Faber, 2015, pp. 341 In this sun, swords and sandals summer of Hellenic excess, now is the perfect time to revisit Christopher Logue’s War Music but, if you are as yet unfamiliar with his account of Homer’s Iliad then, appetite whetted by Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, you’ll appreciate the cinematic vision of Logue’s masterpiece. Logue’sContinue reading “Christopher Logue – War Music: An Account of Homer’s Iliad”
Author Archives: johnfield1
Claire Booker’s ‘Pedestrian in the Multiverse’
On one of the benches punctuating the avenue of limes leading from Christ Church College’s Meadow Building to the Thames, a lady sat drawing. The wheeled shopping cart at her side evoked another era and, dressed head to foot in a light green cagoule, she was ready for anything the heavens might choose to throwContinue reading “Claire Booker’s ‘Pedestrian in the Multiverse’”
Lust for Life – Charles Lang’s The Oasis
My three-year-old daughter accompanied me to John Lewis (though it would be more accurate to say that I accompanied her.) We’d bought the new shoes / whatever it was we needed, and wandered the aisles for a while before she asked whether I was lost. She told me not to worry, took me by theContinue reading “Lust for Life – Charles Lang’s The Oasis”
Richard Scott – That Broke into Shining Crystals
Sometimes books rewire the brain. Even as you read, you know already that, by the time you’re done, you’ll be looking at the world a little differently from now on. Richard Scott’s second collection, That Broke into Shining Crystals, has this quality. I’ve been reading it for a couple of weeks, on and off, andContinue reading “Richard Scott – That Broke into Shining Crystals”
Richard Meier’s After the Miracle
Broad Street was in summer mode: conga lines of language students sporting identical backpacks following the sign of the brolly raised aloft, selfies at the gates of Trinity College and my wife and I, juggling a two-year-old and a five-month-old through the scrum and into Blackwell’s to scratch my poetry itch. Claire Scully’s cover illustrationContinue reading “Richard Meier’s After the Miracle”
In Bloom – Bernard O’Donoghue’s The Anchorage
Reading Bernard O’Donoghue’s Farmers Cross in 2012, it was the poem ‘Vocation’ that caught my eye. The speaker considers a farmer, sowing next year’s crops: ‘Each cold October morning he went out / into the Gate Field and walked up and down, / like the horse-drawn seed drill quartering every inch’. O’Donoghue captures fruitless effortContinue reading “In Bloom – Bernard O’Donoghue’s The Anchorage”
A Fragile Thing – Camille Ralphs’ After You Were, I Am
After a chance remark about George Herbert, the librarian pulled a small volume from the shelf: leatherbound and plain, scruffy but serviceable. It opened to ‘Easter Wings’, Herbert’s iambs restaging sin and redemption where, after a process of subtraction, we become ‘Most thinne’ and ‘Most poore’ but, ‘With thee’, we grow, as ‘Then shall theContinue reading “A Fragile Thing – Camille Ralphs’ After You Were, I Am”
Penny Boxall’s The Curiosities
I’ve been never one for zoos, but daily life offers the same anxieties. Visiting my mother in her gated compound, my first sight is the woman who paces behind and hangs from the railings like Odysseus, lashed to the mast. Inside, in the heat, residents doze in chairs, chins on chests, and others wail. Roy’sContinue reading “Penny Boxall’s The Curiosities”
Fiona Moore’s Okapi
Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks is on my mind – again. On first reading, I paid it scant attention, but it’s nagged away at me. He writes about the publication of a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary in which “there had been a culling of words concerning nature.” If the dictionary’s duty is solely toContinue reading “Fiona Moore’s Okapi”
The Vortex: Hugo Williams’s ‘Fast Music’
Although listening to music remains one of life’s pleasures it does, over time, become complex territory to navigate. It conjures ghosts of palpable intensity. Music is not only music anymore. A random encounter with the perfect track at the perfect moment may surprise you with joy, but you are just as likely to be surprisedContinue reading “The Vortex: Hugo Williams’s ‘Fast Music’”