Book Reviews

In 2018, the ferocious American poet-critic William Logan took time off from routinely, invigoratingly eviscerating contemporary poets to write Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods: Poetry in the Shadow of the Past – a study of classic poems in their historical contexts. It was an informative, interesting exercise, prefaced by this significant reservation: ‘Knowledge of the circumstance is not ipso facto knowledge of the poem.’ Ezra Pound eliminated the weaker passages of The Waste Land, some of them, surprisingly, downright bad Matthew Hollis attempts something similar: an immersion in the verité, the lost circumstances of composition. His subtitle, ‘A Biography of a Poem’, is a brilliant piece of marketing, a hook, an

Shirley Hazzard’s ‘untimeliness’ is a recurrent aspect in most descriptions of her, both the writing and the person. She came to represent ‘a vanished age of civility’: there is something Victorian about her novels, despite the last of them, The Great Fire, being published in 2003, by which time she was starting to resemble ‘an exotic bird blown off course’. This first biography, by Brigitta Olubas, an academic who has already written a monograph on Hazzard and edited her collected short stories, gives us a portrait of the self-created artist throwing off the ‘suffocating gentility’ of postwar life in her native Australia, its ‘tyranny of distance’ from what she saw

One recent estimate claims there are 4.732 billion buildings on Earth, but it’s difficult to establish a credible methodology to count them. Is Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center, created out of swaggering pride and ambition, in the same category as a shanty hut in an Algerian bidonville? Unless you live in a desert, buildings are unavoidable, making architecture not just a necessity for survival but the art form most pregnant with meaning. When I was a boy I wanted to be an architect. Not because I was interested in drain schedules, load paths, wrangling with local authorities or designing kitchen extensions but because architecture seemed the most powerful expression of style. We

I’ve never met John Barton. But reading his books on the Bible I keep thinking of him as an early church father, perhaps St Jerome. Barton has the obligatory beard, he’s an ordained minister in the Church of England, and his writing is sage and measured, scholarly but accessible. Jerome was of course the translator of the Bible into Latin. In the fourth century his Latin Vulgate caused a riot in Tripoli, then part of the Roman empire, because Jonah was portrayed sheltering in the shade of a fast-growing ivy rather than under a gourd, as in the traditional rendering. (This accounts for the ugly spherical fruit dangling from the