Basil Payne obituary
My father, the poet and writer Basil Payne, has died aged 88. Basil believed a poet's job was to act not as an oracle, but as a catalyst. He wanted his words to take the reader on a reflective journey of enlightenment, shaped by their own experience.He...
Rachmaninov: Romances – review
Dmitri Hvorostovsky (baritone), Ivari Ilja (piano)(Ondine)This recording should come with the warning "too hot to handle", such is the combustible combination of Dmitri Hvorostovsky's heroic baritone with the flaming passion of intensely romantic Russi...
Library Poem by Julia Donaldson
Libraries are being closed all over the country, so children's laureate Julia Donaldson has written this poem specially for National Libraries DayEveryone is welcome to walk through the door.It really doesn't matter if you're rich or poor.There are boo...
John Mullan’s 10 of the best: erotic dreams
From Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene to a rooftop encounter in Thomas Pynchon's V, here are some of the most memorable erotic dreams in literatureThe Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser"… by my side a royall Mayd / Her daintie limbes full softly down did ...
Jacqueline Rose: a life in writing
'Victimhood is something that happens but when you turn it into an identity you're psychically and politically finished'One day, Jacqueline Rose came across a troubling passage in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. The narrator, Marcel, lies besid...
Raw Material by Derek Mahon – review
Mahon's translations and reworkings contain some welcome surprisesPoetry is what is gained in translation, wrote Joseph Brodsky, inverting Robert Frost's more pessimistic view. It can happen: Edgar Allan Poe's poems are notably improved in Baudela...
Poetry Comes To Life in a Poem Forest
Artist Jon Cotner thinks that poetry shouldn’t just be studied, but rather should be looked at as ”a way of life, a mode of knowing.”
With this in mind, the artist created ”Poem Forest,” a work created for the New York ...
Wisława Szymborska 1923-2012
Nobel prizewinner who viewed the world through poetryWhen Wisława Szymborska, who has died aged 88, received the Nobel prize for literature in 1996, the Swedish Academy stated the following in its citation: "Her poetry … with ironic precision, ...
Dorothea Tanning obituary
Painter, sculptor and poet with a vivid, dreamlike styleThe American artist Dorothea Tanning, who has died aged 101, was a talented painter whose reputation was confounded by her long marriage to the great surrealist Max Ernst. He figures prominently i...
Dorothea Tanning, surrealist artist, dies aged 101
Tanning was the last living member of the surrealist movement, wife of Max Ernst and published her first novel at the age of 94The artist Dorothea Tanning has died in New York aged 101. She was the last living member of the surrealist movement, whose c...
Wislawa Szymborska, ‘Mozart of poetry’, dies aged 88
Polish president joins tributes to Nobel prize-winner, calling her the country's 'guardian spirit'Polish poet and Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska, whose beguilingly simple, playful poems spoke to the heart of everyday life, died yesterday aged 88.Des...
