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Sea songs and waking dreams
A regular complaint of friends about work is that they do not know what they are doing. How are we to know what we are doing, except by experience? It seems a waste that generation after generation...
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Roomful of Mirrors
The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Canto 26 – Dante Alighieri Dante’s Inferno is a book about sin and punishment, set within a staggeringly complex Aristotelian framework. It’s also a platform for the poet...
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Stopping by woods
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening – Robert Frost There are a few places left in the world which are more natural than I am comfortable with. Places where the usual protections of urban humanity do...
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The comfort of King Lear
King Lear – William Shakespeare Shakespeare in Modern Culture – Marjorie Garber The name King Lear echoes for me with the tinny sounds of GCSE and A-level criticism. The blindness of Lear, the...
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Alice Oswald’s poetry of rivers
British Academy Literature Week in Senate House, University of London, 22nd May Jo Shapcott has described Alice Oswald’s poetry as ‘unsettled and settling in every good way’; the true role of poetry is...
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Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney died a few days before my family went on holiday, so his collected poems came with us. While some members are more devoted to poetry then others, the assembled group are all fairly keen...
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Royal Festival Hall, T.S.Eliot prize readings, Sunday 12th January 2014
Ian Duhig opened the evening, and felt that the audience had had enough of a cold coming to warrant reading ‘Journey of the Magi’ to start. He was quite right in saying that nothing is the same for you...
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Spoken Word 2: Seamus Heaney
There was an evening to commemorate Seamus Heaney on the 20th of November at the Southbank Centre. It is now February. There is no excuse, besides me starting a new job at that time and being really...
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Dante’s Two Suns
“Soleva Roma, che ‘l buon mondo feo, due soli aver, che l’una e l’altra strada facean vedere, e del mondo e di Deo” “Rome, which formed the world for good, once held two suns that lit the one...
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