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Getting personal: NBCC’s quiet winner Clare Cavanagh
“Poetry makes nothing happen,” W.H. Auden famously observed. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t try. One of the more unnoticed of this year’s National Book Critics Circle award-winners is Clare Cavanagh‘s...
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Notting Hill Editions: Irish saints, Dutch executioners, and “a crumb of...
Alas, the books pile up faster than I have time to read them – or, in some cases, even look at them. Some months ago, I received an unbidden package from the U.K., and I’ve only just now broken the...
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Seamus Heaney talks of “my hero,” the late Dennis O’Driscoll
“Selfless” and “companionable” Dennis O’Driscoll is dead. I did not know him, but apparently many of my friends did, from the Facebook postings and Twitter chatter. The Guardian praised him as...
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Au revoir, Seamus Heaney! My two letters from the Nobel laureate
Generous, humble, and glowing from the inside “You of all people!” That’s how my first letter from Seamus Heaney began. It’s not hard to keep track; there were only two. This first one was in a...
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Seamus Heaney at Stanford
Portrait of the poet as a young man. Seamus Heaney, who died yesterday at 74, never taught at Stanford, but he did visit here at least once. I was thumbing through Stepping Stones, the book-length...
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Seamus Heaney: “rhymes as important as revolution”
I’ll be speaking at a private book club event next week. On what? The role of the reader. So many write and write and write about the process of writing, the burdens of the writer, the writer’s...
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Seamus Heaney, Zbigniew Herbert, and Apollo in one evening…
In English, s’il vous plaît… A Polish friend and blogger, Artur Sebastian Rosman, sent me this youtube clip of the Irish Nobel poet Seamus Heaney reading the poems of Zbigniew Herbert. We’ve written...
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Zbigniew Herbert, Vasily Grossman, and “a small kernel of human kindness”
Grossman saw it all firsthand in the Red Army. Many of you may remember my post some weeks ago on Vasily Grossman‘s Life and Fate (here). If you read the whole excerpt, you may wonder what becomes of...
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Partying with Walcott, Heaney, Brodsky: “I wished I could have brought it all...
Could he have found a big enough jar? I never met Nobel poet Derek Walcott – but Sven Birkerts did, and he writes a marvelous, ebullient essay about Walcott and his sidekicks and fellow Nobel poet...
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Seamus Heaney and a toddler who “blew the heart wide open.”
And some time make the time to drive out west Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore, In September or October, when the wind And the light are working off each other … Those are the opening lines...
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Seamus Heaney’s last days: “a moment of changing direction … a movement of...
John Deane (Photo: Mossy Carey) We’ve posted on the seminal conference at Loyola University in Chicago last week here and here. This is our final installment. The Irish poet and novelist John Deane,...
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Biographer recalls the last days of Roger Scruton: “when not writing, he was...
His last chance to “chat about the future.” (Photo: Pete Helme) My post on Sir Roger Scruton‘s death on January 12 tapped into an unexpected amount of interest. I didn’t know the writer and...
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Dana Gioia’s archives go to Huntington, Stanford – including “tens of...
Dana Gioia’s books, manuscripts, libretti are now at the Huntington Library. Dana Gioia is a man of letters in the time-honored sense of the term, influencing our culture as a poet and essayist, but...
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Joseph Brodsky wrote an annual Christmas poem. Why did he do it?
A Christmas card from the Brodsky Foundation features “Anno Domini” and Martin Schongauer. My favorite Christmas card this year has a poem on it. The Joseph Brodsky Foundation usually doesn’t...
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Partying with Walcott, Heaney, Brodsky: “I wished I could have brought it all...
Could he have found a big enough jar? I never met Nobel poet Derek Walcott – but Sven Birkerts did, and he writes a marvelous, ebullient essay about Walcott and his sidekicks and fellow Nobel poet...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Seamus Heaney and a toddler who “blew the heart wide open.”
And some time make the time to drive out west Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore, In September or October, when the wind And the light are working off each other … Those are the opening lines...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Seamus Heaney’s last days: “a moment of changing direction … a movement of...
John Deane (Photo: Mossy Carey) We’ve posted on the seminal conference at Loyola University in Chicago last week here and here. This is our final installment. The Irish poet and novelist John Deane,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Biographer recalls the last days of Roger Scruton: “when not writing, he was...
His last chance to “chat about the future.” (Photo: Pete Helme) My post on Sir Roger Scruton‘s death on January 12 tapped into an unexpected amount of interest. I didn’t know the writer and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Dana Gioia’s archives go to Huntington, Stanford – including “tens of...
Dana Gioia’s books, manuscripts, libretti are now at the Huntington Library. Dana Gioia is a man of letters in the time-honored sense of the term, influencing our culture as a poet and essayist, but...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Joseph Brodsky wrote an annual Christmas poem. Why did he do it?
A Christmas card from the Brodsky Foundation features “Anno Domini” and Martin Schongauer. My favorite Christmas card this year has a poem on it. The Joseph Brodsky Foundation usually doesn’t...
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