On Time and Mess
Once we understand excess, then we can get really simple. – Robert Rauschenberg Exploring poetry’s absent indispensable character Because poetry is not a thing that lives, to…
books
The Second Body
At 6 a.m. on a Thursday morning in November it was completely dark outside, but the butcher’s shop was strip-lit and the raw meat area was full of busy young…
Shopping centres, caves and the fate of us all
If you leave Nottingham train station and head towards the centre of the city, you will eventually come up against a large brown wall barricading the city. Actually it is…
Green Boots
The water falls on her head, on her face, around her ears. She sits on the floor and it falls encasing her in the only shelter she has found in…
Shortening the Candle’s Wick I
Realisation I lie in the rich grass a blissful ringing in my head. Distant voices bring me food the way ants brought gold to a king in olden times….
Shortening the Candle’s Wick II
Over the wet alders the wind gallops along the road raging, swinging a club. Then tired out in the high pines’ lap like a child after crying still sobs. Wet,…
Apples & Other Languages
Camilla Nelson’s words bring things to life. ‘Stir this miracle to waking,’ she says, in the first poem in Apples & Other Languages, a signal of the alchemy of ideas…
Corbel Stone Press: On Translation
Run by Autumn Richardson and Richard Skelton, Corbel Stone Press is one of the most distinctive small presses around today, whose work spans books and journals, pamphlets, booklets and music….
Furry Attractions: Polar Bears in the Zoo
In the western hemisphere, polar bears have lived in our midst since the Middle Ages, a result of our fascination with these charismatic carnivores. Already in 1252, Henry III of…
Great and Small Mythologies
Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid, released last year in a posthumously published translation by Seamus Heaney, is concerned, amongst other things, with the inadequacies of art. In it, Virgil describes…
Being a Beast
Mankind has celebrated a close connection with the animal kingdom since our Stone Age ancestors dressed in furs and painted bison on cave walls. Mythology abounds with tales of creatures…