Gerard Manley Hopkins and Critical Discourse (Georgia State Literary Studies)
The Wooden Spoon (Free subscription) | 11/05/2009
“A Congealed Nebulosity” a review by Nigel Beale Reading Geoffrey Hill’s Collected Critical Writings feels a lot like what it might to step into a graduate seminar in 19th and 20th century poetry without having taken the prerequisite courses, or completed the required reading. It will not be immediately understood by “a common well-educated, thoughtful man of ordinary talents;”...
The Wooden Spoon (Free subscription) | 11/03/2009
At the New York Review of Books blog , Colm Tóibín has a brief review of a recent theater production, 'No Worst There is None', on the final five years Gerard Manley Hopkins spent in Ireland. Hopkins was living in Dublin at the time, in a deep despair that he pinned on the place, and it was there wrote his gorgeous, gripping 'terrible sonnets' (terrible in the sense of their depth of...
The New York Review of Books (Free subscription) | 10/26/2009
Colm Tóibín A scene from ‘No Worst There Is None’ at the Dublin Theater Festival One of the strangest and most beautiful shows in the Dublin Theatre Festival, which ran during the first week of October, was entitled “ No Worst There Is None ” and concerned the life of the English poet and Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins . It was performed for an audience of twenty-five...
A Pelt, a shrub, a soil sample (Free subscription) | 10/25/2009
Scott Hamilton has r eviewed my chapbook over at Scoop Review of Books , alonside Mark Young's Pelican Dreaming:Poems 1959-2008 ( Meritage 2008). If the company wasn't enough, Scott's reading picks up on things others have missed, nameley the presence of Swinburne (who He describes as "rotten-ripe" - true enough, I suppose), and more so Gerard Manley Hopkins. (I also have a weakness for Robert...
X Poetics (Free subscription) | 09/08/2009
My fabulous Language & Thinking Class at Bard in August produced this performance by combining language from Edward Said's "Movement & Migrations" from Culture and Imperialism and Wallace Stevens's poem "The Snow Man," (which is quoted by Said along with other poetry including Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Pied Beauty," particularly the line " All things counter...
How books got their titles (Free subscription) | 08/21/2009
Grimus (1975) was Rushdie’s first novel. The book is a riot of wordplay in which anagrams take a central role. Among its characters are the Gorfs, who live on the planet Thera in the galaxy of Yawy Klim (the Frogs who live on the planet Earth in the Milky Way): and the figure who gives the book its title, the creator Grimus, has a name which is an anagram of Simurg, the mythical bird of Persian...
A Garden Carried in the Pocket (Free subscription) | 07/07/2009
Finch, Charles. The September Society . This is Finch's second novel. Both feature the gentleman detective Charles Lenox. An event in India (involving stolen jewels, of course), a London detective in love with his neighbor, and a missing Oxford student provide the fodder for this mystery set in 1866. I just wasn't captivated by this novel for several reasons. I found Charles Lenox to be a bit bland....
Videos