July 1, 1981
The Celebrants
1 Remember Melusine morose specter, whose own superstition once made a serpent of her: she was betwitched into a myth by chance out of her housekeeping because she was credulous, and so […]
July 1, 1981
Parting Present
From The Loveless Letters The years are replaced and petrify. Some distant percolation of rain-forest like a dream still there in daylight has given me this polished five-sided talisman: a […]
July 1, 1981
Loveless Leaving
From The Loveless Letters Dear, distant wife, soon no longer distant: my masters have spoken to swivel my world again and I’ll trade in this gaudy pang of distance for […]
July 1, 1981
Loveless Times
From The Loveless Letters Dear, distant wife, here the bell does not call us to think on the divine, leaning on the dark wood of childhood in clean and singing […]
July 1, 1981
Contemporary English and Irish Poetry: An Introduction
No consideration of the tenor of poetry as it is being currently written and/or published in England makes sense if it is divorced from a much larger question. The real […]
July 1, 1981
Three Sacred Places in Japan
Practical Zen Hush. Timber-smells. The grain and sheen of floorboards buffed by unshod feet. A dim chamber with its paper screen and brisk ink-daubs, where the abbot sat . . […]
July 1, 1981
Our Vegetable Love Shall Grow
Shaking in white streetlight in a cold night wind, two luminous blue fangs push through the grass at the bus shelter: an early crocus, drawing color from some hidden underfoot […]
July 1, 1981
From “Ten Poems from a City Calendar”
In the true weather of their art these silver streets bustle, skin lit towers: we break some magic barrier into the daylight of the Duc de Berry’s golden hours and […]
July 1, 1981
Circus
These circus people wean their children late: double-jointed steps unfold from a caravan and a mother sits, staring at her thoughts, while men arrange the masts and get the big-top […]
July 1, 1981
The Thick and the Thin of It: Contemporary British and Irish Poetry
The poetry of Ireland and Great Britain is, at the top level, much as it was at the beginning of the seventies, when W S Graham’s Malcolm Mooney’s Land and […]
July 1, 1981
Coastline
This is the landscape of the Cambrian age: shale, blue quartz, planes of slate streaked with iron and lead; soapstone, spars of calcite; in these pools, fish are the color […]
July 1, 1981
At Seven a Son
In cold weather on a garden swing, his legs in wellingtons rising over the winter rose trees he sits serenely smiling like a Thai his coat open, his gloves sewn […]