Poetry

Brian Bilston’s life is summed up perfectly by the incident with his neighbour’s dog. The annoying Mrs McNulty comes round to claim that the animal has spontaneously combusted. Brian has his doubts, not least because Mrs McNulty has never owned a dog. But he nevertheless uses the incident as inspiration for a poem, ‘The Day My Dog Spontaneously Combusted’: there he was, chasing sticks, doing tricks, and all that stuff next minute, woof Brian tweets the poem to his 23 followers. This is part of his ‘renewed commitment to social media’, but serves only to reduce his follower count to 17. What’s worse, ‘to add insult to invisibility’ he also

In 2012 OUP published Geoffrey Hill’s Collected Poems; they could have waited, because they’re now going to need another edition. Between 2012 and his death, aged 84, in 2016, Hill wrote another 271 poems, and here they are — although, given his productivity since the mid-1990s, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were plenty more. But the poems in The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin look as though they are part of a deliberate and ordered sequence, all of them using the same form, of irregular lines, occasional internal rhymes and Hill’s characteristic style, hopping over centuries with semi-cryptic allusions, barks of rage and mordant humour. I say

Biographers are a shady lot. For all their claims about immortalising someone in print, as if their ink were a kind of embalming fluid, it has long been suspected that they enjoy wielding their pens more like a cosh or a scalpel. Victorian writers were especially nervous about the prospect of a biographer prodding and slashing away at their reputations. Tennyson worried that he would be ‘ripped up like a pig’ after his death, and many of his contemporaries did all they could to present their best face to posterity: hand-picking an authorised biographer; making a bonfire out of any embarrassing letters; discreetly muzzling friends who might be tempted into

Kate Clanchy is an extraordinary person. She is a veteran of 30 years’ teaching in difficult state schools, as well as an acclaimed poet (awarded an MBE in 2018 for services to literature) who has nurtured a generation of successful young migrant writers. In 2006 she was one of the judges for the Foyle young poets of the year award. Seven years later, seeing how the winners were scything through Oxbridge and networking ‘like an artsy version of the Bullingdon Club’, she wanted the same opportunities for her own pupils, ‘not just the poetry, but the sense of entitlement’.  She was teaching at a comprehensive in east Oxford, a generally

This passionate series of engagements with the life of St Francis will stay in my mind for a very long time — I hope forever. Ann Wroe describes it as ‘A Life in Songs’, and it does, indeed, rehearse the familiar story of the rich young merchant’s son dispossessing himself, and giving his life to Christ so wholeheartedly that not only he, but the world, was transfigured. We revisit the kissing of the leper, the preaching to the birds, the founding of the order, the call of St Clare, the mission to the Middle East to bring peace to the Crusades, the gift of the stigmata. All these familiar events

It’s not surprising, perhaps, that Emil Cioran isn’t much read in England. Born in Romania, but winning a scholarship to the University of Berlin in 1933, Cioran was an avid supporter of both the Nazis and the Romanian far right group, the Iron Guard. His writing is bleakly nihilistic, his titles a hint to what lies within: On the Summits of Despair, A Short History of Decay, The Trouble With Being Born. Cioran was perhaps the greatest 20th-century practitioner of the aphorism, that ancient, fusty, patrician form associated with Hippocrates, Erasmus, de la Rochefoucauld and Pascal. Viewed in a certain light, though, a kind of mordant humour begins to emerge