The “lazy and indifferent” heron of “Monday or Tuesday”, Virginia Woolf
The only short story collection that she had selected in her lifetime, “Monday or Tuesday” is a 1921 collection in which she pursued the approach to writing set out in…
Category: poetry
“The Faber Popular Reciter”, Introduction by Kingsley Amis
In a letter of 12 August 1977 to Robert Conquest, Kingsley Amis wrote: The Faber Book of Non-Trendy Verse has been easier and is going faster: a careful look through…
Not not not not
I decree that Nothing about me is to be of other existence, My solo self is to be completely sovereign. My boundaries are to be impassable, inviolable. Let me be…
Down down down
Down down down. Circling circling circling. Circled, finally. Circled, lastly. Further down, digging in, digging down. In trench, entrench. Down down down. Circling circling circling. Spiralled, spirals. A final spiral.…
Pentecost: The Dove Descending Breaks the Air
From Little Gidding, TS Eliot: The dove descending breaks the air With flames of incandescent terror Of which the tongues declare The one discharge from sin and error. The only…
Denise Levertov, “Conversion of Brother Lawrence”
I particularly love the lines “your way was not to exalt nor avoid the Adamic legacy, you simply made it irrelevant” – which neatly summarises Brother Lawrence’s way of deceptive…
“The Best Lack All Conviction, while the Worst / Are Full Of Passionate Intensity”
According to this article from August 2016, lines from Yeats’ The Second Coming were quoted more often in the first seven months of 2016 than in any of the prior…
“This Woful Elegy”: the grave of William Costello, “of the parish of Grangemocler”
Visiting the Killamery High cross, I spied just to the south of the cross a striking gravestone, that of “William Costello, of the parish of Grangemocler”. With a little bit…
Séamus Sweeney 