#ChoralMarch, March 19th: “Luminosity: 1. Lux Tenebris”, James Whitbourn
Born in 1963, James Whitbourn is a contemporary choral composer who began his career with the BBC. His “Luminosity” is one of the few choral works composed for dance and…
Category: poetry
Malcolm Guite with pilgrimage poems for the first week of Lent
At his blog the poet Malcolm Guite features a suite of poems on pilgrimage, one for each day of the first week of Lent: In this first week in…
Happy Birthday Edgar Allan Poe, and a cheers to the Poe Toaster
Poe would be 210 if he was alive today, which would be a surprising development for all concerned. And presumably today will see the appearance of the Poe Toaster at Poe’s Baltimore…
“Shopping Centre” – a poem from September 2007
Came across this rather randomly lately, will leave it as is, with its hilariously unsubtle allusions to this and that intact, as a memorial of pre-bust Ireland: Shopping Centre. Time…
This Be The Best
In 2013 I entered this in one of the Spectator’s poetry competitions, if memory serves a version of a well-known poem endeavouring to convey the precisely opposite message. With apologies…
Against the inspirational
A while back I posted about what I called the Inspirational Imperative; the pressure to craft suffering and distress and setbacks into more-easily-digestible, feelgood stories of “inspiration.” The need to…
Are Daffodils a native Irish flower?
The thought occurred to me randomly, and wasn’t sorted out by a few seconds of Ecosia searching (but it’s not Google) – only this article by Dick Warner from 2011:…
Lincoln Allison on Belloc and the lost art of declamation
Looking for something else entirely, I come across this piece from 2005 on the Social Affairs Unit Blog by Lincoln Allison on Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Verses. Allison begins with a…
Séamus Sweeney 