not conceive of bone

(especially not my own!).

Bones were of the dead and

of the old, and I was neither.

Now, in a sense, I’m both.

My tunic stretched out

like a sack and melded with

the soil. My brasses lost their

sheen, turned to crusted

lumps, but never seemed

to doubt they’d be revived.

The greatest change of all

was me. I left your world

at just turned twenty-one.

Gone, I’d guess, much quicker

than I’d come. Painlessly,

unknowingly. But gone.

As our new mechanic ways

subverted nature, so earth

subverted rain, submerging me.

Two more years of action

next conspired to churn and

disarrange whatever parts had

battled to remain. My friend,

I’d not have had you see me then.

Well, as it will, time stilled

the air and held the ground,

then stalled. Stalled, until the

forty thousandth morning when

a farmer felt my outline in a field.

Not quite where the finish of me

started, I’ll remark, but close

enough for anyone who’d known.

I’d made it to another century

somehow. Touched another

consciousness at last.

I got a box and bugle call;

the fit young men more

solemn than I would have

guessed. My regiment was

found at once (the patience

of the brasses!) and now it’s

just the name. I thank them,

really, but I wish they’d save

their time. While better men

are nameless, I’ll be fine.

Posted on by Marly Youmans

Five poems by Marly Youmans

MARLY YOUMANS is the author of sixteen books of poetry and fiction. Recent work includes a long poem, Seren of the Wildwood (Wiseblood), a novel, Charis in the World of Wonders (Ignatius), and a poetry collection, The Book of the Red King (Phoenicia)

Pentina for the Childhood Dream of Hong Zhu An

       After seeing My Dream from 50 Years Ago, National Gallery, Singapore

In the deep of night, a little boy may dream

A sight that takes him fifty years to paint…

Primordial and strange, alive with fish,

A branched and schooling glimmerage of leaves

On a tree that joins the heavens to the earth.

Are the eternal things rooted in earth  

And, gleaming, come to us as truth in dream?

His mother says a dream of schooling leaves

Means he’s a luck child, born to see and paint

Under a canopy of fortune’s fish.

Emblems of abundance, the household’s fish

Swim idly in the tank—not koi of earth

And tree, though bright, as if splotched with paint:

The boy recalls the shimmerings of dream,

The windblown gleams and flitter of the leaves.

Like a stirring angel, the tree of leaves

Is movement in his mind—his musings fish

For what a tree can mean, for what a dream

Descending in the night can say of earth,

And how a dream incarnates into paint.

Sometimes it takes half-centuries to paint

A childhood dream, to utter what the leaves

Are whispering to our Adamic earth,

To show the essence of a tree of fish

And find realities inside a dream.

What windfall wealth it was to dream and paint

Fish like spirit leaves, called up from earth…

A Tang Scholar-Poet in the Stables

   After a “white painting” by Han Gan, 8th century

The emperor’s prime horse, Night-Shining White

Of the frolic of lifted heels, the eyelids of dawn,

And trembling, flaring nostrils: come to me,

And let me bridle all your larking ways

So I may leap upon your moonlight back.

I read your mystic riddle, sense that you

Are secretly celestial, that you

Are one of Shangdi’s pets, that you are sky’s

Hidden mystery, a blood-sweat dragon.

So yield to me, fire spirit, burnished snake,

Imperial and carp-scaled dragon who

Has danced and cycloned over Mongol plains,

Scribing wild and delicate inscriptions.

My pilfered, fragrance-crowned Hipparion,

My pinioned horse of lasting poetry,

My brother bard, we’ll fly this earth, and ink

Immortal letters onto clouds and air.

Idylls of Spring

1.

When wind, invited, tangles with the curtain,

When scilla, daffodil, and Lenten rose

Declare the winter’s drawn-out doom as certain,

I hear my name as sung by streams and meadows

And earth that wakes and wishes to be garden,

Yet linger for the baby curled in bedclothes,

This sleeping child with skin and hair like silk,

Breathing out a cloudy scent of breastmilk.

2.

Soaring over pomegranate trees,

The breeze gliding its fingers through our hair,

All flowers busied with the steps of bees,

My love and I went tumbling through the air

Like circus artists of the high trapeze,

Joined at the root, needle-naked, bare

To clouds and leaves—the semen on my thigh

Foretold this child while birds sang lullaby.

3.

Tug on the threads that long-dead mothers spun

For fairy tales—they’re not just snow and moonbeams

But realms where sins are thrust east of the sun

And west of moon. Dire sacrifice redeems

The tragedy of couples come undone

Or lovers magicked into marble dreams.

And if a child is captured by a witch,

She’ll flee the hut that seems half belle, half bitch.

4.

Puff of breath, warmth risen from the nest

Of crowning hair—a mortal fragrance raised                    

Like scent from a field that the dew has blessed…

I think of Bashō’s Matsushima praise,

His bay of scattered pine isles shawled in mist,

Some like a child directing toy-sized plays,       

Some formed like babies at a mother’s breast,

Some shaped like children islanded in rest.

5.

And when our baby wakes, I make a song,

How I’m rose tree and she a bud-and-briar,

How I’m the arbor, she a scuppernong

Shy in leaves, how I’m the frisking fire

And she a spark, how I’m the lake at dawn

Where she’s a swan… and though we seldom tire

Of songs and laughing, all at once we cease

And stare, eyes locked, in momentary peace.

6.

What is there worth the doing in my time,

I wonder, if it is not making—to seed

With life and by this make our own eye-rhyme,

To feel the energies of lake and field

Stirring in me like an unborn child

That longs for birth and wants her summer’s yield;

To strive to make such moments live, unfurled

In words, and so be midwife in the world.

Blue Scene, Gold Box

 After seeing Geumgwedo (1656) by Jo Sok,

National Museum of Korea

The lake and sky have mingled after rain,

Coupling with clouds and mirrorings of cloud,

The clouds not white but blue against a sky

That pales almost to white, and the blue shape

Of Sleeping Lion floats, a royal cloud

Islanded in mist of palest blue.

The sight is in me like a seed of pain,

So lovely that some part of me is bowed

In grief that all this wondrous scene will fly

Except in mind, where it may be dreamscape

To linger, mean, and grow, the way a crowd

Of leaves once hid a hanging chest from view—

Inside, the babe: a mythic foundation

That leads to kings by the seventh generation.

Four Winter Treasures at Otsego Lake

The eldest fir’s a mountain of needle-green;

  Against its dark, as if against a screen,

A dragonish tangle of running script,

  Beauty encrypted in branches, by snow tipped

And outlined, cursive burst of energy—

  Arrested strangeness, and the apogee

Of all calligraphy, the wyvern lines

   Explosive, frozen, wild: the winter’s signs

And sigils backed by the unshedding tree,

   Tor that thrusts its verdant jubilee

From earth to sky beside the ice-chained lake

  That holds what autumn tossed in its opaque

Jewelry-box—red leaves and maple keys

   Jailed when frigid waters commenced to freeze.

And at Point Judith stands that mark of power,

   Man-made, laborious Kingfisher Tower,

A beauty mark upon a cheek of ice,

   Stonemasons’ height of earthly paradise,

The castellated spire they might have dreamed

   To please the Sleeping Lion, ridge that seemed

Some eminence to rule the lake and land,

   Blue palisades in lion’s shape—the grand

And playful cat who knows no hours or days,

   No first or last, and cares not for this praise.

Posted on by Lani Burshtein

Prosopopeia

LANI BURSHTEIN is a schoolteacher, artist and writer living in Toronto. Her poetic interests include disaster, history, visual arts, opulence, childhood and constructed identities

The following poems explore the literary device of prosopopeia, or giving voice to inanimate objects. But some objects aren’t quite so lifeless as we’d like to think, are they?

TECHNICOLOUR’S ROSE

Romance isn’t dead—I’ve dyed. I’m red.

Twinkle can be tooled. My throat is jewelled.

Vamps have sultry angles. Mine are spangled.

Divas can be lifeless—this one’s priceless.

Technicolour’s rose: refracting bows.

Twins of mirrored face: my soles can pace.

Glamour grows through time. My road rewinds.

Homeward-bound she wheels; clicking heels.

Brick’s iconic trippers; ruby slippers.

QUEEN OF HEARTS

Observe my curves, my cuts, my twinkling facets

Admire my frozen fire, my glassine assets

Regard the artisans that chiselled me thus

Embrace my Cartier case, its velvet must

Be enthralled with all the lives I’ve traced

Applaud the filmic broads whose gowns I’ve laced

Respect the intellect of sparkling science

My sobriquet: the Taylor-Burton Diamond

MORNING ELIXIR

Electrify your sluggish mind with black

Elixir bitter— swirling steam’s attack

on sluggish thinking. Fill your tiny cup

and energize your neurons. Level up.

Blow for cool, then dip me back and drink,

I wake you and upgrade the thoughts you think.

Your concentration is my gift bestowed.

Now, rise and grind my beans. I’m espresso.

FROM DREAMS YOU KNOW MY HALLS

I am the widened space that speaks of naught.

My columns—tilted pines—my mats, your walking

feet upon the forest floor unyielding.

Your camera scribes the silver shadows fleeting.

My dangling boughs, grey pipes, my curling leaf—

abandoned furniture. Your presence: brief.

You interrupt my silences to pry—

I give up nothing. Structures, too, can lie

awake at unclocked hours, knowing nil.

My river—moulding carpet, nest—these sills

of windows rimed in plaque without excuse.

Here, clouds collect so you cannot peek through.

From dreams, you know my halls. I shan’t explain

my provenance. I’m liminal. My lanes—

a shuttered wood around a witch’s hut.

I’m liminal. My gates are always shut.

HMS EREBUS

Who are you to seek me—

you, who have never crunched ice like hardtack

you, without rot, mast or muster.

You think you can desecrate my ribcage,

trampling in cold shock at my collapse,

slicing the sea-rot from my dreads?

Disturbing my bones with bubbles, extinguishing

the darkness I chose?

Yes, I chose it.

A candy trail from brass buttons to bleached bodies

misled you with missives slit between the stones that knew me.

And still do.

A cairn is not a conscience.  How

I rewrote your map in my mordant image: Starvation Cove.

Don’t think the sunken shell

of me can’t wield a spoon greased in blubber;

Crack open one scurvid tin

and find out just how many mouths

a bay can have.

My warning is your invitation.

Oh, to starve again—I dare you.