Resurrection in barley
An astonishing image used by Seamus Heaney in his 'Requiem for the Croppies', as he explains here regarding the poem...
Of golden taps and super-men
An interesting insight by the writer Louis Golding when he visited the Achilleion in Corfu in the early 1950s. The...
Too much information
Dante anticipated the age in which we are drowned in facts, fake and otherwise. Note his observation of our being...
Leadership as multi-tasking
You get to steer the ship because you can handle multiple tasks at once. Here, John demonstrates his leadership skills:...
The piling up of beauty
Clive James' spent decades working on his splendid translation of Dante, sometimes in 'back burner' mode, other times full on. ...
The urge of bees
A charming way to convey the genesis of ideas or desires, likening them to the urge of bees to make...
Poems for my family 006 – Cavafy
This poem has been in my mental saddlebags for about a quarter of a century. I can't remember how I...
Technique as dousing
In discussing the technique of writing, Seamus Heaney conjures a water diviner as a metaphor. At first glance far-fetched, as...
Thick-pelted richness
Lovely notion, a frog-hopping place, cosy and dense with goodness, not to mention harbouring secrets. See also this meadow's...
Slow words emerging
A halting mode of speech, the words slow-emerging, like the tearing of pages from a long-closed book. That is how Dante's...
Unreel writing
There's something of fairy-tale magic in this idea of writing as a thread teased out from the writer's cupboard of...
Sunlight dripping
Durrell's various Greek island books and Miller's Colossus of Maroussi enchanted me with their marvelous descriptions of people, places and...
© Beatrice Otto 2021 - design & content unless otherwise stated - all rights reserved