Elizabeth Bishop’s Proliferal Style by Angus Cleghorn

Bishop’s persona is part she-moose, part bus; part warrior-fish, part oily vessel; part pastoral idyll, and part atomic bomb...
Read MoreItaly’s Midsummer Bescheerung by Vernon Lee

The cool shadow of the fig-trees in the yards, with the whiff of that queer smell, heavy with romance, of wine-saturated oak and crumbling plaster; I know with a little stab of joy that this is Italy...
Read MoreFriendship in Fiction

In philosophical treatments of friendship, it can often be elevated to the highest form of human relationships, even if its perfect form is rare...
Read MoreGeorge Orwell on bookshops

When I worked in a second-hand bookshop the thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people...
Read MoreThomas Travisano on Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop explored Brazil extensively, making trips down the Amazon, traversing the tropical rainforest with Aldous Huxley...
Read MoreAcross Poisoned Oceans

The pair fly to Japan where they discover the virtual world conjured via the internet does not reflect reality...
Read MoreTimelessnesses

Inside St Mary’s Church in Gdańsk stands a Clock of Everything. At fourteen metres, it was the tallest clock ever built when Hans Düringer completed it in 1470...
Read More‘Why was I making so many cups of tea?’

It couldn’t possibly be that I was actually missing the ebb and flow of office life, could it?
Read MoreJoe Linker on Keith Kopka

It's poetry where the Punk finds their way out of the mosh pit and into the solo business of writing poems to make sense of it all...
Read More(Parentheses are outward-looking); “quotation is inward-looking”

A parenthetical phrase (like this one) may refer to things outside of it, parts of the sentence it inhabits (say)...
Read MoreMore than Heavenly Bliss by Andre Gerard

Important as the soup is in To the Lighthouse it is never identified, never seen as “beautiful red soup” or “eternal” tomato soup...
Read MoreDouglas Penick on David Jones

At the time of the dooms in the third quarter of the Reaper’s Moon, in the island of Britain...
Read MoreThe tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right...
Read MoreThe thing about new blooms is that they tend to bleed— / Those petals birthed / hugging close / that come warmer weather are tricked into jumping away...
Read MoreI spent a good part of my childhood at home staring outside my bedroom window, following the trail of planes approaching the nearby Paris airport in the sky from my banlieue. I envied the passengers...
Read MoreThe tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right...
Read MoreThe thing about new blooms is that they tend to bleed— / Those petals birthed / hugging close / that come warmer weather are tricked into jumping away...
Read MoreI spent a good part of my childhood at home staring outside my bedroom window, following the trail of planes approaching the nearby Paris airport in the sky from my banlieue. I envied the passengers...
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