The poet Jim Stewart (1952-2016) earned that rarest of writer’s accolades: of being well-loved by those who not only knew his work but knew him. He had a well-deserved reputation as a gifted and inspiring teacher who, in typical Dundonian fashion, seemed to hide his calling under a genuine sense of duty, so that his Read More
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
Homer’s epic has always prompted strong responses ever since its first appearance during Greece’s archaic period. Poets and playwrights ransacked it for stories in the later centuries BCE (Before the Common Era). The process continued through the European Middle Ages and the Renaissance, on through the various literary Augustan, Romantic, Victorian and Modernist periods, and Read More
This is an edited transcript of an interview conducted by Jim Stewart 22nd October at 2015 Dundee Literary Festival for DURA. The interview can be viewed by clicking on the image above. Jim Stewart: It’s a pleasure to introduce Peter Davidson – a fellow of Campion Hall, University of Oxford. Peter has written poetry, and Read More
She’d been hit, and laid on the verge. Slinging her dead weight round the shoulders for a two mile walk to the cottage that drew stares, her head walloping this and that way, my hands held her paws at peace. Under the hedge all summer she suffered the usual. Her snarl deterred nothing. Beetles decided Read More
John Aubrey (1625-97) has done it again – namely, got someone else to write his book for him. An odd chain of events is thereby generated. Aubrey – endlessly busying himself in retrieving, preserving, and collating other people’s work, whether contemporary or in England’s recent past – left himself little time or energy to do Read More