Tag Archives | poetry

Test of stamina at Bim Literary Festival, day two

21 May 2012 · Literary events · Comments { 3 }

Wow. That was intense. Three hours on a hard bench listening to poetry readings with no break and no refreshments. That’s a real test. Luckily it was an open-air event, on the boardwalk at Hastings (the Barbados one, not the UK one). It was easy to get up and stretch your legs occasionally, and the [...]

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The World's Wife by Carol Ann Duffy

Giveaway: “The World’s Wife” by Carol Ann Duffy

11 July 2011 · Reading · Comments { 4 }

I picked up a free copy of this in New Beacon Books – there was a stack of them left over from World Book Night earlier this year. It says inside the back cover that I’m supposed to pass it on to someone else to read and enjoy, so if you’d like a copy, please [...]

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“Crow” by Ted Hughes

8 December 2010 · Reading · Comments { 0 }

I rarely read poetry, but I enjoyed this strange little book by Ted Hughes. It’s full of dark imagery, violence and unexpected humour. The poems read like myths of the origins of the world, except that at the middle of them all is Crow, this anarchic, chaotic, ugly, violent figure, playing tricks on God and [...]

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“T.S. Eliot” by Peter Ackroyd

6 October 2009 · Reading · Comments { 0 }

I hardly ever read poetry, but for some reason T.S. Eliot’s poetry speaks to me. Perhaps it’s because, like Eliot, I used to work at a bank in the City of London, and the feeling of his poems is the exact feeling I had as a ‘Hollow Man’ looking at the masses of other Hollow [...]

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Wislawa Szymborska

29 April 2009 · Reading · Comments { 0 }

Just discovered the work of Wislawa Szymborska through a poem reprinted in an old edition of New Internationalist from last year. It was called Psalm and I thought it was a beautiful and humorous poem, perfectly illustrating the absurdity of man-made borders. Here are the first few lines to give an idea: How leaky are [...]

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