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 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 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.

Posted on by Rupert Loydell

Four poems by Rupert Loydell

RUPERT LOYDELL is the editor of Stride and a contributing editor to International Times. He has many books of poetry in print, including The Age of Destruction and Lies (Shearsman), Preloved Metaphors (Red Ceilings) and Damage Limitation (zimZalla). He has co-authored many collaborative works, and edited anthologies for Knives Forks & Spoons Press, Shearsman, and Salt. He also writes about post-punk music, pedagogy, poetry and film for academic journals and books

HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT

Events hamper the imagination.

Spirituality mostly revolves around

complexity and trying to reframe

the impossible as now believable.

Religion is essentially a big office

producing the new world we might

be longing for, a plague appropriate

for an England where everyone is

morally corrupt, bombs explode

and laboratory monkeys scream.

The beautiful afterwards of history

is a revelation but questions remain,

encapsulating the cultural logic of

empire and ghost voice corporations.

Faith is a clumsy metaphor for fugitive

moments within, an uneasy philosophy

ever reliant upon misread scriptures.

Time circles and collapses, whilst

readers are the only ones whose

overwhelming melancholia can be

salvaged from the so-called death of

gleeful affirmation and are capable of

waiting on the platform for salvation,

secrets always hidden in plain sight.

Like all theories of everything, it is

too simple and leads to longer words

and inevitable destruction, might be

described as superstitious nonsense.

© Rupert M Loydell

ENTANGLED

The idea of place is a central theme, journeys are at the core. Writing allows me to displace your narratives and replace them with things more relevant to my choice of subject matter, an endless gathering up blindness and doubt.

I am not bothered with chapter endings or pauses between moments. Instead, I allow a series of bizarre events to unfold the story and totally forget audience comprehension.

Verisimilitude intrigues and consoles me quite a bit when performing the impossible, which is mostly misdirection, a musical take on freedom as I work on my wondering, making my stories unrealistic to fascinate younger people.

All things can be visions, shining through the blurring of upside down books offering a route through labyrinths that become the when and the was, different possibilities and devices to heighten ambiguity.

© Rupert M Loydell

POSSIBLE DEFINITIONS

A poem is two things. First, it is an abstract

idea. Second, it is a trace of how the author

has used language, a way to gain knowledge

about the process of acquiring knowledge.

Writing is an act of displacement, evidence of

one possible arrangement of images and words,

each chosen by its author, always reliant upon

what shapes or letterforms mean or represent.

The page or line break is an imaginary boundary

which allows for rhythms, associative thinking,

different forms of and routes to understanding.

Language is always rooted in specific moments

and personal circumstances despite any claim

to universality. It is not only how it is written

or said but also what is heard, seen and read.

Words can only ever be stolen or borrowed.

© Rupert M Loydell

COMMON SENSE

At what point will common sense prevail?

When will the last bus arrive? Will it ever

stop raining? Probably never, soon, yes

of course. There are many ways to think

about drawing and you must understand

that perspective is an imposed system

of representation, not an actual thing.

My studio’s awash again, cacti sodden,

jugs and plastic cartons full of rain but

no canvasses or works on paper harmed.

I hope to find courage to look the storm

in the eye, contemplate what is missing

from my life; have no use for concealment,

can only read what is put in front of me,

try to hear the music, work out the shape

or form of these fragmented narratives

and random episodes. If there is too much

storytelling I am gone. Let me make up

links between moments, order the scenes,

work out how to understand juxtaposition,

collage and remix. Epiphanies are patently

false, happy endings a literary device that

makes things all too easy and predictable.

We must rescue ourselves from the swamp

of literary seduction, false promises, and

question everything before the water rises,

bus services are cancelled and we no longer

recognise common sense even as it sneaks

up behind us to bite us on the bum and

make us behave in a more reasonable way.

© Rupert M Loydell

Posted on by Derek Turner

The importance of ephemera

The Lost Folk

Lally MacBeth, London: Faber & Faber, 2025, hardback, 340pps., £20
DEREK TURNER finds a well-meant quest for authenticity obscured by Angst

Britain’s folk culture is world-famous, and perennially popular – the Abbot’s Bromley Horn Dance, Padstow’s ‘Obby ‘Oss, Lewes’s Bonfire Night, and Lincolnshire’s Haxey Hood Game, to name just some of the rituals that even in a digital age help anchor the English to their earth. In recent decades, a young generation of “new countryphiles” have become involved in folk culture, joining in with traditional festivities and activities like Morris dancing and well-dressing, yet also exploring new ways of expressing identity and strengthening community.

Lally MacBeth is a representative figure among these countryphiles, as founder of the Folk Archive to foster interest in new forms of folk culture, and co-founder of the Stone Club, which celebrates Britain’s Megalithic monuments. In this, her first book, she builds on her Folk Archive work to call for greater recognition of folk objects that too often go unnoticed, and to help formulate a folk culture fit for the future. She is herself a Morris dancer, and an apparently indefatigable collector of curiosities – trawling charity shops and car boot sales in search of whatever is autochthonous, personal and locally distinctive, from church hassocks to horse brasses, pieces of old costume to tourist ware tea-towels, and shop fittings to pub signs.

Her own interest was sparked when she came across a photograph of her great-great aunt, taking part in a 1934 Ludlow pageant of Milton’s Comus – such pageants a form of folk culture now extinguished, and not even generally considered as being aspects of folk culture. She has concluded that folk culture, as conventionally defined, is too categorically confining – the filtered choices of a particular class at a particular period, now become stale and tired.

Folk culture builds community by formulating folk memory and repeating rituals that can link classes and generations to each other, and all classes and generations to particular places. MacBeth is right to aver that folk culture can be fostered by institutions as well as by individuals; churches can be repositories of folk beliefs and folkish items, and county councils can be custodians of local character. The author pays overdue tribute to many different kinds of people – dance teachers, event organisers, gravestone carvers, preservers of vernacular buildings, signwriters, topiarists, and yet others – whose largely unsung activities have helped perpetuate local distinctiveness.

Folk items can be reassuringly solid – like the eleventh century reindeer antlers used at Abbot’s Bromley, shell grottoes, ships’ figureheads, or model villages like Buckinghamshire’s Bekonscot. But they can also be disconcertingly ephemeral – badges, costumes, posters, or even sandcastles that only stand for a day. They can even be ideas – like the piquant folk-memory that a statue of Pan was once carried in church processions in the Gloucestershire town of Painswick.

The only locally distinctive items she wants to exclude from her ethnographic catalogue are “problematic and offensive historical language.” She accuses the folksong collector Cecil Sharp of recording “incredibly racist dance practices,” and creating “a folk world that suited him: sanitised, classist, racist and very, very male.” She loathes the blackface traditionally used by some Morris sides, for reasons that until the 1970s were considered more or less innocent (albeit infra dig). She expends anguished paragraphs on one solitary Morris side which has so far resisted pressure to whiten up its act. One can understand why such things make the author uneasy; yet is this not ‘sanitisation’ of the kind of which she accuses Sharp? Sharp, it should be noted, was a Liberal and a progressive, who for several years collaborated productively with the socialist collector-dancer Mary Neal (although they later fell out).

Morris dancer at Rochester Sweeps’ Fair. Image: Derek Turner

The author’s well-intentioned wish to embrace folk objects of all kinds from all kinds of marginalised or newly-arrived communities carries the obvious risk of ultimately overwhelming globally unique native objects. Folk culture allows communities to define and defend themselves – as the author says, to “feel a sense of home, and a sense of belonging.” But if everyone is to ‘feel at home,’ can anyone actually be at home? Authentic folkish manifestations are spontaneous responses to specific situations in space and time, as ‘instinctive’ and enjoyable as treading the measures of a Morris; should they also be objects of anthropological Angst?

The author is on easier ground when she asks us to honour undeservedly overlooked figures like Florence Elsie Matley Moore, who devoted much of the 1930s to painting, photographing and restoring Worcestershire antiquities and popularising country dances. Somerset’s Ruth Tongue emerges engagingly as eccentric fabulist-folklorist, who alienated more serious-minded students of folklore by toying with traditions, and claiming to speak with fairies. So too do Pamela Colman Smith, folktale-teller, occultist and Tarot card illustrator – and poor, paralysed Nellie Sloggett, who forged a successful writing career from her bedroom in Padstow, regaling readers with lively tales of ‘piskies’ and other Cornubian conceits.

Raconteurs help perpetuate folk-memory as much as scholars like the 1930s writers Dorothy Hartley and Florence White, who recorded country cooking and other crafts, or the oral historian George Ewart Evans, whose classics Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay (1956) and Pattern Under the Plough (1966) recorded authentic voices of rural Suffolk that were soon to be stilled. Fond fantasies as much as facts help underpin rescue and restoration efforts like those carried out by the too little known “Ferguson Gang” – five admirable women who between 1927 and 1957 helped raise huge amounts of money to save areas of the West Country threatened with development.

Whatever reservations we may have about some of the author’s political stances, she deserves commendation for calling such people to mind. She also deserves credit for raising important questions about the nature and future of ‘folk’ in an age of mass movement and social media shallowness. Yet in the end folk culture may not be amenable to even the most earnest analyses, and will evolve in its own way. As the author herself observes, folk culture is “…inexplicable, something that just is.”

Posted on by Kevin Maynard

Translations from Bao Zhao, Luis de Gongora and Giacomo Leopardi

KEVIN MAYNARD studied at Exeter University and the Warburg Institute before becoming a teacher. His poems, translations and photography have appeared in several small UK literary magazines (Agenda,The Rialto, The SHOp, The Interpreter’s House, the online magazine Littoral etc.), and his book of Chinese war poems, The Iron Flute, appeared from Arc Publications in September 2019, and is still available from all good bookshops and online outlets, or directly from Arc. See:
https://www.arcpublications.co.uk/blog/the-iron-flute-an-interview-with-kevin-maynard-285

AN ASCENT OF MOUNT LU

travel outfits dangling down
                        you traverse wetlands

traipse through tangled chaparrals
                        until you reach your mountain lodge

sheer bluffs, a thousand of them
            piled up peaks that block your way
a mighty myriad of ravines
            that ring you round and round

towering precipitous
            ancient and primordial
scattered so randomly
            you muddle up their names

deep caverns
            where you catch a glimpse
                        of subterranean springs

lofty trees that lean up
            to the pathways in the sky
pines that cluster, cling together
                        on high mountain ledges

cloud-filled caves
            encountered here and there

shaded ice-pools
            that still freeze in summer
southern trees
            that thrive throughout the winter

strident honking of crane-birds
                        to greet the yearned-for dawn

clarion howls and hoots
                        of gibbons late at night

canyons within whose plunging depths
                        the spirits are concealed

sharply chiselled summits
                        where divinities are hidden

you are one
            who loves these mountain heights
                        who deeply feels this wanderlust

so up you climb
            to where the winged ones go

                        to merge forever
                                                with the mountain mists

Bao Zhao (414?–566)

Gongora’s Letrilla 8

(2025)

Lady Luck doles out good stuff —

doles out the bad stuff too:

for some the softest flute

for others the swanee kazoo.

She leads us here and there:

in so many directions —

the monstrous and the fair;

both beggars and well-to-do.

Lettres de cachet for some;

for others billets-doux.

For some the softest flute

for others the swanee kazoo.

Sometimes it rains in torrents;

sometimes the sun breaks through.

Your grapes will either sweeten

or wither on the vine.

Your crops may ripen and grow tall

or be blighted by mildew.

For some the softest flute

for others the swanee kazoo.

A witness thinks she knows the face

of this homeless John Doe —

and if his face is dark enough

he’ll end up on Death Row.

While crooked bankers everywhere

more riches still accrue.

For some the softest flute

for others the swanee kazoo.

Luis de Gongora (1561–1627)

Letrilla 8

(1581)

Da bienes Fortuna

que no están escritos:

cuando pitos, flautas,

cuando flautas, pitos.

¡Cuán diversas sendas

se suelen seguir

en el repartir

honras y haciendas!

A unos da encomiendas,

a otros, sambenitos.

Cuando pitos, flautas,

cuando flautas, pitos.

A veces despoja

de choza y apero

al mayor cabrero;

y a quien se le antoja,

la cabra más coja

parió dos cabritos.

Cuando pitos, flautas,

cuando flautas, pitos.

Porque en una aldea

un pobre mancebo

hurtó solo un huevo,

al sol bambolea,

y otro se pasea

con cien mil delitos.

Cuando pitos, flautas,

cuando flautas, pitos.

TWO POEMS BY LEOPARDI

INFINITY

Ever dear to me

this solitary hill —

this hedgerow, too,

that quite cuts off

the far horizon

from my view . . .

But when I sit

and meditate awhile,

such boundless distances

are conjured by imagination —

such a superhuman silence —

and such deep stillness,

that the heart feels

not a little fear.

And when I hear the wind

rush through this foliage,

I start comparing its voice

with all that silence;

and then are brought to mind

eternity, the seasons dead and gone,

this so vivid present . . .

and the sound it makes.

And in the midst of such immensity

all thought’s annulled —

how sweet it seems to me

to drown in such a sea!

                                   Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837)

L’INFINITO

Sempre caro mi fu quest’ermo colle,
e questa siepe, che da tanta parte
dell’ultimo orizzonte il guardo esclude.
Ma sedendo e mirando, interminati
spazi di là da quella, e sovrumani
silenzi, e profondissima quïete
io nel pensier mi fingo, ove per poco
il cor non si spaura.  E come il vento
odo stormir tra queste piante, io quello
infinito silenzio a questa voce
vo comparando: e mi sovvien l’eterno,
e le morte stagioni, e la presente
e viva, e il suon di lei.  Così tra questa
immensità s’annega il pensier mio:
e il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare.

Canto XIII: The Holiday Is Over

Bright, mild, windless lies the night—

and, by holy moonshine is distilled

silence among the roofs and gardens, lifting

the far peaks near—austere, implacable,

serene.  O lady, now a deep hush settles

upon each empty path, while seldom gleams

from shadowed balconies lamplight . . .

At ease you slumber—for with welcome ease

does Sleep into your chamber steal: and free

from care you rest, entirely unaware

of all wounds dealt, or of how deep you slid

into my breast . . . You slumber, while I scan

these skies (so kindly-seeming); and I greet

primeval and almighty Nature, who

fashioned me from infancy for grief.

Hope I withhold, she whispers, even hope . . .

May your eyes shine, if shine they must, with tears,

or else shine not at all.  And so we end

the day’s solemnities—from its delights

you drowse now, and perhaps in sleep you dream

of all you pleased, of all who gave you pleasure . . .

but not of me: I’d never dare to think

you dreamed of me . . . Meanwhile I ask how much

of life remains, and fling my carcass down

and shout in pain, and shudder: dreadful days,

and in so green a time!  Ah, now along

the road there drifts the solitary song

of some sad labourer returning late

from revelry to his poor dwelling-place;

and frenziedly my heart contracts to know

how this world fades away, leaving behind

barely a trace: behold this festival

itself has fled, and to this festival

succeeds, tomorrow, one more working day.

Time snatches from our mortal hands each human

incident.  That huge hubbub raised

by peoples of the ancient world: gone where?

That cry, to rend the sky, of our forebears,

and all their mighty Roman realms: gone where?

The clangour of their arms on land and sea?

The world lies quiet, and is at peace again,

and now we barely speak of them at all.

When I was still a child, how hot my heart

then hungered for each holiday!  Recall

when one such day was done: I lay distraught—

awake and grieving on my bed of down—

there died away upon the paths that night

little by little, one such song as now

clutches my heart with sorrow yet again.

                                                  After Giacomo Leopardi

Canto XIII: La sera del dì di festa

Dolce e chiara è la notte e senza vento,
e queta sovra i tetti e in mezzo agli orti
posa la luna, e di lontan rivela
serena ogni montagna.  O donna mia,
già tace ogni sentiero, e pei balconi
rara traluce la notturna lampa.


Tu dormi, ché t’accolse agevol sonno
nelle tue chete stanze, e non ti morde
cura nessuna; e già non sai né pensi
quanta piaga m’apristi in mezzo al petto.
Tu dormi: io questo ciel, che sì benigno
appare in vista, a salutar m’affaccio,
e l’antica natura onnipossente,
che mi fece all’affanno. A te la speme
nego, mi disse, anche la speme, e d’altro
non brillin gli occhi tuoi se non di pianto.
Questo dì fu solenne: or da’ trastulli
prendi riposo; e forse ti rimembra
in sogno a quanti oggi piacesti, e quanti
piacquero a te: non io, non già, ch’io speri,
al pensier ti ricorro.  Intanto io chieggo
quanto a viver mi resti, e qui per terra
mi getto, e grido, e fremo.  Oh giorni orrendi
in così verde  etate!

                                Ahi, per la via

odo non lunge il solitario canto

dell’artigian, che riede a tarda notte,
dopo i sollazzi, al suo povero ostello—

e fieramente mi si stringe il core,

a pensar come tutto al mondo passa,
e quasi orma non lascia.  Ecco è fuggito
il dì festivo, ed al festivo il giorno
volgar succede, e se ne porta il tempo
ogni umano accidente.

                                   Or dov’è il suono
di que’ popoli antichi? or dov’è il grido
de’ nostri avi famosi, e il grande impero
di quella Roma, e l’armi, e il fragorio
che n’andò per la terra e l’oceano?
Tutto è pace e silenzio, e tutto posa
il mondo, e più di lor non si ragiona.
Nella mia prima età, quando s’aspetta
bramosamente il dì festivo, or poscia
ch’egli era spento, io doloroso, in veglia,
premea le piume; ed alla tarda notte
un canto che s’udia per li sentieri
lontanando morire a poco a poco,
già similmente mi stringeva il core.

Posted on by Liam Guilar · 2 Comments

The tale of the oldest animals (The freeing of Mabon mab Modron)

LIAM GUILAR is Poetry Editor of The Brazen Head, and the author of several poetry collections, including the series A Man of Heart, Presentment of Englishry and The Fabled Third (Shearsman), set in post-Roman Britain

This is from a translation of Culhwch and Olwen, ‘the oldest surviving Arthurian tale’ from medieval Welsh prose to modern English Verse. The story tells how Culhwch marries Olwen, the giant’s daughter. However, before he can marry her, he must complete forty tasks for her father. Many are obviously impossible; some merely extremely difficult. The tasks are completed not by Culhwch but by King Arthur and his men. What follows is the second and third task.

The complete translation, How Culhwch won Olwen, a verse translation of the oldest Arthurian tale, will be published by Shearsman in 2026. See
https://www.shearsman.com/store/Liam-Guilar-trans-How-Culhwch-Won-Olwen-p767786031

The translation is based on Culhwch and Olwen. An edition and study of the oldest Arthurian tale, by Rachel Bromwich and D. Simon Evans, (University of Wales Press, 1992)

The tale of the oldest animals (The freeing of Mabon mab Modron)

After they’d told Arthur all that had happened,

he said, ‘Which of these wonders should we seek first?’

‘It’s best to seek Mabon mab Modron

And to find him we need his kinsmen,

Eidoel mab Aer.’

Arthur and his knights arose,

and sought throughout Britain

until they came to the outer walls of Gliwi

where Eidoel was a prisoner.

Gliwi stood on the top of his fort:

‘Arthur, what do you want?

Life’s bad enough on this crag 

without you coming to ruin me.

I have neither wheat nor oats,

nor goods nor pleasure.’

‘I haven’t come to harm you,

I seek your prisoner.’

‘You can have him, although

I never intended to give him up.

And on top of that my help and support.

The men said to Arthur: ‘Lord, go home.

You cannot go with your host,

to seek such a petty thing as this.’

Arthur replied: ‘Gwrhyr the Translator,

It is good for you to go on this quest,

You know all the languages of men,

and some of the animals and birds’.

Eidoel, it is good that you go with my men

to seek Mabon, as he is your cousin.

Kei and Bedwyr, it is my hope

that whatever you seek you will find.

Go on this quest for me.’

They went until they found the Blackbird of Gilgwri.

Gwrhyr asked her: ’For God’s sake,

Do you know anything of Mabon mab Modron,

who was taken from between his mother and the wall,

when he was three nights old?’

The Blackbird replied:

‘I was a young bird

when first I came here

and found this anvil.

It hasn’t been touched

except by my beak,

tapping each evening.

Today you can see

all that’s left is the size

of a nut. God’s

vengeance on me

if I know of this man

you ask me about.

However, I will do

what is proper for

Arthur’s messengers.

There is another

creature God made

before me, and I

will take you to him.’

They went until they found the Stag of Redynure.

‘Stag of Redynure, we are messengers of Arthur,

we know of no animal older than you.

Say if you know anything of Mabon mab Modron,

who was taken from between his mother and the wall

when he was three nights old.’

‘When first I came here,

I had but a single tine

on either side of my head.

There were no trees but a single sapling.

That sapling grew into an oak with a hundred branches.

Then it fell to the earth, and now

there’s nothing of it left but a red stump.

Though I’ve been here from that day to this,

I’ve heard nothing of this man you mention.

But because you are Arthur’s messengers,

I will be your guide to an animal God made before me.’

They came to the place

where they found the Owl of Cwm Kawlwyt.

‘Owl of Cwm Kawlywt these are messengers from Arthur.

Do you know anything of Mabon mab Modron

who was taken from his mother on the third night?’

‘What I do know, I will tell to you.

When first I came here

the great valley you see

was thick with trees.

Then came a race of men

and laid waste the wood.

A second wood grew.

You now see the third.

The roots of my wings

are mere stumps now.

From that day to this

I have heard nothing

of the man you are seeking.

But I will be a guide

for Arthur’s messengers

until you come to the oldest

creature in the world

who has travelled the furthest:

the Eagle of Gwern Abwy.’

Gwyhyr said: ‘Eagle of Gwern Abwy

We have come, as messengers of Arthur,

to ask if you know anything about Mabon mab Modron

who was taken from his mother

when he was three nights old?’

The Eagle replied:

‘I came here

a long time ago

and when I first came here,

I had a stone,

and each evening,

from the top of my stone

I pecked at the stars.

Now it is not a handsbreadth in height.

From that day to this I have been here.

I have heard nothing of this man.

However,

when I was seeking my food in Llyn Llyw,

I sunk my talons into a salmon,

thinking he would feed me for a long time

but he pulled me down into the depths.

It was with difficulty I got away.

What I then did,

with all my kinsmen,

was to launch an attack.

We sought to destroy him.

He sent messengers

to me

to make peace,

then came

to me,

in person,

to have fifty tridents

removed from his back.

Unless he knows something

of the man you mentioned

I don’t know of anyone who does.

However, I will take you to him.’

They came to the place where he was.

The eagle said: ‘Salmon of Llyn Llyw,

I have come to you with Arthur’s messengers,

to ask if you know anything of Mabon mab Modron

who was taken from his mother on the third night.’

‘As much as I know I will tell you.

With every flood tide I go up the river

until I come to the bend

beneath the walls of Kaer Loyw.

Never in my life have I encountered,

such misery as I found there.

So you may believe me,

let one of you climb

on each of my two shoulders.’

Kei and Gwrhyr climbed on his shoulders.

They travelled upstream until they came

to the other side of the wall from the prisoner.

They could hear a-weeping and a-wailing.

Gwrhyr said: ‘What man laments

in this house of stone?’ ‘Alas, man,

I have cause for lamentation.

Mabon mab Modron is the prisoner here.

And no one has ever been imprisoned so cruelly,

neither Llud Silver hand nor Greit mab Eri.’

‘Is there hope of obtaining your freedom,

with gold or silver or worldly goods?

Or will it require assault and fighting?’

‘Whatever you can get of me,

will be got by fighting.’

They returned to Arthur

and told him where Mabon was.

Arthur summoned the fighting men of the island,

and they went to Kaer Loyw.

Kei and Bedwyr went upstream

on the shoulders of the salmon.

While Arthur’s warriors were attacking the fort,

Kei broke the wall, fighting with the men inside,

even when he was carrying the prisoner on his back.

Arthur came home with Mabon a free man.

Posted on by Stuart Millson

Musical winter warmers

Silver buckthorn under snow. Image: Derek Turner

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, orchestral works, SOMM CD 0713

E.J. Moeran, Symphony and Violin Concerto, SOMM ARIADNE 5045

Arlene Sierra, Birds and Insects, BRIDGE 9599

Vaughan Williams, Mantegna, ALBCD067

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) was a man of half-English and African descent, a composer in a monocultural Britain who was championed by those quintessential musical knights, Sirs Edward Elgar and Malcolm Sargent, and who was thought to represent a vital new generation in our cultural life. Yet Samuel died in poverty – and still in the prime of life. Who knows where his musical star might have guided us?

But on a new recording from the ever-adventurous SOMM label, we are able to savour an orchestral march – championed by Sir Henry Wood – that could easily slot in alongside Elgar’s famous contribution to the military oeuvre. In Coleridge-Taylor’s Ethiopia Saluting the Colours, we find – not a piece about mystical African Emperors, their cult and country’s ability to defeat European outsiders – but a touching story-in-music about a slave in the Carolinas – named Ethiopia – giving thanks to the Stars and Stripes, as flown by the Union Army in the latter stages of the American Civil War. Of course, there are many Southerners who have not forgotten the scorched earth policy of General Sherman as he ‘liberated’ the country known as Dixie, but historical controversies aside, listeners have the chance to savour Coleridge-Taylor’s semi-Elgarian style – not to mention the rich tone of the Ulster Orchestra, under the baton of Charles Peebles.

Other works on the disc also capture the Victorian-Edwardian period feel of the music, with Rebecca Murphy, soprano, the soloist in Zara’s Earrings, Op. 7 – A Moorish Ballad, with text by John Gibson Lockhart (Walter Scott’s son-in-law, and biographer). Ioana Petcu-Colan relishes the solo part the quarter-of-an-hour in length Ballade for Violin and Orchestra in D minor. A Brahmsian lyricism, but somehow sweeter than the original tones of the great Johannes, is never far from the surface. Lovers of the music of the English Musical Renascence will enjoy this collection enormously.

E.J. Moeran, who died during a storm on the coast of Eire in 1950, was a symphonist and tone-poem writer, able to establish an immediate atmosphere of landscape and folklore in his music. Of Irish descent, Moeran was born in England, and absorbed all the loneliness of the East Anglian coastal marshes and sands, earning the praise of fellow composer, Lowestoft-born Benjamin Britten. Yet despite Moeran’s Englishness of fen and meadow, and a beery period of mugs of ale and madrigals in the North-West Kent village of Eynsford with characterful composer, Peter Warlock, it was to an almost imaginary Ireland that E.J. – or ‘Jolly Jack’ – was drawn. His Violin Concerto, completed in 1938 and inspired by Kenmare Bay, seems to assemble every part of his character, and it is the one major work of Moeran which concert-programmers turn to on the rare occasions that the composer is even thought of these days. On a new CD from SOMM Recordings, founder and director, Siva Oke (with painstaking audio restoration from Lani Spahr) brings a 1946 live broadcast from St. Andrew’s Hall, Norwich, into the sound-world of 2025 – with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and soloist, Albert Sammons, conducted by Sir Adrian Boult.

Longer than the concerto by some 15 minutes, the CD also features the Symphony in G minor, a piece that is filled with lyricism and impetuous outbursts of energy – again, mirroring the composer’s stormy and unpredictable character. Those familiar with Bax’s Celtic twilight symphonic output will relish the Moeran, enjoying along the way the muscular playing of the BBC Symphony Orchestra of 1949 (again, under Boult) and a finale every bit as exciting as that found in Sibelius Fifth and Walton’s First symphonies.

Sarus Crane, Cornish Bantam, Thermometer Cricket, Lovely Fairywren – these are the magical titles of short pieces which comprise Books 1, 2 and 3 of Arlene Sierra’s collection devoted to Birds and Insects. A walk through a modern Natural History Museum, or a contemporary-music, natural-history sound-installation, Arlene’s music casts a strange spell – as if you were about to disappear into a fantasy of Nature. Arlene is an American composer, but London-based and has enjoyed many collaborations with leading orchestras in Britain, Japan and America. Although very much her own, distinctive, modern yet approachable style, the music seems to stand alongside similar evocations of birds by, for example, Messiaen or Ravel; and a feeling created for the listener, very much like the Japanese composer, Takemitsu, in A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden. As complex and miraculous as the delicate bodies of the creatures it represents – the music wafts from the trees, canopies and cover of the forests and woods where its inspirations live their lives. In the hands of pianists Steven Beck and Sarah Cahill, I can think of no better album of contemporary music this wintertime.

Finally, great hymn tunes abound in a CD from Albion Records – Mantegna – so named because of the 15th-century artist, painter of The Agony in the Garden. The atmosphere of Passiontide and Gethsemane is very much to the fore, in Vaughan Williams’s setting of Sidney Lanier – an American author and poet who served in the Confederate Army in the Civil War: “Into the woods my master went,/Clean forspent, forspent;/Into the woods my master came,/Forspent with love and shame… ‘Twas on the tree they slew him, last,/When out of the woods he came.’

All People That on Earth Do Dwell (the ‘Old Hundredth’) – RVW’s famous arrangement, used at the Coronation of Elizabeth II – and the tune King’s Lynn make for inspiring listening, with the words of G.K. Chesterton: “O God of earth and altar,/Bow down and hear our cry,/Our earthly rules falter,/Our people drift and die…’ Although the son of a Gloucestershire clergyman, Vaughan Williams – though inspired by Christian culture and belief – remained an English agnostic for all his days, yet even in his deep, harmonic hymnody, misty mornings near coastal East of England churches, the Norfolk Rhapsodies and the horizons of Wenlock Edge are never far away. William Vann, the Dulwich Choral Society and the London Mozart Players (the ensemble due to open the 2026 English Music Festival) give a full-bodied and well-recorded performance.