The sonnet never written
This is one of the longest and most entertaining chapters in Machado de Assis' novel Don Casmurro, a fictional memoir...
Pebble pusher
Keats, known as a poet, was also one of history’s great letter writers. He loved life and seized it even...
Gift-bearing ambassadorial winds
Having a love of Persian poetry, known only through translation, and of Chinese poetry, engaged with tentatively and carefully in...
Beginnings
According to Adam Nicolson, some of the earliest poems were found in Sumer in cuneiform, dating from nearly two thousand...
Of wine and poetry
Here we have a poet and a vintner who connects the magic between wine and poetry. Wine can be poetic...
Translation as hammering
Heaney conveys in a simple image the difficulty of translating poetry. Elsewhere, he refers to his progress as being ‘scriptorium...
A poet’s eye view of the poet
I always liked Ezra Pound's definition of the poet as being the 'antenna of the race'. Here Wallace Stevens enlarges...
These Italian hills…
Though I’d jig a hornpipe if I saw one, I love this vivid viper of glass-green, and can imagine cooling...
Being never wholly so
This line from a poem concerns being and being written or heard about. If it isn't written (and presumably, read)...
Marvelous night for a moondance
A full moon tonight, an October night, and having recently listened to Van Morrison in a sudden burst of nostalgia,...
On memorizing poetry
A few years ago I wrote this piece on memorising poetry. For World Poetry Day, I share it here in the hope it will...
Something more pressing
Yes, you can find a thousand things more urgent than writing, or at least more insistent. Writing for this...
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