a quote to note, podcasts
Listening time: 3 minutes.An intricate description of the effect an ancient temple can work on the spirit – a falling away of complication and anxiety and a spilling over of clarity and hope. I had such a feeling when a handful of us were allowed to roam...
a quote to note, podcasts
Listening time: under 4 minutes.The Countess of Gormenghast ponders her personal curriculum for her newborn son Titus, soon after despatching him to a régime of nanny-care for the first five years of his life. She clearly has higher hopes for him than for his...
a quote to note, podcasts
Listening time: under 4 minutes. Casting back across the sweep of history, there is only a handful of creatures, human and otherwise, whom I regret not being able to meet, pending the perfection of the time travel machine I’m building in the (mental) shed. Of...
a quote to note, podcasts
Listening time: under 5 minutes.We play with dogs and cats and some other creatures. I used to play with a fox in our garden in London: he made a show of taking my abandoned fleece delicately in his mouth and began pulling it off the table where I’d left it,...
podcasts, poems for my family, poetry mojo
Listening time: under 4 minutes. I discovered this poem in my early twenties, possibly while first living and studying in China where I also got to know the poems of Osip Mandelstam.  I loved its blithe life-loving adventurism, its disdain for danger and death, its...
podcasts, poems for my family, poetry mojo
Listening time: 3 minutes. Surely one of the sweetest love poems of all time (alongside this one), in which Adam and Eve enjoy each other’s company in perfect accord. These lines of Milton lift you on the wing of an inventory of beauty, then daringly repeated...
podcasts, poems for my family, poetry mojo
Listening time: under 5 minutes. One of the greatest love poems in English, this was written by Michael Drayton (1563-1631) the night before he died. Drayton was a friend of Shakespeare and a student of Spenser. I can think of few more dignified and moving...
podcasts, readers & reading, review
Listening time: 8 minutes.Enjoy this celebration of a favourite book by a favourite author about a favourite poet. Nicolson’s homage to Homer is a highly original take on the Iliad and the Odyssey, also providing fresh insights into the nature and continuing...
podcasts, poems for my family, poetry mojo
Listening time: under 3 minutes.The lovely opening line of this poem by William Carlos Williams creates a surprising contrast between the stillness of a rose and the tumult of war. The rest of the poem picks up, in rhythm and imagery, on the rose, filling out like a...
podcasts, readers & reading
Listening time: 13 minutes. One of my top two children’s books of all time, I first read Elizabeth Goudge’s Little White Horse as a grown up. That didn’t prevent my being enchanted and strengthened by it. Thinking which of the WritingRedux book...
podcasts, poems for my family, poetry mojo
This poem has been in my mental saddlebags for about a quarter of a century. I can’t remember how I came across it but after a few readings it imprinted itself on my memory. It’s by a Greek poet, Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933), and draws on one of the...
