INNOCENTS AND OTHERS

That is the thing about films. They don’t change. You change. The immutability of the film (or a book or a painting or a piece of music) is something to measure yourself against. That is one of the things a great work of art does. It stays there waiting for you to come back to Read More

Bear

They say if you don’t like the Scottish weather just wait a bit and it will change. Arguably, the same might be said of Bear. This collection is so varied that if the style of one poem is not to the reader’s taste, moving on is hardly problematic and very shortly a more agreeable offering Read More

Home Front

Home Front is a new volume of poetry by four women who have each had a husband or son who has been to a combat zone. Bryony Doran, Jehanne Dubrow, Elyse Fenton and Isabel Palmer are the poets, whose voices tell of having a loved one in armed conflict. Each poet has a collection within Read More

THE WOMAN NEXT DOOR (LONGLISTED, 2017 BAILEYS WOMEN’S PRIZE)

The Woman Next Door is Yewande Omotoso’s second novel, appearing five years after her debut Born Boy, which earned her the Etilasalat and Norman Mailer Fellowships and the Miles Morland Scholarship. Omotoso grew up in Nigeria and has lived in South Africa since 1992. The novel reveals the continuing prejudices in modern Cape Town suburbia Read More

Jim Stewart: A Creative Memorial

Their keening need will fold its sound, bred in the humid shells they’ll make ‒ to shift, and free (peculiar as themselves) new birds. Jim Stewart,  from “Oystercatchers” Before he died, Jim and I discussed the idea of having some kind of Memorial for him, based loosely around the poetics of the American Poet Joe Read More

Letter by Hazel Ellis-Saxon

  Dear Jim I am in Malawi. It is 7.30 a.m. and I have just woken up. I suspect you died last night. Unable to get through to Eddie – the African bush is not known for rapid internet services – I can’t know for sure. And I have to leave my computer now to Read More

In Memory

‘Great poets do not die; they are continuing presences’ (Virginia Woolf) Dr Jim Stewart is a continuing and steadfast poetic presence with me, both as friend and esteemed colleague in Woolf studies. He is very much present in the Cambridge University Press Edition of Woolf’s works, as superb textual collator, highly skilled proof reader, and Read More