Hopelessly insane: Homer fans
Here Christopher Logue highlights the sheer vital durability of Homer and the magnitude of such sustainability, kept alive through a...
Language as anchor and mooring
Heaney uses several maritime metaphors in discussing a poem set in a sea-faring culture. Here he refers to speech that...
Hospitality protocol 101
Homer is awash with examples of great hospitality and generosity between hosts and guests, even uninvited ones washing up on...
Roughing out poems
Hand-written notes and journals have a magic to them. Durrell is a favourite poet and his house in Greece was as...
Roiling poetry
Written by a poet, this suggests that poems aren't written, but rather roil and form of their own volition. Having...
Barefoot erudition
Patrick Leigh Fermor wore his vast learning lightly, as real scholars often do. Here he more than meets his match...
The sonnet never written
This is one of the longest and most entertaining chapters in Machado de Assis' novel Don Casmurro, a fictional memoir...
Tapping into the current
Lawrence Durrell was a superb poet and I found his definition of poetry intriguing. While I'm not sure it always...
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...
The strangest of times
Been enjoying the rhyming recitals of Probably Tomfoolery, and in particular this one, 'The Strangest of Times', see him perform...
Poems for my family 003 – Donne
Listening time: under 3 minutes.
This is the third poem I chose to share with my family, copied out by...
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)...
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