In this week’s enviably well-travelled newsletter:

• The popular poets of Paris

• Fear and loathing in the West Country

• A very unfortunate tomb raider

The Little Paris Review:

Le petit chat, le grand soleil

Opposite our flat is a bookshop that opened just over a year ago. Bookshop leases are protected here in Paris – you often see vacant premises with a sign saying ‘available for lease as a bookshop’. Once a bookshop, always a bookshop, I suppose. All the same, our end of the street isn’t the obvious place for a new one: we have a takeaway Pizza Hut, two motorbike dealerships and – still just hanging on – one of those old-fashioned petrol stations with the pumps on the pavement, where they come out to serve you; though apart from the occasional owner of a brand-new motorcycle, no-one ever seems to use it.

Happily, though, the bookshop seems to be plying a quiet but steady trade. Recently I asked the owner which poets he sells most often. His list, as you’d expect, accords pretty closely with the national poetry bestsellers. At the top is Christian Bobin’s posthumous Le Murmure, published by Gallimard in its stylish (and affordable) folio series. Bobin’s work lies on the boundary between prose poetry and lyric fiction: beautifully written fragments that relate to each other in suggestive ways. There’s a great deal of this kind of thing in French poetry imprints. Prose poetry is much longer-established here, of course, and the French, like the Americans, have more tolerance than the average Brit for high seriousness.

Next in the list is Hélène Dorion, Mes forêts, which sold a staggering 135,000 copies in 18 months – good going by any standard. Dorion is a well-established French-Canadian poet, but the secret to the success of Mes forêts is that they put it on the syllabus for the baccalauréat (the equivalent of A levels). My little copy, adorned with a ‘bac’ sticker, cost €5.90 (£5), and comes with a bonus interview with the author as well as the ‘dossier’ of critical essays typical of French school editions. I don’t love Dorion’s work, but I do quite like some of the poems. Here is part of ‘La branche’ (all translations here are my own):

et l’horizon craquelle
un sentier se referme
sur l’écorce des choses

que rongent les vers
et les fourmis

il n’y a que ce qui casse
et repousse
autour de nous
syllabes informes
qu’assemble la lumière

fine cracks on the horizon
and a path closes
on the bark of things

that the worms
and ants gnaw

all there is, is what breaks
and grows back
around us
shapeless syllables
assembled by the light

I appreciate Dorion’s quirky insect-eye view of the world, even if sometimes her conclusions seem a bit self-consciously ‘poetic’. Her style is not really original: there are several French poets writing in this sort of spare, meditative way, mainly about nature, with hints of personal experience and not much punctuation. A couple whom I like better are Gérard Bocholier and the Swiss poet Pierre Chappuis. You can see, though, why it’s Dorion on the school syllabus. She’s a living Canadian woman (a first for the baccalauréat, apparently); her poetry is a bit more expansive and prone to draw the moral than either Bocholier or Chappuis; and, unlike Bocholier, it requires no knowledge of Christian scripture or liturgy.

It’s obvious why Dorion is selling so many copies, but it was encouraging to hear from the owner that they sell quite a lot of poetry in general. Their few shelves of it have a rather rumpled feel – we spent a good ten minutes a few weeks ago looking for a book I wanted which the computer said was in stock but which had become displaced, presumably by such eager fingering of the goods. Another author he told me they sell regularly is Cécile Coulon; in fact, they’d sold out of her more recent collections but still had a copy of Les Ronces (‘The Brambles’), published in 2018, which won two poetry prizes that year. Coulon is a rather glamorous-looking poet and novelist in her mid-30s, with a slick website and an Instagram account. Les Ronces has sold more than 60,000 copies and, though I was initially sceptical, I can see why.

Most of the poems in Les Ronces are several pages long, and written in a kind of mildly incantatory free verse that is both very easy and rather difficult to translate. I mean that the diction and syntax are, taken phrase by phrase, quite ordinary, the stuff of everyday conversation, which in translation easily sounds merely prosaic. In French, though, these pieces are structured by repetition – of words, phrases, rhymes, part-rhymes and often whole lines, recurring as refrains – gathering a kind of musical momentum:

l’enfant que je ne suis plus

Un matin le chat m’a réveillée avant toi
il s’est glissé sous les couvertures
dans ce grand lit de bois
où tu me déposais doucement
quand je m’endormais le soir
sur la banquette arrière de la voiture
on dit qu’ on cesse d’être un enfant
le jour où l’on s’endort et se réveille au même endroit
j’ai cessé d’être un enfant ce matin quand le chat
est venu me tirer du sommeil avant toi
un matin le chat a joué derrière les rideaux et le soleil
m’a griffée
alors je suis sortie des draps
comme on sort d’un ventre chaud
j’ai ouvert grand les rideaux
j’ai soulevé le chat
nous sommes descendus tous les trois
le petit chat, le grand soleil et moi
tu attendais en bas

the child I no longer am

One morning the cat woke me before you did
it slipped itself beneath the covers
in that big wooden bed
where you would lay me gently down
when in the evening I fell asleep
on the seat at the back of the car
they say we cease to be a child
the day we fall asleep and wake up where we were
I ceased to be a child that morning when the cat
came to pull me out of sleep before you did
one morning the cat played behind the curtains and the sun
scratched me
so I came out of the sheets like one
coming out from a warm womb
I opened the curtains wide
I picked up the cat
all three of us came down
the little cat, me and the big sun
you were waiting at the bottom

I can’t say I love Coulon’s poetry but it is compelling, highly readable and with a quiet music of its own. If Dorion might lead you to Bocholier and Chappuis and then back, perhaps, to a poet like Pierre Reverdy, Coulon points towards those poets who write to be spoken aloud: the restless word-play of Valerie Rouzeau or the dazzling formal dexterity of Souleymane Diamanka, both writing in a tradition derived from Louis Aragon, Robert Desnos or Andrée Chedid and, behind them, the first great writers of French chansons, such as the early 16th-century master Clément Marot.

This is what struck me about France’s best-selling poets: I wouldn’t put Coulon or Dorion at the top of any league table, but these are no Len Pennies either. They are technically accomplished poets doing fresh things within a recognisable tradition. Perhaps this sense of being part of a shared tradition has something to do with the most obvious difference between French and English poetry culture. Read almost any interview in which a French poet is asked where they first encountered poetry – from the establishment favourite, Guy Goffette, to the hip-hop poet Souleymane Diamanka, born in Senegal – and they say ‘at primary school, of course’. The of course is because everyone has to do it. Learning poetry is an obligatory element of the curriculum for children at école primaire (aged 6-11, roughly years 2-6): simple rhymes to start with, but by the final year of primary school they are reciting entire verse fables by La Fontaine and complete lyrics by Hugo and Baudelaire. (My middle son, who’s 10, has already learnt La Fontaine’s ‘La laitière et le pot au lait’ and Hugo’s ‘Demain dès l’aube’ so far this term.)

There are obvious pedagogical objections to making children take turns to stand at the front of the class and recite, but perhaps this shared experience has something to do with why even French poets as disparate as Coulon, Dorion, Diamanka and Goffette nevertheless feel like they are part of the same long-running conversation. Diamanka, whose poetry I first discovered in the bookshop across the road, came to France when he was two. He did not speak French at home and he fell in love with French poetry in CE2 (Year 4), when he was nine: his class teacher from that year later wrote the preface for his first collection. Diamanka’s account of learning the language in the street and at school reminded me of nothing so much as Marot, another master of French verse form, who tells us (in a poem) how in 1505 he ‘was brought into France’ to learn French (rather than Provençal, his mother tongue). There was no CE2 back in 1505, but if there had been Marot would have been in it, because in 1505 he, too, was nine years old. Diamanka’s ‘Feuilles d’octobre’ (‘October leaves’ or ‘October pages’) begins:

Dans mon jardin il neige
Des feuilles d’automne
Il pleut au ralenti
Comme sur les côtes bretonnes

Des plumes il en pleut des tonnes
Dans mon jardin trop sobre
Il pleut des feuilles d’automne
Il pleut des feuilles d’octobre

La forêt s’allège
De ses beaux habit beiges
Il pleut les note d’un autre solfège
Dans mon jardin il neige

It’s snowing in my garden
Snowing autumn leaves
It’s raining at half speed
As if upon the sea.

Pens and feathers by the ton
On my garden, once so sober:
It’s raining leaves of autumn
And pages of October.

The forest now is slipping off
Her lovely umber gown
It’s raining in another clef
The snow is coming down VM

Mes forêts by Hélène Dorion (Bruno Doucey, 2021; €5.90); Les Ronces by Cécile Coulon (Le Castor Astral, 2021; €13.50); Habitant de nulle part, originaire de partout by Souleymane Diamanka (Points Poésie, 2021; €8.70)

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Review of the week:

Killing ten dogs in forty minutes

Bucolic isn’t the genre it used to be. It’s hard to square the largely urban, mass-manufactured life most of us now experience with the quaintness and simplicity pastoral poetry is known for. Yet the greatest writing about the countryside – from Virgil to John Clare to Norman MacCaig – receives the rural not as a repository of innocence, but a microcosm of the wider world and its all-too-human problems.

Ralf Webb’s latest collection, Highway Cottage, lies squarely in this tradition of pastoral writing. In poems that blend quotations, pilfered bureaucratic jargon, dramatic monologue and surreal lyricism, he uses the language and landscape of his West Country childhood to dissect class politics, agricultural life, overdevelopment, environmental damage, masculinity and sexuality.

‘Hunter’s Farm’, which falls near the midpoint of the book, is also its high tidemark. Drawing on a news story about a West Country hunter fined for feeding animals hazardous biowaste and later caught on camera killing ten of his dogs in forty minutes, Webb weaves a monologue from the hunter’s stream of consciousness, wielding this unsettling bit of reportage as a tool to pry open the psychological nastiness beneath English pastoral. Webb’s ability to fuse and appropriate different registers to harrowing effect is on full display, with phrases like ‘Biosecurity is flexible in practice / And one person’s neglect is another’s efficiency’ echoing Augustan aphorism, regulatory jargon, and the strange ravages of landed capital. As the poem progresses, Webb’s speaker ruminates on his supposedly superior understanding of safety, loyalty, and finally evil, building towards an unsettling conclusion:

Evil lives, to be sure. It lives in ignorance,
And I am nothing if not an enlightened man.

The hunter’s contortions of logic and morality cut to the core of the darkness swimming through this book: by addressing the West Country’s idyllic bleakness through its residents, Webb conveys a psychologically realised impression of the world of his youth and its troubles.

Likewise excellent is ‘The Poet’s Dream’, which blends quotations from the writer John Addington Symonds with Webb’s own reflections, producing an unusual linguistic sensibility lying somewhere between Renaissance and Romantic; phrases like ‘spontaneous flower’ and ‘mutual love’ show a brave stylistic affinity for archaic voices normally off-limits to contemporary writers. It allows for a genuinely original reflection on literary homoeroticism – a topic he has also written about in his criticism. (Webb’s previous book, Strange Relations, was a study of four bisexual 20th-century writers, Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, John Cheever, and James Baldwin.)

What makes Webb’s best poems special is his ability to blend allegiance to and stylistic awareness of the English countryside’s literary heritage with modernistic methods, absorbing disparate language in experimental ways; the final effect feels like a collage of consciousness, mixing elevated and demotic. Webb’s work reminds us of the moral labyrinths beneath the beauty of the countryside, and demands the reassessment of the social, environmental, and cultural costs of pastoral. The pagan dream-logic of these poems reveals Webb at his most introspective and tender, drawing back the landscape to show his own emotional life running underneath.

Where Webb falls short is in his occasional technical missteps throughout, and in the last of the book’s three sections, which is sadly less polished and emotionally sophisticated. One early poem attempts slant-rhymed stanzas to approximate folk poetry, but instead sounds (to my ear) shoddily constructed and amateurish:

For ten long years ignore the pleas
Of those who live in Wych Elm fields
Let ten years’ damp, and rain, and rust
Supply, through ruin, a sunny yield.

Several poems from the third section veer too close to cliché, with images such as ‘we put for sale signs in our dreams’ feeling too easily achieved, while in other places Webb’s metaphors become confused, as in the lines ‘Must be threshed by desire’s latticework / In order to learn its rare and exquisite pain’. The first line packs in too much, asking the reader to compare both threshing and latticework to desire. The second line, meanwhile, describes desire in a tired, overdone manner; though it is unclear if Webb intends this ironically, it reads too earnestly to integrate well with the rest of the poem.

One other feature of Webb’s writing, which may put off some readers but is not necessarily a flaw, is his tendency to handle feelings technically. Throughout Highway Cottage, emotion is generally expressed in formal technique, which creates a distancing effect. Webb’s tendency to write in this way occasionally renders his verse stiff, though for those used to writing in this vein his reserve will pose no obstacle. Despite these issues, Webb’s work never fails to be interesting, and at his best shows him to be a deft painter of language. Even where it is imperfect and his efforts to enter the psychological and folkloric underworld of the West Country don’t wholly succeed, his ability to craft poems which are supplely wrought, ethically aware and emotionally mature makes his a distinctive voice. MP

Highway Cottage by Ralf Webb (Penguin, 2025; £10.95)

Poem of the week:

False King’s Chamber

The curator rings
in the night, voice shaking,
says my king’s chamber

is a false king’s chamber,
the treasure I brought him
false treasure. My pyjamas

thin by the hall telephone.
The hall strange
in the night. My king

nobody. Right now,
he says, he is dragging
my thin haul

to the museum lawn,
trinket by trinket,
where it is vanishing

in the early snow. Strange:
I would have thought
my boot-calloused

feet would blast a trail
through the freezing hour
toward the weird new shapes

of my beloveds, numb
as ornaments – of course
it is ‘real gold’, he spits,

they thought of everything –
so that I might gather
them into my arms.

But my feet lie bare-blue
and still among the chair-legs
and table-legs; the brass

ferrules sinking in the night-
coloured carpet; the dropped,
still-gibbering plastic

of the receiver saying
of course I am quite welcome
to my rubbish. Everything

I have trusted to bear me
on its thin shoulders
into the first real life. JN

In this week’s pleasantly rambunctious newsletter:

• Why does poetry sell so little?

• Helen of Troy in Tennessee

• Why ‘We would all of us be crunchy in the bite / of a huge enough decision’

Editorial:

How to help the Worst Poets

We have been doing a bit of arithmetic. Collectively, four books – Freida McFadden’s The Housemaid, Charlie Mackesy’s Always Remember and two whodunits by Richard Osman – sold 1.58 million copies in the UK last year. This is, by one estimate, roughly a quarter-million more than every book of poetry – by all the living and the dead – sold last year, added together. So, then, what is a bestselling poetry collection, aside from an oxymoron? The bar is low: if bookshops can shift just 2,500 copies of a slim volume of sonnets about cats, it will appear on The Bookseller’s Top 50 Poetry Bestsellers of the Year chart. If they sell twice that, it’s in the top 20.1

Why does poetry sell so little? We blame the reviewers.

One poet (whose work we enjoy) has frequently suffered at the hands of critics. We have seen her books cruelly described in broadsheet reviews as ‘beautiful’ (The Scotsman), ‘verbally deft… fearless, funny’ (The Times) and ‘brilliant’ (five stars, The Telegraph). We say cruelly, since this is the kind of harmful language that can wither a career on the vine. As many a starving genius will tell you, positive reviews put no food on your table. Nonetheless, critics continue to smother almost all contemporary poetry in a grey fog of indistinguishable praise, to readers’ increasing indifference.

But in 2018, this one poet had a rare stroke of luck: a small literary journal gave her a negative write-up. That it is still remembered eight long years later illustrates how unusual this kind of criticism is. The article inspired numerous essays defending the poet, hundreds of tweets, discussions on national radio, and the kind of sales mere praise rarely brings.

She is now one of the tiny handful of living poets to regularly appear in that Top 50. A couple of months ago, she announced a new tour, The Worst Poets Club, in which she will appear alongside three other bestselling authors who have benefitted from similarly memorable reviews. (We plan to go.)

A truly good review is one that starts an interesting conversation: a bland, forgettable puff is not a good review. At The Little Review we hope to publish good reviews, scathing ones when necessary. The Worst Poets of the future will thank us. TLR

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Review of the week:

‘…and burnt the topless towers of Tennessee’

The last thing we need is another retelling of the Greek epics – how Helen was a feminist icon; the voices of the voiceless in the Trojan war – at least, not when they disregard the historical meaning of the stories. It seems like every year there is another attempt at such rebranding, so I went into reading Helen of Troy, 1993 by Maria Zoccola expecting more of the same rehashed, obvious myth-busting for the modern world. I was wrong.

Zoccola’s poems are shaped by the Iliad’s Helen of Troy but are not about her. And while they do take place in a modern world (well, Troy, Tennessee, in the 1990s) they aren’t a retelling with values and lessons of our times. Instead of the same story from a different point of view, these poems tell a new story within a similar pattern. In a nutshell: a woman is married, leaves her husband, and goes back to her husband.

This is an oversimplification and there are intricate strands in the web tying Helen of Troy to Helen of Troy, Tennessee; abduction and freedom, choices we make and choices we don’t get to make, mythical symbols of swans and eggs and goddesses and fate. But this web hangs on the frame of leaving and returning, like so many of the Greek stories.

And if, like me, you haven’t been boning up on your Iliad, or haven’t watched the 2004 Brad Pitt movie Troy in a couple of years (shame on us), it really isn’t a problem. The imagery and spot-on setting of 1990s America, along with Zoccola’s profoundly sensitive ear, are what will capture you. From ‘the pizza-scented kingdom of grease-streaked children’ in the ‘rat-themed las vegas’ of Chuck E Cheese, to a computer that ‘starts heating up / like a goddamn fish skillet and making these hellacious / groaning sounds’ to the ‘huge metal bodies perfectly quiet, hot to the touch, / trembling lightly with the weight of what’s inside’, this book is a time capsule that holds both the pulse of an era and the heart of an individual woman living in it.

The patterns and characters from the Iliad are just a ship in which Zoccola carries these poems ‘over the edge, freedom a thing / that first required a great fall’. She sails us through the Appalachian hills and on over the edge, full of falling and failing, and somehow freedom. PJK

Helen of Troy, 1993 by Maria Zoccola (Scribner, 2025; $18.00)

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Poem of the week:

The Poet Compareth Himself unto a Village

It’s a big thing for the village. I’m shared out, 
Gathered apart –
                 they part the several pieces with
A gentle rending, pull the inward through.
I’m a lot of very small things for the village.

I go soft into the village, like a
                                      worry, like a dough;
My villagers divide me and divide.
The hairs of my head go tassel a sofa
                                     here, a cushion there.
Some to the baker, too, as a pastry brush.
So in the twilight hush, my ancient, isolated village
Settles down again, cosy, myself all over.

The village straggles out, each little world
About its business in the draining light.
Different fires, different larders,
Many parcels in the reddening light.
Different pots and purposes.
I’m a quiet dispersion by decaying light.

I’m going quietly
                              into the village.
I’m safe in all the houses of the village.
The boys can have the bladder for a football.
I pass between the small shoes of the village.

We would all of us be crunchy, caught inside
Enormous jaws: the champing of a god.
We would all of us be crunchy in the bite

Of a huge enough decision: if
                                  some monster of a night
Could dislocate our seeming soft entireness
Terribly at once in its single mouth –

And damn the village and the evening light!

But here they are, the boys, at the edge of the forest:
A medium-sized forest, they believe.

The ball rolls into the medium-sized forest.
The little boys are enormous in the forest,
The tiny forest that goes on and on.  AW

We are open for submissions until August 13th. If you haven’t yet submitted, and would like to… well, you better get a wiggle on.

Also, if you would like to get hold the full first year of TLR in print (Nos. 1-3) for the absurdly reasonable1 price of just £10, our discounted ‘back-issue bundle’ is available until the end of August.

And now, three highlights from TLR No. 3:

• HC listens to the beat of Tony Harrison’s heart

• ECS on the ‘aggressively Californian’ vibe of Natalie Shapero

• Whither the lollipop lady?

Re-reading:

Speaking up for the rest of [uz]

The news of Tony Harrison’s death in September sent many of us – or [uz] – straight back to our first encounters with his work. I discovered him when I was fifteen or sixteen, thanks to the English degree my Mum was taking at the Open University. Along with its attractive coursebooks, the OU kept spinning DVDs through our letterbox, with one ‘chapter’, if that’s the right word, focusing on the sonnet. I’m sure that other guests featured, but I remember only Wendy Cope reading her pastiche of Philip Sidney, and Harrison performing – that is the right word – ‘Them and [uz]’.

Just as Seamus Heaney has the misfortune to be known for ‘Digging’ and Geoffrey Hill for ‘September Song’, so much of Harrison’s great work is eclipsed by the two or three poems that have been nationalised. I love the one immediately preceding ‘Them and [uz]’ in Harrison’s 1978 collection From the School of Eloquence and Other Poems, and not just because it mentions Newcastle’s Literary and Philosophical Society, which my brother and I haunted as sixth-formers. ‘The Ode Not Taken’ deals with the poetic renunciate CT Thackrah (1799-1833), who had studied with Keats at Guy’s Hospital:

Praising the Classics to the Lit & Phil.,
versed in Greek and Latin, and Eng. Lit,
he scribbled no sonnets on the scribbling mill
but penned descriptions of the scribblers’ shit –
could write hexameters by Virgil’s rules,
and parrot Latin epics, but he chose
flax-hecklers’ fluxes with their ‘gruelly’ stools,
the shit of Yorkshire operatives, in prose.

But there are pentameters in Thackrah’s tract,
the found iambics no prose can destroy,
which want to stop the heart with simple fact:
we do not find old men in this employ.

As a grammar school boy and a Classics graduate, Harrison could also write hexameters by Virgil’s rules and parrot Latin epics; like Thackrah, he feared the vanity in it. The School of Eloquence is all about how the son of a semi-literate baker is meant to make sense of his talents, and how to justify it to the roughnecks on his street (Harrison later lived two blocks down from my street, in Jesmond, which showed that he’d dealt with the roughnecks by leaving them behind). His anxieties are semi-soothed by hearing the poetic pulse, those ‘found iambics’, everywhere in the mouths of his peers. The ‘sonnets’ (most of them sixteen lines) in The School of Eloquence are more dramatic than lyric, voices clashing over rough grids of quatrains:

But your father was a simple working man,
they’ll say, and didn’t speak in those full rhymes.
His words when they came would scarcely scan.
Mi Dad’s did scan, like yours do, many times!

So the pentameter doesn’t deserve its lofty Shakespearean aura: it’s as tough and folksy as the ballad form. In ‘Dove Cottage’, Harrison peels back the wallpaper to unearth ‘five strong verse feet’ graffitied not by Wordsworth but by W Martin, paperhanger: ‘Our heads will happen cold when this is found.’ An intimation of mortality, with a beat that does not go gentle into that good night. Harrison said in interview that ‘that rhythmical thing is like a life-support system. It means I feel I can go closer to the fire, deeper into the darkness... I know I have this rhythm to carry me to the other side.’

He was not speaking purely in metaphor. Few poets were better qualified to talk about fire and darkness than Harrison, who between 1992 and 1995 was on the front lines in the Balkans to send verse dispatches back to the Guardian. The power of Harrison’s work lies in its insistence that life goes on, even when it’s ending. ‘The Bright Lights of Sarajevo’ observes a flirtation in an unlit, bombarded street, ‘black shapes impossible to mark / as Muslim, Serb or Croat in such dark.’ So they need to make themselves, and their intentions, known by other means:

Then the tender radar of the tone of voice
shows by its signals she approves his choice.
Then match or lighter to a cigarette
to check in her eyes if he’s made progress yet.

Theirs is not the only hot blood in a town that routinely spills it:

And I see a pair who’ve certainly progressed
beyond the tone of voice and match-flare test
and he’s about, I think, to take her hand
and lead her away from where they stand
on two shell splash scars, where in ‘92
Serb mortars massacred the breadshop queue
and blood-dunked crusts of shredded bread
lay on the pavement with the broken dead.

That ‘I think’ takes Harrison from the writing desk and puts him in the firing line, just a few yards away from the courting parties. Beneath it all, behind the hanging threat of mines and mortars, the couplets throb in step with the heartbeat and the sexual instinct, urges so great that it’s worth lighting up just for a glimpse of the other’s face, even though people are still ‘dodging snipers’. As Harrison admits elsewhere, ‘I’m always quoting le coeur bat l’iambe – / Jean-Louis Barrault on the metre of Racine.’

Except it doesn’t. The sound that slips the echocardiogram is ‘more fluttery trochee’, whatever the metre is telling us. Harrison is the least impressionistic of poets, the least mimetic, however much he quotes or purports to quote those around him. While others would design a rhythm to ape the machine’s ‘fluttery’ beep pattern, Harrison’s feet march resolutely onwards. We wonder whether the pentameter is a life-support system or merely a confidence trick, one that can’t bat aside the fact of cardiac arrhythmia, let alone the ‘spondaic or dactylic... dry scansions’ of machine guns. The question is summed up in the title ‘Dichtung und Wahrheit’, meaning ‘Poetry and Truth’, of a poem to Marcelino Dos Santos, the polyglot apologist for Mozambique’s armed liberation movement Frelimo. ‘Dulciloquist Dos Santos, swear to them / whose languages you’ll never learn to speak / that tongues of fire at a 1000 rpm / is not the final eloquence you seek.’ That word ‘final’ is all too inviting of the word ‘solution’, and Pentecostal tongues are all too easily forked. Those who spit bile often don’t think twice about spitting bullets.

That ‘Dulciloquist’ quatrain I’m quoting from memory, and I know that I would have a much harder time of it if the rhythm had not tattooed itself onto my brain. So where does that leave us in the battlefield between Poetry and Truth? It’s easy to imagine Harrison as a political sloganeer, pumping out chants to a revolution. But the point of slogans is that sound overpowers semantics, resulting in collective hypnosis. At his worst, Harrison was capable of writing hypnotically, but usually because he was beating an acoustic drum rather than a political one: ‘Facing North’ is an example of a poem where the rhythm is stronger than the words, and is therefore impossible to memorise and quote. A lot of poets dismiss traditional form as a crutch, but Harrison shows that in fact it ups the stakes. You have to find the words that will not be shaken loose, even as the line and life take a battering. HC

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Review of the week:

‘Oh boo hoo’

Natalie Shapero’s poetry voice reminds me, at times, of a character from cult sketch show The Kids in the Hall. ‘Sarcastic Guy’, played by Dave Foley, can’t help but sounding snarky – it’s a ‘speech impediment’, he says – even when he’s trying (I think) to be earnest. I admire Stay Dead, Shapero’s TS Eliot Prize-shortlisted collection, for its relentless and affected (I assume) cynicism, its jokiness-but-kind-of-not, given that her main subject is death. A poem titled ‘Oh Boo Hoo’ asks:

Have I told you
about when I died and came back
and everyone begged me
to please stay dead?

Her use of ALL CAPS for dialogue and quotations throughout the book adds to the spiky effect. Titles sometimes sass the poems, or serve as punchlines. Shapero is fond of em dashes, a Dickinsonian touch that, annoyingly, became an AI tell for a while. Often coming at the ends of her poems, they toss the reader away into possibility or oblivion.

The vibe of Stay Dead is aggressively Californian. Cool detachment and dark humour serve as coping mechanisms on an absurd planet of micro-plastics, medical claim denial and privately owned tracts of redwoods. Acting – in the movies, in daily life, in these poems – is a central conceit: ‘Who doesn’t want to be / in something?’ But there’s no glamour. These are movie extras and low-wage workers living off tips, cast in a life of economic and environmental precarity beyond their control: ‘you can be in the thing / and not even know what the plot is’.

Death and the trauma of near-death recur. Abstract expressionist painters are frequently referenced (Rothko, Pollock, and their precursor Monet). The poems are short, of similar form, and talk to each other, sometimes a little too repetitively. Or maybe it’s all towards the creation of a larger canvas, the ultimate big picture. ECS

Stay Dead by Natalie Shapero (Out-Spoken, 2025; £11.99)

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Poem of the week:

What was the occupation of your main household earner?

My mother is a lollipop lady, one of the best. But it’s clear her career is stalling. Where to go from here? Lollipop supervisor? Lollipop CEO? Lollipop factory? Lollipop heaven? The lollipop industry is contracting and those positions just aren’t available anymore. It’s not a secret: The New York Times reports that lollipop worker households are struggling more than ever to put lollipops on the table. Democrats rely on the lollipop vote but rarely address their concerns in a meaningful way. Politicians walk down the street, lollipop in mouth, hands in pockets, saying the thing is, this was the lollipop’s idea. The public aren’t any better, throwing small hard candies at the lollipop picket line. We hold up our lollipops, begging them to stop, go, stop, go, stop. HSL

The Little Review’s current submissions window was set to close tomorrow, on August 3rd – but a sudden flurry of last-minute submissions has left us fearing that several of you have been racing to meet this deadline.

Given this, in a moment of weakness and uncharacteristic generosity, we have decided to extend the deadline until August 13th.

If you haven’t yet submitted – what are you waiting for?

Send us your essays, reviews, poems, scurrilous gossip, etc, etc, etc. It is free to submit to the magazine, and always will be.

Our submission requirements are very unusual, so please make sure to read them in full at thelittlereview.co.uk/submit. Remember: don’t be a Paul Illidge.

In this week’s lithe & lissom magazine-let:

• The hell of technology

• A most peculiar clock

• Where’s the cheese?

• Newtonian physics vs. grandpa

News:

The hell of technology

[This bit is both distressing and dull. We would recommend that anyone not interested in the agonies of magazine-editing should skim blithely past to the Fiction section. – TLR]

Last week, our editor was preparing to send issue No. 4 of TLR off to the printers. Last Sunday evening, after a hard day of work, he turned off the one ancient, juddering, steam-powered computer on which this magazine is edited and typeset. Naively, he expected that the computer would turn on as usual on Monday morning.

It did not.

That computer is now a very expensive paperweight.

All the files and templates for the magazine have been lost, and must now be rebuilt from scratch. This is something of an inconvenience. The kind of inconvenience that has had us pulling out our hair and howling expletives at the moon.

TLR No. 4 was meant to be in bookshops in early August. As a result of this technical setback, it is now more likely to appear in September, and will be rebranded as our ‘Summer / Autumn 2026’ issue. The year’s third issue (‘Winter 2026’) will follow in November.

If you are anxiously waiting for your copy to arrive of TLR No. 4, we appreciate your patience and understanding. If you would like to support our doomed luddite efforts at this difficult time, perhaps consider taking out a subscription. A full year’s worth of print magazines remains quite alarmingly cheap, at just £12 (plus p&p).

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Fiction:

from The Apostle Clock

Thomas worked at a museum in a quiet London suburb. It was founded in the 19th century by a tea company owner, Vyvyan Emslie, of Emslie Teas, which came in a tin with an illustration of a tiger sitting out of place in a bucolic English field. Vyvyan Emslie had loved to collect things as an amateur zoologist and folklorist with the capital from his small tea empire. It wasn’t a tea found in every house. Some people said it had an odd aftertaste, like cloves and mutton. He collected birds and zebra heads and dolls made out of shoes and good luck charms. He bought dog heads and cat skeletons from veterinarians and vivisectionists. Vyvyan Emslie had cut an eccentric figure, as one could see in old photographs and paintings; he wore a tall fur hat and his beard was stained from the tea which he drank strong, without milk or sugar. Even in a black-and-white photo the brownish stain, on the beard directly below the mouth, stood out.

The museum staff were given free Emslie tea in bulk tins, though the company no longer funded the museum and it had to be self-reliant. Thomas liked to have a cup of Emslie tea with a prawn sandwich and a bag of salty black liquorice he bought from a specialist Dutch shop for his lunch. His colleague Julieanne spent all her money on presents for her boyfriend Gerald, so just had crisps for lunch with the tea. It was not enough for her, so she chewed the tea bags, scooping them damp and milky from the bottom of her mug, and her teeth would be covered in tea-grains the rest of the day.

The museum contained a section on animals and plants, and a section on the wonders and eccentricities of humanity. On the bottom floor was an aquarium which held various anemones and an old, unidentified grey fish with whiskers and a squashed face said to have been there since Vyvyan Emslie founded the museum. It lurked behind a few aquatic rocks and ate sandwiches chopped into little bits and dandruff-looking fishflakes.

Many of the stuffed birds had been painted blue and purple to look more exotic by Vyvyan Emslie, as his empire was financially limited, but the paint had started to crust off. There were plastic models, bought in the 1960s, of unrealistic proportions: miniature sperm whales and pterodactyls, giant fleas and grasshoppers. There was a collection of brown ferns glued to paper, gathered by Vyvyan’s daughter who had had an unhealthy obsession with ferns, ape skeletons which looked like humans with bad posture, beetles, mice, a tragic stuffed dodo, dollhouses from Germany and Japan, black and orange Greek vases, rabbits’ feet once kept in the pockets of the auspicious, Polish and Swedish dolls in floral skirts, craggled Neapolitan nativity scenes, and an array of Egyptian artefacts which Thomas was frightened of and always walked quickly past (a mummified baby alligator and cat, a hippopotamus-headed gold figurine, a hieroglyphed coffin) for anything Ancient Egyptian terrified him. He was also frightened of a 19th-century man-trap, like a large iron jaw, which was used on country estates to catch poachers. Thomas had read of them in Hardy novels. Many of the taxidermied animals – a giraffe, a tiger, a penguin – had been stuffed by those unfamiliar with their natural proportions. The giraffe’s neck was crumpled down like a fallen stocking and the tiger was bloated-looking.

Thomas sold tickets for special exhibitions at the desk, wandered the collections to make sure no one touched anything, and at the end of the night wiped the fingerprints off the glass display boxes, swept the floors and fed the old fish its sandwich and flakes.

On the top floor of the museum was a giant German clock, which resembled a Baroque vending machine. The clock face was at the top, like a face above a decorated wooden torso, windowed with small panes of glass which contained religious scenes with hand-sized figurines. At the turn of a key the characters moved. In the biggest and central window, the Apostles were supposed to go past and curtsey before a figure of Christ, but the clock had been broken for years and since the museum had become independent of Emslie teas they had no funds to fix it. The Apostles did not curtsey as they should, and all flowed past Christ like the last figure, Judas, who was meant to in the original design to designate his betrayal. The curtsey mechanism was a spring below the doll. The springs were old and rusted; they had no more ‘oompf.’ It made the clock desecrational but also unimpressive and this, thought Thomas, certainly had a negative effect on the museum’s standing and potential finances. In the foyer Thomas had put a glass donation box to fix it, but all it had accumulated was a crumpled paper American dollar. Through his church (Episcopalian) Thomas tried to organize a fundraiser, but the vicar told him one really shouldn’t fixate on fancy Bavarian trinkets when there were starving people.

Sometimes Gerald would come to pick up Julieanne at the end of her shift. He had a curtain of blonde hair and pointy shoes. While he waited for her he would wander the collection and say things like ‘fancy that’, ‘wacky’, ‘oh my’, while giggling. Poor Julieanne had a degree in archaeology.

The little museum shop never had any postcards of the things people wanted postcards of, but sold sticks of tooth-breaking candy, young fern plants wrapped in cellophane, and calendars and diaries with Wind in the Willows characters on them. Once, Margaret, who worked in the shop, had said to Julieanne, ‘All men are either a Rat, a Mole, a Badger or a Toad. Thomas is a mole, the nervous type which I think the most dangerous of all. Which d’you think Gerald is?’ and Julieanne responded, ‘Gerald isn’t like anyone else, he’s terrific.’

Thomas did not overhear this conversation. […] CG

Read the full story in The Little Review No. 3, available in print or as a PDF

Buy TLR No. 3 for £5

Review of the week:

But where’s the cheese?

Let’s begin with some pedantry. The blurb of Hal Coase’s first poetry collection explains that its Italian title Eccolo means ‘Here he is’ or ‘Here it is’. But in the one instance of the word appearing in the poems, it includes its own translation: ‘there it is’. No biggie, you might say: the word includes all these meanings. But this slight discrepancy leads me to suspect that the blurb-writer might not have read the whole book. Still, we shouldn’t judge a book by its back cover.

The poems in Eccolo are both very clear and somewhat elliptical. The language is very precise, plain, often conversational. But why is ‘Rodeo Pleat’ called ‘Rodeo Pleat’? Why is ‘The Cheese and the Worms’ called ‘The Cheese and the Worms’? Worms are mentioned once; cheese is nowhere to be seen. Why is ‘Schadograph’ called ‘Schadograph’? For that matter, what is a Schadograph? I googled it: a type of abstract photograph, seemingly produced by placing objects directly onto light-sensitive paper. But here is the poem of that title:

over out of season artichokes
he tells me time doesn’t exist

we muddle through the bill
and walk a high-walled road

that cuts a park in two
south towards the river

the way the roots go down
easing with need

to the plain apartment
where he still lives

Like, what’s that all about? And yet I like this poem very much. It is a bit like wandering into a room where someone is midway through watching a movie, and seeing just a couple of minutes of it. Without knowing any context, you watch in a different way and fill in the blanks. Perhaps you build in your mind a better movie than the one you would see if you watched it from the beginning.

And the poet himself says (nodding to Marianne Moore’s poem ‘Poetry’) ‘I, too, dislike most finished things’. This line arrives just a few pages from the end, in the long piece that comprises Part III of the collection, ‘Ochre Pitch’. It is a sequence of untitled nine-line poems, several of which begin mid-sentence. A dislike for finished things is a liking for the fragmentary, and for me the way in to a lot of these poems is to take them as fragments rather than a finished thing.

As such, the nine-line poem seems the optimal form for this poet; there is a coherence across the ‘Ochre Pitch’ sequence as a whole, but if it tells a story that seems less important than the effect of each poem independently. Concomitantly, the longest single poem in the book, the four-page ‘Portrait of the Artist Soutine by His Beef Écorché’, is the one point where it begins to feel like listening to a Frank Zappa guitar solo.

Even there, though, I feel like it is a poem I could grow very fond of, if I were to be stranded on a desert island with only this book for company. The book would be fine company, if it were to come to that. HI

Eccolo by Hal Coase (Carcanet, 2025; £11.99)

Poem of the week:

Isaac Newton’s Prism Experiment

What can be said about the parked car
that melted on the street beside the sky-
scraper that hasn’t already been said? If only
the wind had bent the building’s sternum
east, its reflection would instead have burnt
one of this city’s beetles to a fine red paste,
to a pigment used to rouge our lips. Yes,
bugs are often zapped by magnifying glasses,
but I can’t even believe in the rapture!
They say a Nissan leaks oil into a pothole
the way iodine dresses a wound. They say
all sorts about the way light can clothe
a tower. But all I saw was Grandad, walking
readily, then gingerly, then through a neon
swathe of yellow. We were far enough away.
Nobody got hurt. Still, he said the heat
confirmed his suspicions about London. JBR

In this week’s effortlessly chic newsletter:

• Why we still can’t pin Shakespeare down

• Encouraging the next generation of hard-to-please critics

• Charles Tomlinson under the surgeon’s life

• GBW contends with a wasp

Insidious Fire:

Hamnet, with extra ham

First hypothesis. Given that Shakespeare is Shakespeare, there may be no good way to explore the links between his life and his art. No explanation will ever be good enough; each must, by definition, turn out shoddy. Take Shakespearean biography, for instance, of which there have been two major schools: the drily documentary (man from place buys large house, invests in malt; also London) and the speculative (fights in war like John Donne, shags Earl of Southampton/Pembroke, revises/reworks/rewrites older play to be – in some convoluted way fathomable only to him – ‘about’ his dead son). Neither gets us where we secretly long to be: with him, in his mind, in his heart.

Let’s follow that with a second, tighter hypothesis, then. Given that biography of Shakespeare’s ‘creative maturity’ may be impossible, the best a new work can do is start from a good place, then get steadily worse. That was certainly true of Matthew Arnold’s sonnet ‘Shakspeare’. ‘Others abide our question. Thou art free’, he began: a wonderful start, and true. But its strongest line was its first; the close of the poem, traditionally a site of concentrated brilliance, became a trainwreck of Bardolatry and rhyme over sense: ‘all griefs that bow, / Find their sole voice in that victorious brow’. A related difficulty seems to hobble Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, the (much lauded) adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s (also much lauded) novel.

Shakespeare’s twins were, clearly, named after two neighbours in Stratford: Hamnet and Judith Sadler. But the nominal overlap – and that is all it is – with the playwright’s best-known work is, admittedly, hard to discount, despite the lack of any textual or contextual evidence linking the two. Both film and book (neither of which is required to ‘be scholarly’, of course) lean on an epigraph from Stephen Greenblatt: ‘Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name, entirely interchangeable in Stratford records’. Hamnet builds its world from a handful of such facts: Hamnet Shakespeare, baptized in 1585, was buried in 1596; the cause of death may have been plague. What makes it such an interesting and – at least initially – compelling world, though, is neither the father nor the son, but the mother.

Anne Shakespeare, née Hathaway – or Agnes, as she is here (another early modern variant) – has, like everyone and everything linked to the dramatist, weathered a great deal of controversy over the years. The infamous ‘second-best bed’ of her husband’s will rendered her, for a long time, a figure of pity, even (if you can believe this of senior male academics) of contempt. More recent work, though, both creative and critical – and capped by the very public intervention of Germaine Greer’s Shakespeare’s Wife (2007) – has sought to bring her out of the dark.

The O’Farrell-Zhao Hathaway is, in every sense, older (as she was: eight years on her husband), and the first half of the film sets up an effective contrast between Shakespeare’s modern, rather colourless masculinity – he’s introduced, in line with an anecdote collected by John Aubrey, as a strict, grey-clad ‘schoolmaster in the country’, forcing tired boys to recite Latin in a dismal room – and her fiery, tangible, ‘earthbound’ femininity. (She flies a hawk, forages meadows, and a flashback shows her learning herbalism at her mother’s knee.) Best of all – and in satisfying opposition to Shakespeare’s assumed linguistic primacy – she performs a medicinal chant, itself drawn from the Old English ‘Nine Herbs Charm’. Jessie Buckley is striking in the role, and the power of her performance comes in no small part from a quiet, withheld intensity that is strongly reminiscent of pre-Conquest poetry; her willingness to let gesture, glance, and spare language do the work. To put it another way, this imagining of Hathaway is fantastically weird: her roots, like the word’s, are in that primaeval context of wyrd (fate, destiny, that which is), and behind it weorþan (to happen, to become). Everything about her is richly suggestive of ‘alternative ways of knowing’, and of that older, pre-Erasmian society. It’s persuasive.

Paul Mescal’s Shakespeare is not. ‘Speaking with people is sometimes difficult for me,’ he tells her early on; there are moments of stammering. These and other small choices (which together give us, in effect, a neurodivergent Shakespeare) could’ve worked well in the hands of a more various actor (Buckley is various). But what made Mescal so affecting in Normal People – a young diffidence, concealing deep feeling and thought – backfires here. He sits at his desk, moments after meeting his future wife, tapping out the beats of ‘But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?’; there’s a distinct whiff not of touching inarticulacy, but of RADA (or, in his case, the Lir Academy). We are told during a moment of Agnes’s uncanny tactile insight that he contains ‘a landscape’, but we’re never (as the lingo goes) shown it. More generally, the unconvincing tone – which sinks to abysmal depths in the second half – is in no small part down to the further linguistic missteps that plague (pun unintended but wincingly retained) the film.

Like nearly all Shakespearean biopics, Hamnet can’t resist cramming the real thing centre-stage (well, -screen) at the first opportunity. It’s bad enough when it’s Romeo and Juliet, or when the three Shakespeare children perform the witches’ lines from Macbeth (is there some implied connection between that and Agnes’s alterity? If so, the script fails to land it). But it’s excruciating when, instead of an actual resolution to the deepening marital conflict (Shakespeare probably was absent for the death of his son), Zhao gives us a highlights reel of Hamlet itself in the form of the play’s London debut.

The woman who, the film has told us, in many ways knows and sees and feels as much as (if not more than) her brilliant husband arrives in the capital, and within minutes is reduced to a Coronation Street character: ‘London?!’ Shakespeare’s possible retreat into silence and money after Hamnet’s death is rich territory for a film’s final act. But in lieu of a credible reconciliation between husband and wife – or braver yet, an acknowledgement that some losses do irreparable harm – we’re asked to believe that a single performance (by the hammiest Hamlet to have ever hammed, no less) caused a grieving mother to suddenly grasp that (and one fears this is basically the thinking behind it) she and her husband simply have different ‘love languages’.

Shakespeare was, after all, a Genius, so everything is alright. After so much established promise, it’s a bitter fizzling out for Buckley’s lead: all griefs are made to bow / To his victorious brow. Or something. TC

Hamnet (dir. Chloé Zhao, 2025)

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A friendly plug

Are You Critical?

The Poetry Society has re-opened applications for its Young Critics Scheme, three words which could be construed as a full sentence. More critics should scheme.

Many ‘Young Critics’ who have passed through this programme have gone on to publish their work in The Little Review, including AB, EY, GDB, and JW. So we’re more than happy to pass on this message from the organisers:

“This partnership programme offers ten emerging poetry reviewers aged 18-25 in the UK and Ireland, supporting them to review, via video, the T.S. Eliot Prize shortlist. The video reviews will appear on the T. S. Eliot Prize and The Poetry Society’s websites, social media and YouTube channels in the run-up to the announcement of the winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize in January 2027. The ten selected participants will attend four online workshops in October and November 2026 on reviewing poetry, editing and video-making, including advice from critics Helen Bowell and Kadish Morris. They will be assigned one book from the Prize’s shortlist in early October to review, and submit a video review in November.

No previous reviewing or poetry writing experience is required. Applications from writers underrepresented in poetry reviewing are encouraged, including those from Black, Asian and other ethnic minority backgrounds; d/Deaf and disabled writers; working class writers; and LGBTQ+ writers.

Applications are open now and close on 17 August 2026. Find full details and submit your application here.”

Review of the week:

Snow in Eden

This is a surprise. It’s ten years since Charles Tomlinson died, and now twenty-two uncollected late poems have arrived. How welcome they are, even if they hardly change anything. Attentive descriptions of depopulated landscapes, pithy close observation, still lifes and studies of motion or changes in light, glimpses of Italy and Japan. There are familiar strains of Tudor music. And of course there is a snow poem, whose first word reminds us of another Tomlinson idée fixe: ‘Eden comes snowing back to us…’ Yet we also hear the occasional very personal note from this most impersonal poet: ‘The loss of an eye – one flick / Of the surgeon’s knife had taken away / The world that both eyes lived by’; ‘Courteous death advanced to meet me’. Let this beautiful publication serve as a reminder of Tomlinson’s significance, or as a taster for those who haven’t yet tried him. JG

The Change of Light by Charles Tomlinson (Dare-Gale, 2025; £8)

Poem of the Week:

wasp summer

us & wasp. us lying
in bed frozen as wasp
beat the skylight.
us at table, wasp ringing
the bell of overturned
glass. wasp: nut of pain

slipping from the flat
lid of its cage. livid jerk.
vespa hurtling hot
pavement. cup full
of anger. suffo-
cating. all afraid until

i’ve mastered it. then,
unthreatened mercy.
i’ve been cruel
when i know i’ve won. haven’t i
also been trapped
desperate

to be freed, bewildered
by my sudden being there. GDB

In next week’s newsletter: Isaac Newton’s prism experiment, a new story from Camilla Grudova, and a mysterious absence of cheese.

Some highly questionable amusements in this week’s newsletter:

• A long, hard look at Millennials’ dads’ dicks

• The tyranny of totes

• Poetry and ‘pissed-off collagen’

• A library quest!

But first: an offer.

You might not yet own the first three issues of The Little Review in print. If so, this is, of course, horribly embarrassing for you. Don’t worry. You needn’t walk around with a paper bag over your head. There’s still time to remedy the situation before word gets out. For the next few weeks, we are selling a Back-Issue Bundle for £10.

A tenner, for all our past issues. A year’s worth of interesting writing – 528 small but perfectly formed pages of poetry, fiction, reviews, interviews, crosswords, cartoons, insolence & triviality – for less than half the price of this months’s vegan harissa special at Pizza Express. You can order it here. (‘It’ being the bundle, not the pizza.)

And now, amid a summer heatwave, we look back at a memorable summer in the recent history of poetry, courtesy of this highlight from TLR No. 3…

Insolence & Triviality:

Dad dick summer: a serious retrospective

Recently I fell down a rabbit hole of poems about Millennial men’s fathers’ penises. When family and friends asked what I was doing, I said I was tracking down ‘dad’s dick’ poems from 2018 to 2020. Though most were bemused that this subgenre existed, two helpful friends proffered almost simultaneously a ‘proto’ dad’s dick poem by British poet Henry Shukman, who now lives in the US as a Zen master with a meditation app.

‘Man Peeing’, which appeared in his debut collection In Doctor No’s Garden (2002), relays a boyhood memory of the ‘fireman’s jet’ of urine emerging from his father’s ‘thing’, which was ‘heavy and thick, a length of rope’. Initially there is identification, so when the father lets out an ‘arse squeal’ and laughs, the boy echoes his laugh. But later a hint of disavowal is detected. The son recognizes that his father, a man of ‘small stature / but some standing’, belongs to ‘another world’ – of adulthood, privilege and patriarchy – where ‘waiters and women waited’.

Why was I hunting for ‘dad’s dick’ poems? The story begins in 2020 with a poem by Joe Dunthorne called ‘The Norton Anthology’ from issue 95 of Poetry London. ‘It was the summer we all wrote poems about how our dads’ dicks / noisily follow us everywhere…’ are its droll opening lines. I assumed this ‘summer’ was intended allegorically as an era in which toxic masculinity was confronted. But no: it was literal. Or so I inferred from the acknowledgment under the title – ‘after Wayne, Raymond and Dean’ – which signalled antecedents in the dad’s dick canon.1 ‘The Norton Anthology’ offers a mythologized genealogy of Dunthorne Family sex organs, from the ‘exclusively symbolic’ balls of a vasectomized father to the speaker’s self-described ‘dreaded shipwreck’. The focus moves to a tiny son in the bathtub with the potential to write his own ‘dad’s dick’ poem one day: ‘He stares into the future. I promise I will not let them / publish the anthology until his poem feels right’.

Funny and smart, the poem hints at the Narcissus myth: a man looks admiringly into a body of water (a bath) at his reflection, which here takes the form of a son destined to write a poem on the identical subject to the one that the poet is self-consciously watching himself compose. But there is an entire hall of mirrors. The speaker is a reflection of his father, the boy a reflection of both father and grandfather, and each ‘dad’s dick’ poem a reflection of the others. There’s a note, too, of what Freud would call secondary narcissism in the grandiosity of imagining the son’s unwritten ‘dad’s dick’ contribution in The Norton Anthology. I thought the poem was hilarious.

I transcribed the text, saved it in a folder for my PhD research, then life got in the way – there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle – until I found myself in a pub in 2025 conversing with poets I hadn’t seen in years. There someone mentioned a poem in which Raymond Antrobus thanks his father for his large penis. I was suspicious of the way this poem was reported: I didn’t associate Antrobus’s work with flexing, in contrast, say, to Frederick Seidel’s boastful affectations – but even Seidel would be unlikely to congratulate himself on the size of his member. So I borrowed The Perseverance from the library and looked up the poem in question, ‘Thinking of Dad’s Dick’.

Here, as is so often the case, the truth lies in between. While it is correct that the speaker points out how wide and long his father’s penis was and then says, ‘Funny to thank him for this now’, the remark seems parenthetical on the one hand and, on the other, necessary to the poem’s conceit: patrilineal inheritance. Many of the poems in The Perseverance grapple with ambivalence about a dead father. Even the redaction of Ted Hughes’s ‘Deaf School’ and the poem that follows (‘After Reading “Deaf School” by the Mississippi River’) position Hughes as a disappointing poetry forefather. In ‘Thinking of Dad’s Dick’, however, ambivalence takes a sentimental turn. The father, who has overshared with his son details of his extensive sex life, is understood to have been aware of his imminent mortality when doing so. He told stories while he could, giving the ‘length of his life’ (note the double entendre) to his son, who now spins his own narratives as a writer. I expect the size aspect of ‘Thinking of Dad’s Dick’ was remembered in the pub because it was emphasized in a 2019 TLS review by Rory Waterman. However, I may be downplaying that detail, unattuned as I am to blokey references to penis size.

The acknowledgement under Antrobus’s title – ‘After Wayne Holloway-Smith’ – rang a bell, though I hadn’t connected the dots to Dunthorne’s poem. By googling ‘Wayne Holloway-Smith Dad’s Dick’, I found on the Poetry Society website the progenitor of the 2018-2020 ‘dad’s dick’ poems. ‘Dad’s Dick’ was originally published in The Poetry Review in the summer 2018 issue. (Could that be the ‘summer’ Dunthorne references?) The poem is one of several ‘Extracts from Love’, i.e. fragments of Holloway-Smith’s book-length project on toxic masculinity and maternal sacrifice, Love Minus Love, published three years later. In the book, the extracts appear without titles; and the poem formerly called ‘Dad’s Dick’ conveys, via its newly implemented all-caps text, associations of billboards, street art, and perhaps Trump’s obstreperous shouting on Twitter.

How directly does Antrobus model his poem after Hollway-Smith’s? Not very. While Antrobus’s ‘horse’s tongue’ echoes Holloway-Smith’s ‘Floppy dog tongue’, the latter’s ‘Dad’s Dick’ is its own beast – and why shouldn’t it be? This twenty-line list of associative epithets is a bald take-down of toxic masculinity and patriarchal dominance, reaching a literary register with vocabulary such as ‘lyric I’ and ‘protagonist’. Its form – a series of put-downs that includes ‘Lifter of toilets seats / Maker of stains / Itcher / Nervous twitcher / Drunkard / Stitcher-up of mother’ – conveys a one-tone renunciation of a father, less nuanced than others in this public conversation. But there was one more poem to find.

Locating Dean Atta’s poem, the remaining participant in the dad’s dick repartee, proved so difficult I found myself in a quandary: was I really going full Miss Marple to track down the final ‘dad’s dick’ poem? Yes. Yes, I was. KM [… Read the full essay in The Little Review No. 3, available in print or as a PDF]

Buy TLR No.3 for £5

Totemic Polemic

We often receive peculiar letters. You may remember the saga of Mr Paul Illidge. Last year, we received the impassioned letter below, which we were pleased to print in the Mailbox section of TLR No. 2.

~

Dear London Review of Books, [We fear this letter may have been misdirected – Ed.]

Yes, I will accept your generous offer of a 25% saving on a year’s subscription. On one condition: you take the free tote bag and stuff it where Donne’s sun don’t rise. Or recycle it as a breakfast snack for constipated essayists.

Prufrock may have measured out his life in coffee spoons, but I have witnessed that ‘eternal Footman’ hold out my tote and snicker. My obituary will be written in thin bags, from the Conway Hall Small Publishers’ Fair to the Uzbek Dried Fruit Symposium. I have enough jute-canvas derivatives in my hall cupboard to rig a tea-clipper and bale up most of its cargo. They may even be having little toties of their own. I cannot recall visiting The Oxford Batman Museum and I was never a delegate at The Dublin Confederation of Punk Fisheries or the East Midlands Cheese and Haiku Summit. Total blackout. If you saw me there, please get in touch.

Maybe all this Totism is a Bloomsbury thing. I see that your neighbours at Faber feature a black linen number among their top-selling items, printed with a quote from Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Rival’:

If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.

An odd choice of words for something that fans will stuff with organic vegetables. Mark Fiddes2

~

After reading the missive above, we knew what we had to do.

The Little Review now sells a tote bag.

Out of spite.

It comes in one colour – yellow, naturally – and is sensibly priced at £2.

Aside from the words ‘The Little Review’, the bag is mercifully blank. This is, we believe, a distinctive selling point. We have not printed any poetry on it – and certainly none of the editor’s own poetry. (This is, alas, more can than be said for bags currently being sold elsewhere. We hope other magazines will learn from our sense of restraint.) TLR

Review of the week:

‘You furious excuse for a buzzcut’

Take up a piece of silk. Bafflingly smooth, it only exists because of the slow movement of worms, their secreted saliva which forms cocoons, harvested and boiled to kill off the pupae inside, separated and spun into thread, woven into fabric by many hands. All of which happens somewhere else, and yet is manifested here in this square of fabric that you touch, softer than skin.

Silk Work, the first poetry collection from Imogen Cassels, asks us to consider these kinds of transfiguration; how things and the words that try to contain them are at once simple and mind-spinningly complex, touchable and beyond our reach. Across the poems, Cassels conjures images only to undercut or revoke them, or to create a sense of simultaneous absence and presence. We find the ‘quiet insistence of snow elsewhere’, the ‘Vacation of a nerve’ instead of the nerve itself, an ‘un-blue’ streak, an unpinned comb, the ‘anti-movement of birds’. At other times the objects in the poems feel more deliberately evasive or wrongfooting: ‘the shadow of a burn so wild / it would uncondition the familiar’, a ‘wrong blossom’ and ‘mock of atoms’. These are images which leave us unsettled, as though we’ve been given and cheated out of something precious in one swift movement.

There is a great seam of irreverence throughout the collection. One part of an eight-sonnet sequence is titled ‘Pissed-off collagen’; ‘After Petrarch’ continues with the run-on, ‘who art in heaven, my razors / have behaved oddly’ which chimes nicely with an insult hurled in another poem, ‘you furious excuse for a buzzcut’. But this humour is balanced with moments of tenderness and longing. Cassels captures the force of sensory memory and the tricks that language plays in trying to make sense of the past; ‘The smell of you in summer or in Oxford, so painful / it’s amazing’. The move between cerebral and embodied life here is at once fluid and jarring. Phrases like ‘A handful of goddesses’ and ‘a little hinge of Shoreditch’ are inviting nooks offered up as shelter in poems otherwise imbued with unease and irresolution.

The collection’s language is musical, full of slant rhymes (larch and lurcher, tinder and tundra) that feel playful and light. But there is always a sense of a hand in control, striving for order and the ‘sweet surgery’ of putting words into a relationship that will allow them to take on the charge of the real life behind them. We are being led in a dance that sometimes trips and jerks us, where language is both communicative and a material that draws attention to itself. Much of the time, it is hard to say what these poems are ‘about’. Syntax is often dizzyingly disordered and words are made to subvert their categories, like the pleasingly disruptive noun-adjectives in the reproach, ‘How group photograph / of you. So sonnet, so love letter, so parting shot’.

At times I questioned whether the poems’ insistence on language’s artifice came at the expense of something more open and emotionally connective. But perhaps this is the point; that we cannot escape language’s limits, even if we try. As readers, we are implicated in this struggle as much as Cassels – accused, aroused, craving something impossible. ‘Each want is past having / which is why I wanted it’, we are told, and ‘the point of hope is that it falls through’. And yet, these aren’t despairing poems – far from it. They are curious, lively; they insist on the point of continuing, of being (and writing) ‘proof against breaking’. They feel like splashes of icy water to the cheeks after a long and comfortable sleep. ADA

Silk Work by Imogen Cassels (Prototype, 2025; £12.99)

Poem of the week:

Another Labyrinth

In our everyday life we lose much time hunting for things for which we have no definite place. – The Library Assistant’s Manual

Rædwulf, buried in the most easterly wing,
grips a facsimile of the Voynich manuscript,
pausing on a page which has been ripped.
‘Find Forthwind, or Tybalt,’ he tells you. ‘Get going.’

Mort hovers over The Aim of the Sage
like a naked bulb, clicking his wooden teeth,
which he uses to ease the needle from its sheath.
‘Deliver to Asher or Forthwind,’ he says, ‘this message.’

Tybalt is in the cloister, reading aloud
from the Book of Thoth, or a convincing fake,
while cradling a mead headache.
‘Tell Mort, or Blanc, or Asher: the vellum’s yellowed.’

Forthwind is scrawling, with thin pen and thinner ink,
in the margins of d’Abano’s Heptameron,
smoking tobacco flavoured with coumarin.
‘Iseult. Or Mort.’ He pauses. ‘I’d like to know what they think.’

Asher, slumped by a quarter-full cup of peyote tea,
is using La Poule Noire for a pillow.
He sighs like a cello:
‘Surely, oh surely Blanc or Forthwind understands beauty?’

Iseult is grimly filleting The Key of Solomon
when it catches the tongue of her candle.
She thrashes at the flamelet: ‘Out, scoundrel.’
Then to you: ‘Tell Tybalt. This is an omen.’

Blanc is nowhere to be seen.
Missing too is the Papyri Graecae Magicae
and several texts which, to the phlegmatic eye,
are only harmlessly obscene. JS

The Little Review is back from its long summer holiday, all bright-tailed and bushy-eyed. This Sunday we will be on display before curious members of the public, at the Oxford Indie Book Fair; if you’re in town, come say hello. (We don’t bite.)

We are open for submissions again, until early August, for our autumn/winter print issue1, and here on Substack normal service (or whatever counts as normal for TLR) has resumed. You can expect a digital magazinette in your inbox every Thursday for the foreseeable future.

This week’s newsletter will, however, be a little more serious than normal. During the hiatus, we received some sad news about one of our contributors.

We do not include our writers’ full names in this newsletter, only their initials (for reasons explained in the first issue’s editorial). But this week it feels right, and necessary, to introduce ‘JMB’, before sharing some of his writing from Issue No. 3.

The pieces below, by John Brantingham, were accepted earlier this year and published in The Little Review No. 3, but John died before he could see them in print.

John was the author of twenty-two books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, and ran The Journal of Radical Wonder. He was the poet laureate for California’s Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, and the delight he found in the natural world is everywhere in his poetry.

‘I have a passion for book reviews. I love writing them,’ John wrote in an email to TLR’s editor. He was the ideal contributor, putting as much care, dedication and enthusiasm into his critical writing as into his poetry. The book review below, ‘The Clutter of the Dead’, a quiet, gentle, understated piece about a collaboration between a poet and a photographer, was published in our Arts section, as part of Faithful, As No Art Is (our running strand of features about photography). It is an essay about how we deal with what the dead have left us. John left The Little Review his words. We are grateful that we have the chance to share them with you.

Review of the week:

The Clutter of the Dead

My grandfather’s Waltham watch sits in my dresser drawer. I am a foot taller than he was, so it has never fit. Still, I keep it rather than giving it away. My Aunt Abby’s copy of The Complete Works of John Greenleaf Whittier sits on a bookshelf, and though I read it once, it’s not the words inside that give me comfort, but the memory of her reading it, and then giving it to me. I am nostalgic about the things my dead passed onto me. They mean something to me, although I’m not sure I could say what.

Saved, by the artist Jody Servon and the poet Lorene Delany-Ullman, explores the connection people have with the objects of those who have passed away in a full-colour collection of photography and prose poetry. It is the culmination of a 13-year collaboration between poet and photographer, in which volunteers offered them objects that people important to them had passed on. Servon and Delany-Ullman interviewed the owners, photographed the objects, and wrote about the memories they evoked.

The two do not create an overwrought discussion of loss. Instead, they maintain their distance by simply and clearly responding to the object and the interview. Not everyone comes off well, and there are no maxims as to how a person should approach death. The prose poetry is removed from the pain of loss, as are the photographs. Objects are photographed simply, on a plain white background. They are offered to us as they are, without commentary or other visual clutter that might suggest a meaning for them. The poems do much the same. For example, in ‘Elaine’s Star’, Servon photographs a sewn fabric star. Delany-Ullman’s poem reads:

On her first workday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Elaine wore her vintage full-length mink coat. Her lips red, hair bright blonde, she liked the company art kept. After her husband was killed early one morning while riding his bike in Central Park, she sewed stars and other ornaments. Sold them retail.

The great passion and drama of life and death are left for us to figure out. Here, the job of photographer and poet is simply to report. What death means, if anything, is left to the viewer and reader. This poem progresses through Elaine’s life until finally we are dryly shown her death: ‘Her new husband, a handsome man, meant to make use of their union. When Elaine asked him to leave, he beat and stabbed her to death.’

The poems often reveal the bad parts of people’s lives and relationships, such as a child whose father was an SS officer for the Nazis, or the grandfather who tries to stick his tongue in his granddaughter’s mouth while kissing her, but this collection is not a discussion of how the dead were flawed humans in their lives. It is not as simple as that. Certainly most of the people in this collection are remembered neutrally if not positively, as we remember most of our dead.

The photography is equally intriguing and reminds me very much of the work of Irving Penn and Richard Avedon. Both isolated subjects on white backgrounds to allow us to view them in a new way. Avedon photographed celebrities, politicians and other people by themselves without the props that usually contextualized who they were, what they were doing, and what made them comfortable. Seeing Ronald Reagan or Marilyn Monroe outside of their normal setting allowed the viewer to think of them as humans, full of self-doubt and awkwardness. My favorite of Avedon’s photographs is one that he took of a butcher, covered in the blood of the animal he had cut apart. Outside of the context of his shop, the blood gains a new meaning or at least a new significance. We are not distracted by the store or the customers or anything beyond that clear fact that eating meat means something else has had to bleed. Penn did similar work, including photographing cigarette butts that he found on the street. Viewing them on a white background, we are asked to observe and understand the life of the butt and consider the person who smoked it. Some are crushed. Some are ashy. Some have lipstick marks. All say something about the people who discarded them.

Similarly, looking at Servon’s objects, we begin to understand and recreate the lives and personalities of their owners. The SS officer who was captured and spent time in an American prisoner of war camp kept two forks from that camp stamped with ‘US’. The woman who moved away from an Indiana farm kept a delicate tea cup from an expensive English tea service. Perhaps this is a kind of fiction prompted by the images, but the photography forces a creative act in the viewer.

One of the most powerful pieces is ‘Dad’s Boy Scout Shirt’, the image of a young man’s shirt that belonged to someone now passed away from old age. Delany-Ullman writes that the owner’s time with the boy scouts continued to shape him, even into his adulthood: ‘He painted over wallpaper, built a stair railing without the proper angle, promised to help others, cheerfully, like some kind of MacGyver.’ Living to his boy scout ideals, his kindness (even through his flaws) shows through. His daughter continues to wear it to remember him:

A Scout is Loyal: She wears his shirt because she can’t let go of his smell. A Scout is Clean: When last washed, it lost a patch, began to fray. The more she wears and washes it, the more it falls apart.

The tension between image and poetry is the relationship that the reader recreates between the original owner of the object and the person who has inherited.

The lack of sentiment in the prose, coupled with the isolation of the image, requires us to take a greater part in the creation of meaning. Of course, readers always help to create meaning, but Saved removes many of the elements that would normally lead us one way or another. In that move and others, this becomes an extraordinary project. JMB

Saved: Objects of the Dead by Jody Servon and Lorene Delany-Ullman (Artsuite, 2023; $45)

Poem of the week:

Watching Wild

The whitetail deer unsee the ramps and uneat
them too, so I uneat their grasses. I
hello them pleasantness and goodbye
them later when I go. The deer contemplate
beyond my thoughts, beyond the ideas
of wild leek eaters. The deer do not need.
The deer are wild in all their philosophies.
They create giant Spinosian theses.
I am content to grub the ground and pull
ramp leaves unearthing them. The whitetails watch.
I’m without need for thought. I can just be.
I timed so much of my life in academical
words and words will snatch your tongue and catch
you up, so I will watch deer, pick ramps and eat. JMB

The Little Review No. 3 is making its way to readers across the country, as quickly as our feeble Editor can package the little things (and plod a mile or three on foot to the Post Office with them, carrying a hundred at a time, wrapped up in a bindle over his weary shoulder).

If you have ordered a copy, it should be with you very soon indeed. And if you haven’t ordered a copy – well, what on earth are you waiting for? It’s just £5, for 176 pages of poems, fiction, features, reviews, insolence & triviality – as well as the first instalment of AR’s Dante comic. Get your mitts on it here.

If you find yourself at a loose end on the afternoon of Saturday April 25th, why not visit the Free Verse Poetry Book and Magazine Fair? It’s at St Columba’s Hall (Pont Street, London, SW1X 0BD), from 12 noon until 5pm.The Little Review will be running a stall. Come say hello.

And now, in this week’s frabjous newsletter:

• VM reviews a wonderfully peculiar translation of Boethius

• A plug for another magazine

• A retro-indie childbirth, from PL

Review of the week:

Heroically weird

Having fallen foul of Theodoric, King of the Ostrogoths, Boethius wrote On the Consolation of Philosophy in prison in AD524 while awaiting execution. Arguably more than any other classical text, his work has a close relationship to the development of literary English: it was translated, first, by Alfred the Great; then by Chaucer; and even, in 1593, by Elizabeth I. The Latin lyrics from the volume were once almost as well-known to educated readers as Virgil or Horace. For centuries it was one of the most obvious literary references for any educated person facing a dramatic change in circumstances or unexpected privation.

Peter Glassgold’s strange and provoking book responds as much to this history of translation as it does to the Latin text (which is also included). As he says in a helpful Afterword: ‘I conceived of a verbal music ringing through time, and the idea of a translation in the form of a historical, or diachronic, sound-collage started to take hold’. Glassgold has developed a kind of diachronic poetic idiolect for translating Boethius, which mingles elements of Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, early modern and contemporary usage. He sometimes lifts words or phrases from existing translations, but this isn’t a cento – most of the wording is his own. All the same, the work it reminds me of most is Steve Hanson’s rich and extraordinary A Shaken Bible (Boiler House Press, 2021), which is a kind of complicated cento.

If this sounds a bit daunting as a reading experience, it both is and isn’t. I did a term of Anglo-Saxon more than 20 years ago, but I doubt you need even that to relish the texture of these translations, if you can tolerate not understanding every word. The preface includes a guide to pronouncing one or two potentially unfamiliar characters, such as the letter ‘thorn’ (þ), which makes a ‘th’ sound. There’s a full glossary if you do get stuck, but the ‘difficult’ forms are spread out just enough to carry you along. Here for instance is the start of a poem:

Who serene in settled life
haþ put proud fate underfote
and rihtwis eyeing eyþer fortune
may holde his chere unwon:
neither rage and menace of the sea
uphurling flodwielm fro þe botme;
ne swa oft of forborstenum oftnum wod
Vesuvius uncoils its smoking fires;
nor bolt lightning’s path wont to smyte
heye toures – noght schal not moeue him.

The Anglo-Saxon element changes the feel of the English as a whole, making it markedly more Germanic, and also more inflected. The glossary tells you what form you are looking at – forborstenum, for instance, in the passage above, is the masculine dative form of the past participle of forberstan, meaning ‘to break’.

I admit I was slightly sceptical about this project when the author sent me a copy. It sounded rather self-indulgent, albeit heroically weird. But reading it has largely won me over. It’s not a beautiful translation in the way that the original Latin often is, but it has a beguiling kind of strength. It’s also surprisingly accurate, in a philological sense: the whole thing is printed as a parallel text, with the Latin on the left-hand page. If you have a bit of Latin and are prepared to be patient with the idiolect of the English, these versions are a fairly good guide to the original. The linguistic creativity and subservience to the precise structure and meaning of the Latin is rather moving, and cumulatively, I think, works as a sort of gloss on the Consolation of Philosophy itself, which is nothing if not a meditation on how to find meaning and grace within extraordinary constraints. VM

Boethius. The Poems from On the Consolation of Philosophy. Translated out of the original Latin into diverse historical Englishings diligently collaged by Peter Glassgold. With a forward by Charles Bernstein. (World Poetry Books, 2024; £19.99)

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Friendly Plug:

Running Dog on a ship

We like an unusual little magazine, and Running Dog is both very little and very unusual. The mag is a mix of poetry, fiction, politics, philosophy, and refreshingly irreverent interviews, with a very handsome logo (above), and beautiful typesetting. They are having a launch party for their second issue aboard London’s glorious Theatreship at 7pm on Sunday April 26. More info here.

Poem of the week:

Afterbirth

The corner tower in The Mighty Boosh
Is where it seemed like we stayed, afterwards.
Noel Fielding, the only man on earth
With a 360-degree profile. Even behind
His ear, you could see it.
And how we both loved
His half-brother, Naboo.
Surreal, we kept saying, surreal.
A hotel room, a hot bath, codeine for me,
And both of us trying to understand what
Had just happened. Near-death,
In an airplane over the sea.
The sky was being dressed up
By its goth girlfriends. I was
Winning awards in Wales, bizarre.
Is it a little bit... random? Its fans
Wondered now. No, just the same as ever.
All of the people had doors in their heads.
All of the people had to play everyone.
No idea how we got there, ambulance,
Horse. Like a horse giving birth, I said later.
Down on the floor on all fours, foaling.
It’s better to get actors who haven’t done it before.
Haven’t done that before. Or done anything. PL

If our sundial is working properly, submissions are open for The Little Review for another sixteen hours. Carpe that diem! (But please, please make sure to read the submissions guidelines first. Don’t be a Paul Illidge.)

Meanwhile, TLR No. 3 has arrived from the printers, and is looking splendid in the April sun.

If you would like to read us in print – and why wouldn’t you? – copies are atrociously cheap, at £5. (Or, of course, you could always subscribe, for just £12 a year).

Review of the week:

99% legit

Reading Sheree Mack is that rare thing: a hypertextual experience offline. Any particularly good line leads one straight to Google; and in the old days to a better poem by someone else. As Mack’s work progresses, hypertextuality of this sort has been blissfully superceded by another kind. Now there’s a useful reading list, via dedications, acknowledgements and notes. Consistent, though, is this magpie poet’s tendency to cliché. Reflex googling still gives statistical insight, to see how many hits one gets, say, for ‘insolent sea’ or ‘the work of the devil’.

For all this, her latest volume, Darkling, shows new skill, Mack finding a useful and satisfying rhythm. It has a more blunt approach, employing a campaigning placardism that serves and releases. It doesn’t have the poise of actual reportage like Gwendolyn Brooks, one of its dedicatees, and she can’t write poems long like Brooks, needing instead splurgey prose interludes. Her technical skill with form is most like Brooks when Mack is autobiographical. But that is still the skill with form of one of the great poets of the 20th century.

The agitprop fire of many of these poems is good, the rhythm powerful as the march passes one. This beats her 2015 book Laventille, and is a better overcoming of the writer’s block that her first book, Family Album (2011), seemed to give her. The first book had sestinas of truly exemplary innovation, a great form for allowing the chattiness of her early voice to satisfy acrobatically. They met the requirements of the form without the usual boring classroom air sestinas had when they were everywhere at the time. Mack turned to emulating patisserie-like lyric poems in her second collection, but the political poems in this latest book are a shot in the arm. They actually do shake things up, unlike so many other books from her avowedly ‘radical’ publisher, the now-defunct Smokestack.

When there is borrowing it is acknowledged, nearly always, and particularly good in the opening cento, the collage-like form well-suited to this new iteration of the poet. Mack has always excelled at wide if quick reading, but these new centos are pile-drivers. Without this, so many centos are just an exercise in style; and in all cases only bravura rescues the endeavour. John Ashbery is the one poet who can pull off a pure ‘style cento’, with only a hint of challenging gay subject matter. All else fails. If not by Ashbery, a successful cento must be driven – as Mack’ s political cento is:

Cento for black birds pushing against glass

The first breath comes from early morning blossom.
Rain falls short. Look. The unbuckling sky. Rain.
There’s an old pain. The memory of water keeps
flowing heavy with blood. Bloodhounds catch the scent.
Black bodies packed into boats & the tide still rolling in.
A corpse dangling from the end of a rope. Justice they say.
& they cut off parts for souvenirs. Within these city walls
there is no room for self-love. Grin, keeping grinning
at the camera. My heart catches on fire as it could easily be my story.
My body. Along blood lines, pumped into the centre of the wound,
it’s the body that remembers as tonight this river will receive
a burden like black morels crushed under foot.
Pull the earth on top of her, turn her black face away from
the light. I cannot. But they’ve got the centuries’ old tradition
to fall back on; the rich white man & the Black woman
kept close in the big house always ready to be cracked open.

The line break after ‘keeping grinning’ is fabulous, as it is genuinely part of the rhythm of the two lines coming to that point, and doesn’t lead to a clever-dick double meaning but a sour confrontation with the banality of evil. There is (another good departure for Mack) a note for this poem, at the back of the book. It reads:

This Cento is composed of lines from my poems of mine [sic.] which were themselves partly composed from lines taken from various other creatives. The title is from Lucille Clifton, and other lines are borrowed/ acquired/stolen from James Allen, Kara Walker, Tafisha A Edwards, Ocean Vuong, Nicole Sealey, Billie Holiday, Martha Collins, and Toi Derricotte. There’s also a nod towards the film Monster’s Ball (2021) directed by Marc Forster.

A series of transformations then. A lot of ‘Cento for black birds pushing against glass’ doesn’t come up on Google, but I don’t suspect this transformation of others’ lines is a thing in this new book generally. It is in that way clean, and doesn’t muddle its excellent activism. Mack’s is almost exclusively a knock-out punch of a book.

When there’s a sign of the old wholesale transposition of a complete poem by someone else, it now has an ‘after’ telling you who. It remains problematic (but not mendacious) only in that a wholesale transposition of a lesser-known poem has never been what an ‘after’ poem should be. Wholesale transposition has always been fanfic, but even fanfic can be acceptable. It certainly was in the late 1960s, for the English Intelligencer poets; they effectively took the ‘I, Maximus’ form of Charles Olson, and its geographical minutiae, and wrote what Gael Turnbull teasingly called ‘I Minimus, of West Hartlepool’ poems. What was the result? It led to one reading Olson, rather than depending on one already having read him.

Mack’s wide reading also makes her part of an elite revolutionary group, and one which I hope effects considerable change. But once you put her homage poem to Eve Ewing’s ‘I come from the fire city’ next to the original, you’re tempted to leave Mack’s behind. Why does Mack start with ‘We come from the fire city’ and not even ‘We all come from the fire city’ or ‘My fire city is’? And then just make a list poem like Ewing’s of fire too? Where Ewing is sinister and sinewy and baroque, Mack is hand-me-down in clunky phrasing. Which is not necessarily a bad thing: Mack is (genuinely) inspired by roaring, cleansing fire as a theme, and bluntness of phrase within that image-world mood music is powerful. But she doesn’t pull off Ewing’s crescendo form, and Mack’s would have been better as a prose poem in a second draft using fragments from the junked first draft. With a little nod to ‘after Eve Ewing’.

This new Mack is 99% clean and a bracing read. Sadly there is a 1%, what seems another cento but isn’t announced as one (or credited). But because it’s only a cento, this is merely rude rather than dodgy. Here’s the poem:

5. we were born under a beautiful harvest moon

The evidence is a tumultuous, violent crowd determined to execute and executing a common purpose to attack the police with alarming and very dangerous missiles is too plain to be challenged.

we dance with the flames
our bodies slathered in light
years to come, we’ll be seen
in slow motion, again & again
arms raised, bricks in mid-air
thrown reaching for what was promised.
we are the sea tides juicy with man’o wars
funny how much authority desire has over us
we want to be on the inside, wear the crown
instead, we’re always drowning in the shallows
trying to make something out of nothing
make tenderness towards the backs turned.

When I call this a cento, I’m only really suspicious that ‘slathered with light’ and ‘we are the sea tides juicy with man’o wars’ are repositioned from other people’s writing (surely the latter is from Kyle Dargan’s ‘I was the sea – my tides juicy with kelp’ and the rewrite adds a mixed metaphor and a misplaced apostrophe). I’m next to certain that ‘funny how much authority desire has over us’ is too authoritative for the poet generally on offer in this book, and this for me raises the question: did her publisher not twig at all? Did he actually read the submission, and was he present with the work in anything other than its mood music and imagery? Had he bothered to look for a source of this authoritative line, he would have surely found the first section of ‘On Power’ by Luther Hughes:

I had forgotten how I got there, on my knees, in the motel bathroom. I had forgotten what drove my eyes to gaze and my head to nod, saying what my mouth should’ve known not to. Funny how much authority desire has over the body. How we just move like a puppet, limbs not our own, voice not our own.

In Hughes’s poem, the line fits; in Mack’s, it sounds oddly waffly. If some scholar were to pursue exegesis across her whole oeuvre, ‘funny how much authority desire has over us’ doesn’t typify any undercurrent to the whole. It only fits an undercurrent 99% left behind. It was the old Mack who took on phrases from others’ intimate poems. The originals worked through painful personal material to redemption and peace. Mack took them and shouted them. We should rejoice that the use of Hughes here is the outlier now, and it is Mack’s own voice at the megaphone. The poet who in her first book managed the intimate as whimsy in sestinas then read around in good poems of intimacy for her second book and bowdlerised them in reverse. She has now found a timely, angry voice, mostly public but with effective blunt autobiography too. This gives a good rallying point and achieves her greatest successes with rhythm and form to date. 5 IL

Darkling by Sheree Mack (Smokestack, 2024; £7.99)

Poem of the week:

Idyll III

Sing on, green love, whom harm had missed, moreless,
lost amongst buds & shoots, an inebriation of nature
came up, my dear, with You,
self-centered, yes
but so is almost every tigerish creature
where we pace, in our zoo.

Man’s evil’s others, as throngs his good.
The universe is bursting. Henry too
with his incredible love
approaches his limit, hooded.
Let him out thereof!
This applies to one or another of you.

Danced in my rafters one white crafty mouse
He trapped the traps & pawed the cheese away
My wife shrieked!
I said to her; There’s food for all of us—
and somewhat added, in his hopeless way:
The stairs, delighted, creaked. JB

Read more about this week’s poem here

Spring is sprung, the grass is riz, and submissions for TLR No. 4 will be open until April 11th. A few things currently on our wish-list that we would love to see:

• For the Re-Reading section: a surprising feature about re-reading the complete works of a poet celebrating their centenary this year (options include: Albert Saijo, Elizabeth Jennings, Robert Creeley, Frank O’Hara, Christopher Logue, John Berger)

• For the Arts section: a topical piece about a new film/exhibition/play/musical/etc that in some way interests with poetry (eg Picasso’s handwritten poetry, featured in the current Tate Britain exhibition)

• For the Insolence & Triviality section: sharp and well-observed parodies of living and dead poets; ‘anonymous Oscar ballot’-style confessions from anyone who has recently judged a literary prize; comics poetry; aphorisms; anecdotes about awkward encounters with famous writers

• For the Reviews section: niche works of non-fiction reviewed by an expert, in a lively, witty and approachable way

• For the Poems section: translations of living poets

Otherwise – surprise us! Shock and appall us! Delight us! More information can be found at thelittlereview.co.uk/submit.

Subscribe to TLR in print

The Little Review Autumn Internship

We are looking for an intern to work with us in August and September.

We will, of course, pay the London Living Wage. We may be broke, but we’re not animals.

The work will be very unglamorous.

After completing the internship, however, you will have our permission to wildly exaggerate about your work at the magazine in any future job applications or interviews.

(eg. ‘Oh, I turned down poems by three Nobel Laureates’; ‘That Autumn issue? I basically wrote the whole thing, under a few of my noms de plume.’)

TLR’s editor will happily write letters of reference endorsing any such lies and hailing you as literary publishing’s New Messiah.

Applications will open on May 1: full details on how to apply can be found at thelittlereview.co.uk/intern

Buy TLR No. 3 for just £5

Review of the week:

Small enough to fit

Rebecca Watts’s third collection, The Face in the Well, is a selection of taut little packages of childhood memories, and moments of adult wonder. Deceptively simple language draws you into crispy drawn pictures that superficially appear calm, stable, normal. Look again, and there’s something a little off in the scenes. A slight misalignment to the world as it should be.

Sometimes this is funny, as in ‘Victoriana’, where a family’s grand plan for generations to be buried together is scuppered:

us three boys
have married and moved, no one
visits the cemetery

so the matter
of who should lie with whom
shan’t trouble posterity.

Sometimes this suggests something much more crushing, such as in ‘The Young Comedian Enrols at Clown School’, where a young woman’s expressive gifts are not recognised elsewhere:

there’ll be people
who’ll want to prevent her from shimmering
like moonlight on the sea;

who’ll want to blot out the moon entirely.

Watts is superb at finding and describing spaces where you have to become small enough to fit, as that’s all you’ve been given. When she opens the poems out a bit, that’s when they start to take wing, and make you think: she knows. A simple trick perhaps, but calling a poem ‘Multiverse Valentine’ immediately raises its aim, and adds something deeper and richer to the image painted:

In your lit eyes I see
other candles,
other flames.

Even miniatures need to think big. RD

The Face in the Well by Rebecca Watts (Carcanet, 2025; £11.99)

Poem of the week:

Skin Game

LEEDS is spelled with LSD and two Es – dealer’s joke

Stuck on this poem and my bus in traffic,
I watch a ski-masked kid e-scooter rings
round a clumsy police van. He cuts past,

cool as if on a rink of potholed black ice,
slaloms between this road’s white lines
through ginnels into his own white space.

The van stalls, police call in. I recall kids
saved another dealer bleeding out nearby:
overcut champagne powder got him cut –

high on his supply, thin ice, slippery slope,
all flesh is... Clichés cut poetry like coke
with talc. Black and white this is and isn’t.

Later, I will gather the waste grass leaves
the masked kid dumps in our old quarry,
dry them and skin up a soft new lyric I. ID

The Editor hurried along the muddy lane behind us, in his unsightly cagoule. ‘Well, ye-es,’ he panted. ‘But doesn’t a critic have some basic obligations, too? Getting facts right, putting things in context, quoting accurately, and quoting enough to give a sense of the book’s style, not misspelling the author’s name, and that sort of thing? If a book review told us nothing about the book, it wouldn’t be very useful, would it?’

We waved away these concerns. ‘Usefulness is what we demand from craftspeople, not artists. The critic’s task is a higher one! Would you expect an aria to be useful? Only a callous soul––’ (here a small child crossed our path, selling matches; kicking it out of the way, we continued) ‘––only a callous soul would strait-jacket the artist thus.’

The Editor was unconvinced: ‘But people email me all the time, asking what the best way to review a book for The Little Review is. Surely I should give some kind of advice?’

We demurred. ‘A review can be cool-headed or passionate, scholarly or conversational, measured or glib. Anyone who insists that there is one proper way to review a book – or that certain styles are inappropriate – clearly hates all art, in general, and the art of criticism in particular.’

The Editor frowned at this, but we ploughed on:

‘The health of an art is to be judged by its breadth and variety. When an art is in a healthy state, it grows in several directions. Genres will proliferate, as they do in music. Meanwhile, a narrow range of permitted approaches is a symptom of a minor, dwindling folk craft – like macramé, or British poetry criticism, or dry-stone walling.’

Here, the Editor muttered something about dry-stone walls at least being useful.

Ignoring him, we continued: ‘Look at film criticism. Despite complaints about falling standards, it remains in rude health: it has its scholarly monographs and its Letterboxd haikus, Cahiers du Cinéma and Fangoria, philosophers and vloggers.’

‘But surely,’ the Editor interrupted, ‘these approaches are only worthwhile if they’re done well. There’s no excuse for basic incompetence.’

We laughed. ‘Au contraire! Even an incompetent, wrongheaded or stupid review can have its charm, as a specimen of outsider art. Rock’n’roll has The Shaggs; expressionism has the prison-doodles of Charles Bronson; literary criticism has the writings of Mr –’ (Here, alas, our voice was drowned out by a passing costermonger.) ‘There are an infinite number of ways to write a review – but only one way to write a truly bad review.’

‘What’s that?’ asked the Editor, scribbling a note for later.

‘The only bad review is a dull one.’ TLR

Good evening,

The third issue of The Little Review will very soon be back from the printers. Between its honey-yellow covers, it contains 176 pages of solid gold, including: a wonderfully peculiar new story by CG; a long, hard look at men’s poems about their dads’ dicks; and a truly fiendish literary crossword.

You can pre-order your copy for the alarmingly cheap price of £5.

And now, in this week’s curiously edifying newsletter:

• The life and music of Ligeti, reviewed in rhyming couplets

• Francesca Wade’s Gertrude Stein, reviewed in the style of Gertrude Stein

• Having escaped JH Prynne’s hairdresser, HT buys a plate of ears

Pre-order TLR No. 3

All This Fiddle: Essays on Music

Micropolyphony

Finding himself on a forced march György Ligeti
was not best stocked with occasions for gaiety
but managed to slip away, giving prodigious thanks,
when his column was bisected by a line of tanks.
On the hunt for new sound-worlds he noted piquantly
his radio blocked all but the Soviet frequency.
Visiting Berlin from Hungary with Stasi guards
he managed to throw them off after a few false starts
and emerged onto a railway platform pointing west
only for his resolve to turn at last to dust.
When finally he did get away it was the turn
of the whole world of tonality to crash and burn.
What I like about Ligeti is how I am overwhelmed
by something so turbulent and yet becalmed.
Huge sheets of micropolyphonic torment
hang in the air while anything like a tune lies dormant.
How Boulez, Xenakis, Lutosławski and Nono
gaped and gasped at Atmosphères and Lontano.
In Atmosphères a fifty-nine note cluster enters
pianissimo and consciousness decentres.
Tracing a huge chromatic deliquescent pattern
tremolos rise like gaseous clouds on moons of Saturn.
You think you’re hearing chord progressions grind and grate
when it’s all just one big pentatonic aggregate.
Amid Lontano’s opalescence even less goes on
with all the timbral textures merging into one,
except when a sonic black hole opens up between
the lowest/highest notes on the tuba/violin.
Afaint afar a scrap of Bruckner Eight echoes
and into that vortex the pulsing shimmer flows.
By micropolyphony I mean an infinite weave
of every last thing subdividing like a wave.
I mean patterns that the ear can’t hope to follow,
the bottomless dark well down which we shout ‘hello?’
without expecting a reply from the abyss
it turns out that we occupy, I mean right here, now, this. DW

György Ligeti: Atmosphères, Lontano, in Wien Modern, conducted by Claudio Abbado (Deutsche Grammophon, 1990); György Ligeti: Music of the Imagination by Richard Steinitz (Faber, 2013; £25)

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Review of the week:

Gertrude is G

The Task

Reading Francesca Wade’s Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife. The volume a part of a storm named Floris. The wind and wetlands aftermath. Clean slates. Gertrude is G and Stein is stone and Edinburgh, granite, a signal obstacle. Gertrude is G and this is very good. Other words are g and not so. August come it must the first letter of summer is f. It spells festival with no review in it. A month of oysters reviewing the pearls. A peace. Lit.

A Little Dog Sees Them

Good day, good dog. Treat, a hard sell. Trot, without carapace. Caparisoned with ribbons. Brush that coat. Treats, a hard case. Basket case. Poor and chaste. For in the castle of my fur. The degendered artist. Doggedly. Philosophic. All. The practice of everydog lifting. Must be carried. Here! I ain’t got no don’t got no any. I don’t have any got no. Don’t no. Make a dent in it. A good one. Goodest. Destiny of men of dogs is not dogly is not creature not nature. What is not dog is not good. Dog days. Best life, some in the sun.

I Like the Poems Too

The want is pretence. The want is finding. The want is finding, and a direction. The poem is facing. The poem is about-facing and this way and that is a dress and also a lining. A seam being not a binding. Reading a ripping into the lining. With what. Self. With what satisfaction. Esteem. The finding a seam and a want is about facing. Satisfaction is making a fractional face and on side the reader is keeping. A face. Aside. Found out and found out about, a fine thing. Satisfaction is a find thing. Pretence a want a found out about. A sight and aside a sigh. I see a voice a readerly saying.

Paris

If complexity a city pity complexity a city then a city and lights and a city and flights if a pit a city sans pitié.

At Home

Syntax preferred relaxation or gold. Gold a preference. Gold goal. The market the purchase a prose. The market the market. Rose gold. Syntax a preference fashion flag meaning colour. Colour meaning and also more flag if between acts, wars. A sight inside or beside but always a seated and all ways a prose.

Miss Translation

Destin clandestinité destinataire destainer non taire noun the tear I have an ear for exile I have an air of asile aisle game unpaintability je jeu identity teeth.

Future Past Soldiers

A little language Maréchal Pétain must use a little love un petit discours please police stay stain satin if the south of France sunshine actually east stasis name absence anonymity Alice a list enlist delink unlist stones lilies corpus gloss a little echolalia inter nation. Maréchal Pétain must garden.

Dear Reader

Appreciation. Repudiation. One day. One daisy. Lazy. Easy. Repetition. Petals. Saying. Variation. A stem being and without. Capitulation. A stem being and bloom. Decapitation. Every century appreciation. Revolution an award a worn on. Petals. Lapels. A Bastille daisy.

Indexical

Is ism being ism. Is verisimilitude similarly simultaneously being vermoulue. Is ism wormeaten. Green shoots. Gertrude, ghosted. Green geese. Jouissance. Worms comforts and joys. Adjournment. This day today adjournment being simultaneity, veritably. Yes it is Gertrude. Yes. AVC

Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade (Faber, 2025; £20)

Poem of the week:

A Orella

from Learning My Grandmother’s Language

Teaching English all day, I need to eat. I order ears for lunch. Barman comes over.

Put me some ears. Some ears? Some ears. And wine? And wine.

Sit in a stone-floored square, stone balconies, stone Christ upon stone cross. Four bars around one square, and every bar serves ears.

Slippery-tough an ear. A chewy-slurp of cartilage. And, let’s be frank, the taste is mostly olive oil and salt. My tongue licks paprika, a little garlic.

Orella. Orela. Slip the sound of ‘ear’ and you’ll say ‘border’. The ear’s the borderland of our own body, the riverbank, the smuggler’s route from ‘there’ to ‘here.’

This ridged and valleyed land’s an ear, tilted up and listening.

Barman comes back.

You don’t like ears? You haven’t finished them. Maybe next time you should order tongue. HT

In this week’s fruity cornucopia of a newsletter:

• A look inside our Spring 2026 issue

• An elegant collection of reviewers’ clichés

• SE: ‘no one but your mother will want to buy your art’

What’s in TLR No. 3?

We’re so glad you asked. The very third issue of The Little Review is out on March 31, and available to pre-order now at the alarmingly cheap price of £5. Between its lemon-yellow covers, you will find:

• How to be idle in ancient China

• Camille Ralphs on bad poetry

• Dante, the divine comic strip

• The Little Paris Review

• What happens when The LRB gets groovy

• The strange story of the CIA’s book club

• Taylor Swift meets Sylvia Plath

• The beat of Tony Harrison’s heart

• Laughing nervously with Natalie Shapero

• Pathetic, phallusy: a hard look at Millennial ‘dick lit’

• Hamnet – with extra ham

• The best and worst of Seamus Heaney

Plus new writing by: Ella Frears, Declan Ryan, Kathryn Maris, Camilla Grudova, Jack Nicholls, Victoria Moul, Alex Wong, Godelieve de Bree, David Wheatley, Sarah Fletcher, Simon Ings, Henry St Leger & more. TLR

Buy TLR No.3 in print

Insolence & Triviality:

Searing Honesty

There are few contemporary poets so alive to the liminal spaces of lived experience. Here is a bold new voice, a poet of place, identity, and history’s erasures, attending with a kind of searing honesty to the intricacies and uncertainties of what it means – and doesn’t mean – to be alive in the modern world. There are some fine poems here.

Here is a poetry of:

fierce intelligence
wry, clear-seeing compassion
dazzling virtuosity
luminous detail
untold stories

and devastating moments when lyrical utterance and a probing intelligence collapse the liminal spaces of lived experience. Secret histories tumble across the page like birds: ‘a flurry of transient figures, / gull, goose, starling.’ His is a poetry of

taut, disquieting lyricism
astonishing technical assurance
raw emotion
(dissected with a
wry, probing
fierce
razor-sharp
intelligence)

which is at once tender and searching, timeless and, emphatically, of our time.

Hers is a poetry of sheer verbal joy, of searching, even disquieting, curiosity, and wry observations on quotidian life: by turns playful, indignant, meditative and dazzlingly intimate; radically, brilliantly unconventional in almost every way, and wonderfully self-aware. Always compelling, and often simply virtuosic, she writes with:

uncommon insight and authority
an impressive command of her craft
a ludic, streetwise sophistication
a terse delicacy that is rare in younger poets.

In this startling, uncompromising first collection, we find the steady gaze of an acute poetic eye for what is normally unseen, a rare lyrical ear for what is left unsaid. Heartbreakingly sad and laugh-out-loud funny, often in the same poem (I am thinking especially of the stand-out title poem), equally at home in

trenchant political satire
the intricacies of Japanese folklore
the farther reaches of the Berlin club scene
the back-catalogue of the Beastie Boys
the liminal spaces of lived experience

this consummately assured debut surely announces the arrival of a major new figure. Here is a book to which you will want to return again and again, each time with fresh admiration. He writes with a rollicking insouciance matched only by his dizzying, luminous clarity.

Riffing on scraps of modern consumerist culture, this is a poet whose hard-won intelligence and remarkable authority belie her apparent whimsicality – readers can expect poem after poem of staggering originality:

glinting with violence
timely and elegiac
(but never sentimental)
unflinching, visceral, raw,
sassy and sexy
(and often extremely funny)
astonishingly well crafted
at times literally breathtaking

and wonderfully alert to what it means to be alive in the world. A fresh new voice.

Apology for the foregoing:

Yes, even bugbears such as ‘raw’ and ‘breathtaking’ can be right and judicious sometimes, while ‘luminous’, ‘fierce’, even ‘visceral’, are fine words in this context generally, only suffering, all too often, the sad fate of having bugbeardom thrust upon them. Individual elements are not presented here as necessarily objectionable.

It is in the status of the cliché that the problem resides, and since we all use clichés almost all the time – so that they are, in a sense, humanly sanctified globules of communicative communality, warmed for us by use – obviously it is indecent for anyone to deride or reject them too categorically. But just as we must decide for ourselves what is too categorical, so it is for everyone individually to take a view on the question of when a piece of utterance, or a whole field of utterance, has become too far dominated by cliché, or when the clichés become deadening or hollow instead of expressive.

The pasticcio above is not, as I see it, an attack on each of its items. It is meant as a critical indication of habitual characteristics – and, moreover, of a resultant character of habituality which sometimes seems to settle on the reviewing columns. Dead and dying metaphors, like many dead and dying things, evoke particular unease. But it is not all about metaphor and the inflation of emphatic overstatement, otherwise forgivable or expressive.

Sentence structure and cadence may also be cliché. And at what point does the prevalence of a received habit of expression, a ‘mainstream’ idiolect, become inconsistent with independent and diverse critical thinking? AW

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Poem of the week:

from I Blow Dry My Lashes

I

sometimes there are things in life i can do nothing about
for example a girl
who paints a hitler moustache with her mascara
there’s a waste bin for body parts
for example when you no longer want your hands
sometimes that can happen
then you can get rid of them in the rubbish bin
down where the elder tree leans

my toes look like ET’s finger
phoning home has never really worked for them
which means on the way home not even the nettles
applaud me

II

sometimes there are things in life i can do something about
for example the iron-on bead picture of the christ child
no one but your mother will want to buy your art
for example the cassettes on which i
interview myself i’m three or four
and in full possession of my misgivings

for example the screwy look in the eyes of my first doll
15 years later i still haven’t taken her
to the doctor
and as for separating out the rubbish
into which bin does a doll go
how do you get rid of what you loved
when it no longer works

SE, translated by MC

As we approached the editor’s cell, we could hear it more clearly: a high, keening howl. A clanking of chains. We recognised the particular timbre of that howl. Only one thing makes The Little Review’s editor whimper like that: the poor creature must have been reading emails from Writers.

Two Case Studies

In last week’s newsletter, we explained the difference between writers and (capital W) Writers, and why we abhor the latter. We also explained our NB rule, a hurdle at which many a Writer has fallen:

NB: Any submission that includes poems must include at least one book review per poem. [...] Submissions containing only poems (and no reviews) will not be read, and may not receive a response.

Submissions which ignore the NB rule do not very often receive a response – but occasionally they do, when our editor (softhearted fool that he is) thinks there might have been an honest mistake.

After all, to err is human. What matters is whether we learn from our mistakes.

Since submissions are currently open, this week we offer you two real case studies, illustrating What To Do and What Not To Do if you have sent poems to The Little Review without following the NB rule, either by accident or by design.

In the salutary examples below, two poets make this error. Both receive a reply encouraging them to read our submissions page. Read closely, and you will notice that they respond to this encouragement in subtly different ways.

[The poets’ words appear in italics; our editor’s replies appear in bold. A few minor details have been omitted; these omissions are indicated with square brackets.]

Case Study A: What To Do

[This correspondence is between the editor (TFS) and an individual we will call ‘J–’, to protect the innocent.]

Dear editors,

Please find attached a little poem titled [title] a meditation on the year of the horse, and all the fortune-related traditions that come with Chinese New Year.

Bio: J– is a writer based in [city]. His work has been published in [various magazines]. Follow his Substack @[–]

Kind regards,
J–

~

TFS: Dear J–

Happy new year! Please could you read the magazine’s submission rules?

Best wishes,
TFS

~

Ahhh, yes sorry, I just saw the part about including a review for a book of poems. Please disregard this email. I’ll send another one with a book review later.

Thank you,
J–

~

No worries! It happens all the time. The magazine is actually closed for submissions at the moment, but re-opens in March and April. Perhaps you could re-submit with a review then.

Let me know if you would like to see a list of suggested books for review, or if you need any help sourcing review copies,

Best wishes,
TFS

[J– is bathed in the light of righteousness. Lilies grow where he has trod, and those who walk his path walk in the footsteps of the blessèd​​.]

Case Study B: What Not To Do

[This correspondence is between the editor (TFS) and an individual we will call ‘Paul Illidge’, since that’s his name.]

Greetings:

I’d like to submit this poem for consideration. It’s the shortest in a series of poems written in the spirit and manner of Samuel Beckett.

The poem is one of reminiscence, of love past, faded but not forgotten.

Paul Illidge

My recent work appears or has appeared in [long list of magazines].

~

Dear Paul,

Please could you take a look at The Little Review’s submission requirements?

All the best,
TFS

~

What, that poems should be no more than 20 lines?

Good grief. What a joke.

[The submissions page actually says: “There is no maximum or minimum length for a poem or a review in The Little Review.”]

~

Dear Paul,

It does not say that poems should be no more than 20 lines. Please could you read the submissions page?

All the best,
TFS

~

I’ve read it. Just tell me what you want me to read there. Why be enigmatic?

~

Dear Paul,

I honestly don’t mean to be enigmatic, and surely there’s no enigma; as you’ve read the rules, which are very clear, there’s no need to spell them out again here. We’re on the same page. (Before, I had assumed that you hadn’t read them, given what you chose to send in.)

But since you had read the rules, including the bit in extra-large bold text beside the letters “NB” for added visibility (and the paragraphs below), when you sent in this poem you knew that this particular submission would not be read. You understood why it would not be read, and nonetheless sent it in anyway, which is quite a peculiar thing to choose to do.

I’m very intrigued: why would you send me a poem that you didn’t want me to read?

Best wishes,
TFS

~

Post-graduate degree in creative writing. Wow. How impressive!!!1
Pretension, thy name is [TFS].
Where I live we call people like you “losers.”

~

You didn’t actually read the rules, did you?

~

This is the quality of journal my work appears in . . . [hyperlink to a dull magazine]

~

Oh! That’s a pity, but don’t be too depressed about it. With luck and perseverance, your work might appear in better journals in future. When you’re submitting to them, perhaps try sending in work that meets their submission requirements? You’ll be amazed at how much it helps.

Fondest and warmest regards,
TFS

~

Wow. Not getting enough dick
up your dirt shoot?
I guess that’s why you’re so obsessed with
“submission” requirements.
Shall I send you a photo of my dick?
You could send me one of yours.
We could fantasize about sucking each other.
I’d love that!!
Unlike you, I have no submission requirements.
Mm--mmm.

~

TFS was confused by this final email; it did not appear to follow from the prior conversation. There were mid-sentence line-breaks. Was it meant to be verse? Puzzled by the non-sequitur, and unsure whether a reply was needed, he naturally passed it on to us for a second opinion.

While our editor might have been slow on the uptake, we recognised this missive instantly for what it was: a Lonely Hearts ad, intended for our Letters section.

Accordingly, it has been printed in TLR No. 3’s letters pages under the headline ‘O Romeo, Romeo’. Following Mr Illidge’s example, we did a little biographical research. To help pad out his advertisement and make it more appealing, we took the liberty of adding this postscript:

Now in his seventies, Mr Illidge has published several ‘translations’ of Shakespeare’s plays into modern English, including Romeo and Juliet, having previously co-written the screenplay for a straight-to-video thriller, Head On (1980). Any readers who would like to take up this lonely old gentleman on his polite offer of a photograph are invited to write to him care of his publishers, the World Encounter Institute, a right-wing think tank based in Nashville, Tennessee.

(We did not mention Mr Illidge’s post-graduate degree, for fear of disgusting any potential suitors. Some things, after all, are best kept private.)

Our editor was surprised to learn we had printed this ad. He asked, with a furrowed brow, whether we were quite certain Mr Illidge would be happy to see it published.

But, of course, our Romeo had already given his blessing: the word ‘QUERY’ was absent from the subject line of his email. And on TLR’s submissions page – which Mr Illidge assures us he has read – it says very clearly:

We assume all correspondence is intended for publication, unless the word QUERY appears in the subject line.

~

So, those were our case studies. There is much more colourful correspondence in the Letters pages of TLR No. 3 (out on March 31). That issue is now available for pre-order, priced at an inflation-defying £5. Get your copy here.

In next week’s newsletter: we reveal the contents and covers for TLR No. 3. TLR

Order TLR No. 3 for £5

~

Review of the week:

Fleur’s pas mal

In 1986, I had dinner with a reviewer who had, he said, just written a stinger about Fleur Adcock’s latest. We had a mild spat. I was guilty of introducing the word valuable into the conversation. And I didn’t mean it merely as an acknowledgment of the renewal of language and thought that belongs to all good poetry. No, I was claiming that Adcock’s peculiar fusion of skill and sensibility gave access to things often lost to the dinginess that settles on the everyday.

Naturally, when her Collected Poems was published to coincide with Adcock’s 90th birthday, I turned straight to the 1986 volume, The Incident Book, to see – yes, to see if my judgment of almost 40 years ago held up but, more, in the hope of finding a trove of poetry that would transform non-existence into experience. And there it was.

So how does Adcock infiltrate the areas between events so as to make them newly perceptible? Well, she manages to talk in an ordinary tone of voice about moments so fugitive that most of us would not be able to handle them unheightened. ‘The Bedroom Window’, for example, describes a passing gaze from a house which the speaker is minding. Its last sentence (a significant word: Adcock’s conventional syntax counterpoints her lineation) ends with ‘from’ – a hanging preposition such as we rarely see so placed in poetry not self-consciously demotic. It leaves the speaker poised between her deep past and the drop upon it of a curtain.

Adcock, who died in 2024, had a good way with lists. Totting up what goes to make ‘the genius of Surrey,’ she writes, ‘Woods and shops and houses, / churches, allotments, pubs and schools / and loonie-bins were all we had.’ She does not baulk at the comedy of the grim: sailors prepared to kill themselves speak of ‘choosing to fall on friendly steel / and squirt our souls into the heavens’. And she plunges enthusiastically into impersonation: ‘his eyes glowing like that / as if he had invented the guitar’ captures all the sarky ill humour of an overlooked adolescent.

The form of her poems is always in service to their sense, as when one poem’s metrical rhyming couplets lead up to the plangency of ‘I want my mother, not her chiffonier’. The cream of this volume is ‘On the Land’, its unrhymed quatrains developing a viscerally powerful story into a claim of parallelism between men’s and women’s experiences in the First World War. That she makes this large claim stick says much for her ability to shine extraordinary light on ordinary life. CD

Collected Poems by Fleur Adcock (Bloodaxe, 2024; £25)

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Poem of the week:

Three Epigrams and a Song of Despair

Walk around, all your life,
full of red paint.
Paint, and painted Cheerios,
each with its complaint.

Walk around, all your life,
dishes in your guts.
Cups a-rinsing with the plates
and chipping where they touch.

~

Montana aspen:
sizzle of leaves,
where only the spangle
our sense deceives.

Where only the sequins’
distortion hissed:
TV on a channel
that doesn’t exist.

~

I have walked barefoot in the graveyard
where my own bones are to lie.
And the grass will need cutting, like today.
But the grass will be me.

~

Song

The upside down of treble,
reverse of déjà vu.
How is it that the pebble
gets in the running shoe?

How is it that the bubble
gets into the champagne?

And why must there be stubble
as hard as sugar cane?

The harder that they come, Sir,
the bigger is their fault.
A typical merganser
knows sugar cane from salt –

knows how to judge the talk
and how to turn the screw.
How does the little rock
get in the running shoe? AM

~

The Little Review opened for submissions on Sunday. By 4pm of that same Sunday, an elderly Shakespearean from Canada had offered to send us a photo of his penis. (There will be more about this charming man in next week’s newsletter.)

Before we receive any more such billets-doux, it feels like a good moment to share the editorial from Issue No. 2, which explains how submissions to this magazine work – and why we reject every single Writer.

Editorial:

We dislike Writers. We like Readers.

People often ask us questions: Where did you get that hat? Do you have the time? Is this the way to Monte Carlo?1 There is one question we are asked almost daily: Why do you have such a peculiar rule about poems? The question refers to what we call the NB rule (it appears in bold beside the letters ‘NB’ on our website). The NB rule has won The Little Review compliments in some quarters and caused gnashing of teeth in others. The NB rule – which we will explain soon – was born out of conversations with wan and woebegone editors of poetry magazines. (We are not a poetry magazine. We are an interesting magazine, one that just happens to be about poetry.) These editors had a shared predicament: they were drowning – they all used the word drowning – in submissions of poems, more than they could possibly read and judge fairly.

Many of the poems were sent in by people who had never read their magazines, or had never read any magazine, or had never read anything. Many of the poems were terrible. Some magazines try to ameliorate this problem with ‘sifters’: an army of un- or ill-paid interns, enlisted to dredge the slush-pile so that the editor need only read the ‘best’ work. The result is that the majority of work sent to the magazine is not read by the person who claims to edit it. We find this idea unappealing. Our editor reads every submission we receive, and replies to them all – all, that is, except those that break the NB rule. We might regret his taste (we often do) but it is his.2

Other magazines have tried to stem the tide of poems with submission fees, arguing that making people pay is the best solution to a terribly difficult situation. We disagree, but the fee-chargers are allowed their point of view; we would never wish to speak ill of any of those avaricious, grasping bastards.

But the most anguished editors, the ones whose magazines publish book reviews as well as poems, faced a second problem: they struggled to drum up many reviews at all. They would sigh to us that, while a great many people were writing books, it seemed that very few were actually reading them.

These two problems were connected: the editors were plagued with Writers, when they wanted Readers. We have met Writers. We dislike them. The Little Review is not a magazine for Writers. We are a magazine for Readers.

By Writers (capital W) we refer specifically to those people who write stories or poems but never read them. They are legion. Many have published books. Nobody really enjoys a book by a Writer; there is nothing to enjoy (imagine a record by a musician who has never listened to music). Like conversationalists who only speak and never listen, they are bores.

The writers whose work we enjoy are not Writers. They are Readers – interesting, interested people who naturally spend more time reading than writing. Why wouldn’t they? Life is short, and they are hungry for pleasure. They want to experience the very best of an art form that they love.

There are magazines that exist purely for Writers. Some have hundreds of subscribers. Nobody reads them. They are not for reading: they are for Being In. Their subscribers scan the list of contributors, but leave the rest largely unread. We recently heard a poet complain that one such magazine in a distant country was closing down. The poet’s friends were all very sad about this. They all wanted to Be In the magazine. None of them read it for pleasure, though occasionally one might flick through it and study a few poems, looking for clues about the kind of work that might Get In.

Considering these two problems – the deluge of poems; the dearth of decent book reviews – we invented the NB rule:

NB: If you would like to send poems to The Little Review, you may send as many as you like, of any length, so long as every poem is accompanied by at least one book review. (Do not review your own book. Yes, Walt Whitman did it. No, you are not Walt Whitman.) Submissions that include more reviews than poems are gratefully received. Submissions that include fewer reviews than poems will not be read, and might not receive a reply.

This has, at a stroke, solved both problems. We receive very few submissions from Writers, while the submissions we receive from Readers tend to be excellent: witty, surprising, passionate. Though we consider the poems and reviews separately when weighing up submissions, one can inform the other; we find that understanding a reviewer’s tastes, views and influences can help us to better appreciate their own poems. Reviews inspired by the NB rule have introduced us to countless good books that would otherwise have slipped our notice.

Some of the most entertaining and insightful come from Readers who have never written a book review for a magazine before, and so, in their innocence, actually say what they think.

NB does not stand for nota bene. It stands for No Bores.

Subscribe in print for just £12 a year

~

So, that was the editorial. If it hasn’t put you off entirely: The Little Review is open for submissions until April 11. If you are interested in writing for us, do please read the submissions guidelines carefully, and to find more about the kinds of features, reviews and poems we’re looking for, visit our Tips page.

Poem of the week:

Fragment of Pottery Decorated with a Human Face

Evidence says seagrasses evolved from red and green algae
into ferns and great conifers before something like nostalgia

drew them back to the sea-bottom via sugar cane, bamboo,
and major grains like rices. Don’t quote me here – this is loose

where looseness is, at worst, innocuous as a mushroom
that only acts toxic, while at best it offers brief freedom

from the quadrille of the strictly factual, letting language
and idea off the leash a little in the interest of play, which

we know to be fundamental to the development of skillsets
necessary for the biocultural success of the individual. Yet,

elsewhere, in milieux where attendees expect accuracy
if not exactitude, looseness greases the pole the osprey

roost on, and pours a wilful gravy over everything on the plate,
masking hazmat and gristle. Too much of it one night

after earfuls of shambolic bombast from associates born ready
to warp daylight in their favour, I was the lone attendee

at my sad afterparty, isolato of the walk-in wonder cabinet
yards away, where a piece, and by ‘piece’ I mean fragment,

of pottery called to me – triangular; big as a slice of apple
pie cut for a hungry uncle, but small as the rack in the table-

top pool table he’d give you for Christmas; heavy in the way
old stoneware always is; its insides coarse and speckled grey,

dense, cold; the gentle curve of its part suggesting the whole
had been a jug. Loath to bring pie back up, but an ornamental

relief resembling piecrust must have run along the vessel’s
width because a strip of it remains, damaged but incontestable

along the top of the inverted triangle, under which a rustic
human face in black and green on the left, green and black

on the right, looks out, eyes widened at the viewer not to give
but to be received, eyebrows angled like the accents in élèves

to check her students. She is prototype of Virginia Woolf
in her fur-collared coat, cheek in hand as in the photograph

used in US ads for To the Lighthouse, whose Mrs Ramsay
feels herself hurled outward from the eddy of human activity

and meaning-making in the middle of a dinner party, drifting
off into the vague echoic bourgeois sea inside her. It’s a thing

you have to fight privately, even if it almost always happens
in the presence of others, although the meaning of presence

has come to contradict itself, and the rhetorical choreography of
power can drown you from a world away, like Prokofiev

in a scherzo. And while what Mrs Ramsay grieves is her role
as conductor of the socio-affective lives of others and the toll

it takes on her, mostly because her labour tends to go unnoticed
and, although she’d never say this, the fruits of her own harvest

don’t belong to her, the queasy robotics these conditions induce
and depend on – plus the chill of powerlessness felt in the face

of their inoperability, given how enmeshed they are in basically
everything – aren’t too far from sweating it out in life’s galley

while all my so-called shipmates fatten on the crème anglaise
I can’t even get myself to spit in. But if a potsherd can empathise,

this one can. She has outlasted tyrants’ speeches, felt the bejesus
they squeeze out from the organs of appetite that keep us

running like a business. She has substance adequate to prop
open doors for those who push past her and forget by the pop

of their indifferent cava. She can give you notes on proceeding
as a fraction of what you had once felt capable of being

and you can turn her over, the vegetal green of her face bright-
ening on the flipside to the shade of it when low angular sunlight

passes through nostalgic seagrass. I’ve seen a lot of it of late, floating
fat on my back in the Atlantic all October, awaiting the sting

of jellyfish and shark bites, eelily wigged out by the bounty
of its weeds at first, then easing into it, sensing them want me

there – a welcome to the ecosystem, their wavy blades along
the length of me like lashes and the pleasantly abrasive tongue

of sand a gangplank into an ambience that doesn’t have to try,
it just does. The ocean laughs at definition; it doesn’t signify,

hypothesise, hoodwink or prevaricate; no stakeholder profits from
my being in it yet – but like a housekey in the thunderstorm

of history, I feel it in the air tonight. Brute mechanic demands
inflicted on many by a market economy necessitate reassurance

that we’re more than just numb functionary cogs or fungible
appendages to the gross computational body of the ultrarich.

What this looks like can get ugly, so you have to figure
out how to organize your ugly lest uncle stub his cigar

out on your fontal cortex and do it for you. It can’t be play when
it drops like this. Not when power powers its sick heaven

on juice cold-pressed from modest paychecks. Make money
while you sleep they say but mostly we lose sleep over money

we can’t make or keep long enough to feel any safer than a
cartoon egg on a wall or a primogenitor lost in the savannah

diorama of living hand-to-mouth as herds of opulence or cottage-
core reindeer phantasmologically stamp their wattage-

crazed images where uncle’s spent cigar has left a scar that looks
for all the world like a red corpuscle, a plate of pancakes,

a wildfire via camera drone, and fading bands of ice around
old mopey Saturn, first observed in 1610, but from the end

of a wooden telescope in Padua that summer, Galileo thought
they looked less like rings than a pair of ears. There’s no right

or left ear indicated on what’s left of what you were once anymore
but you’re better off without – this news cycle like an uproar

aboard a sinking ship, the hull of it torn open on the 9/10ths
of resentment our captain forgot to provide for in the maths

now the workforce lies underwater while the rich are safe indoors
in waterfront resorts I’m asked to in the idiom of credit offers

I tear to pieces to spare myself the mistake of considering.
I crawl the outskirts of comfort instead and smell everything

on the dinner menu. I admire the vein-blue bubbles of favour
the rich inhabit like a klatch of backslapping gerbils. I endeavour

to aspire. I spark up an umpteenth novena with the intention
of a clearer vision of my place in time, and in its inwit, heaven

takes me back to the sea! Here I’ll tell a story I never told
anyone. I walked too far along the shore one day as a child

and found a beach covered in a thousand tiny fiddler crabs.
They held their one weird claw to the sky like they were mad

as hell at being made. When a wave came in, they would all
skitter backwards into a thousand holes in the sand, one hole

per crab. When the wave receded, they would then manoeuvre
their bodies back out of their holes and into the bright salt air.

Next, they ran (a few at first, now dozens; hundreds) down
in the direction of the sea – defiant, proud; like a battalion

into battle; but when a new wave followed, they would skitter
back into their holes. This went on for as long as I remember –

hole to shoreline; shoreline to hole – till I felt I could hear it,
their movement, their seething made of time and its desperate

little clicks – while the sea pushed on, its own sound a seething;
and they said to be one or the other, but I wanted to be nothing. TD

A very short newsletter this week – we blame the icy weather; our fingers are too numb to type; the fire is flickering and dying in our little stove; we are running out of copies of The Collected Sacheverell Sitwell to burn – but a short newsletter that nonetheless contains two real treasures. Inside:

• When is a book like a gin glass?

• MJS defies the conspiracy theorists

Best regards,
TLR

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Review of the week:

Chic

I have spent a lot of time staring at gin glasses. Working for a homewares brand, in a shop stuffed with alluring products, they were uniquely transporting. I had a dream: to pinch one of them by a stem, gold or sage green; the hour dim, the light refracting; in a black dress, with company. One sip and I could grab at the past like a god; I would have an appetite big enough for the present; the future, bothersome and demanding, would release me.

Francofilaments reminds me of those gin glasses. Eileen G’Sell’s second collection is a woozy promise: chemical, pleasing. A promise oxygenated by France, feminism and cinema. Glamour is bronzed by a certain grubbiness. In ‘Morning Sex’, the speaker tells us ‘It’s true I held your hand like a man. Your fridge, clean as alien spacecraft, makes me want to mess your mattress.’ Scenes approach seediness without quite touching it, because the poet’s speakers are too brave, or too beautiful, to really suffer.

There are glasses – of wine, of Perrier – and there are olives, but the main course isn’t food, or fashion, or even politics. What is intended to satisfy, in this collection, is the aura of a French film star. Poems are named after Adèle Exarchopoulos, Marion Cotillard, Jean Seberg. Exarchopoulos is:

So many O’s in a name
so hungry for the apocalypse
thunderstorm mouth empty
bottle of blue mascara.

It has the sensationalism of a trailer, while capturing the yearning of our most sincere film-makers, desperate to record life at its richest. Filmmaking can become a struggle to get – and keep – our attention. G’Sell lets us know it; she lets the reader think they got there on their own. Francofilaments reminds us that watching with enough care and precision not only ennobles the subject: it ennobles us. ‘Claire de Lune’ begins:

I’ve been alive a long time, a tongued lime
in August, a soft rhyme floating
down the tenth arrondissement. I am
a Fontainebleau moth, white as death

Film turns us all into watchers, but you don’t need to be a poet like G’Sell to watch, beautifully. SGB

Francofilaments by Eileen G’Sell (Broken Sleep, 2024; £12.99)

Poem of the week:

The Superseded Model

With relief it passed from living memory,
crossed the rubicon into the great slush of history.
Our children’s children are entertained to learn
that their great-great-grandsomebody believed –
swam in the water of that collective faith –
in those improbable-sounding physics. Those
as it turned out impossible physics. That we
as a species might have thought it plausible
that the ground beneath our feet was turning
over and over itself, like a combustion engine,
like a clod of earth kicked from the divot
of the penalty box, that we were scattering our dirt
in a comet trail across the page of space –
ha, ha! Oh yes – you see them in the dark
corners of the internet, spouting their rubbish,
hawking screenprint T-shirts – tWHYlite; I’m A Sundowner,
Why Aren’t YOU?; or Nighty-Night and their motif, a christingle
half-peeled, under a terrarium cloche... Like the moon
landing, it was taped, of course, still spooling
now from digital newsreel in every open palm –
the moment the panel was opened, revealing
in all its devastating simplicity the device
we must’ve known was there all along. MJS

In this week’s multifarious newsletter:

• In Some Untidy Spot (our occasional series on art and artists), we take a long, hard look at the erotic magic of Ithell Colquhoun

• Tackling 5,000 years of patriarchy – with a little help from Anne Carson

• A dicey new poem by AAP

If you enjoy The Little Review, and have been vaguely meaning to subscribe – well, it’s only £12 for a full year of print magazines. What are you waiting for?

Don’t let ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would,’ like the poor cat in the adage. Seize the day and click this shiny button:

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Some Untidy Spot:

Occult Condoms

Magicians do not welcome ridicule. The 19th-century mage Éliphas Lévi warned any readers who might scoff at his ‘transcendental science’ that ‘you will endeavour to laugh at it, and will only gnash your teeth.’ But when, in occult circles, are we permitted to laugh? This question must bother readers of Ithell Colquhoun (1906-88) – the occultist, poet and surrealist whose magnificently odd paintings have been the subject of a revelatory recent Tate exhibition – because she seems to have had highly evolved antennae for precisely the kind of silliness one would imagine to be anathema to magic.

She was, without doubt, serious about magic – by which we mean the belief that there is an unseen world of forces, which we can apprehend if only we tune in correctly. She spent decades trying to join a series of magical groups, from MacGregor Mathers’s Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and its dissident offshoot the Society of the Inner Light, to the Ordo Templi Orientis, the New Isis Lodge, the Order of the Keltic Cross and the Order of the Pyramid and Sphinx.

Her paintings were cerebral attempts to plumb the spirit world. She seized on André Breton’s claim in his 1924 surrealist manifesto that automatism – creating images by chance, then interpreting them as a window onto the unconscious – was ‘the fundamental procedure of surrealism’, but she took it further into occult territory, aligning her experimental methods of creating automatic images with the alchemical elements: ‘fire’ was fumage (smoke pictures), ‘earth’ was decalcomania (paint-covered surfaces pressed together then peeled apart), ‘water’ was écrémage and parsemage (mopping pigment off the surface of water), ‘air’ was the puffing of coloured powder onto a surface.

For her, it was the cosmos speaking through these automatic marks. ‘I feel these stains to have a “mantic” or divinatory quality, which may in some sort be compared with the practices of clairvoyants, who use ink-splashes, sand, pins flung together by chance, and the irregular patterns left by tea leaves and coffee grounds to release the contents of the unconscious,’ she wrote.

Colquhoun created a deck of ‘Taro’ (now handsomely reproduced in a set of Tate postcards) in which each card’s meaning is represented by a coalescence of vividly coloured dribbles of enamel paint. Abandoning the traditional Tarot deck’s major figures (The Fool, The Hermit etc), she invented her own: one shows ‘The Lord of the Winds and the Breezes, The King of the Spirits of Air’, a red-and-yellow swirl on green. She wrote abstruse articles on the Golden Dawn’s hermetic colour theories. She adopted a magical name, Splendidior Vitro. In Brittany she was known as Druidesse Boudica.

And it was magic that led her to be banished from the British Surrealist Group. She had joined in 1939, but the group’s doggedly atheistical leader Édouard Mesens expelled her the following year over her refusal to renounce her occult beliefs.

When Colquhoun and her Russian-Italian husband Toni del Renzio (a fellow painter, also exiled from the group) held their own surrealist poetry evening, Mesens ‘reacted violently’, as Desmond Morris relates in The British Surrealists:

He gathered together a gang of loyal friends and they attended the poetry reading, armed with rotten eggs. They began by demanding that a letter of protest be read out to the audience by Ithell. When this was refused, they started to hurl their rotten eggs at the platform, where Ithell and Toni had to take refuge behind a grand piano. After about half an hour of this bombardment, most of the audience had left and the meeting had to be abandoned.

Morris believes Mesens’s rage was, in large part, the sexual frustration of a ‘twice-scorned lover’: his romantic overtures to both Ithell and Toni had been rebuffed.

Given all the above, we can feel confident that Colquhoun was serious about magic. So why, in her writing, does she mate the sublime with the ridiculous? Take her most famous book, The Living Stones: Cornwall, which begins with a deeply felt hymn to the Lamorna valley – ‘Influences, essences, presences, whatever is here… I salute you; I share this place with you. Stirrings of life, expanding spores, limbo of germination, for all you give me, I offer thanks. Oh, rooted here without time I bathe in you; genius of the fern-loved gully, do not molest me, and may you remain for ever unmolested’ – then proceeds to relate her quest to purchase an outdoor chemical lavatory, called an Elsan, from a neighbour who cheerfully confides: ‘I’m just a nun. I was in a convent for over thirty years, and I’ve no idea of the value of anything.’

Magical matters, and – even more daringly – their less-than-perfect dependability, are all grist to her comic mill. When she visits the Men-an-Tol, the pierced granite disc memorably described in DM Thomas’s poem ‘Penwith’ as ‘the wind’s vagina’, she records that she ‘crawled from east to west through the ring-like stone set on edge in the centre of this monument as a cure for rheumatism and was disappointed with the result, not knowing that in order to be effective the rite should be performed in a state of nudity.’

This is the voice of a brisk, no-nonsense daughter of empire, born in India and educated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College. For one so spiritual Colquhoun remained remarkably practical-minded, even actively allergic to uncritical woo. Pondering the fetish for ‘the simple life’, she wonders whether it really is simple, ‘when all water has to be carried, the lavatory is a long way down a spooky corridor and the only warmth comes from hot bottles? Is an earth-closet in the garden that has to be emptied periodically really simpler than main drainage?’ She adds that hippie girls in communes must find out the hard way that ‘to keep even relatively warm, clean and fed in primitive conditions is more difficult than in “squarer” surroundings.’

One senses she is not easily hoodwinked. Yet here she is, in full magical flight, in a stanza from her ‘Ode to the Philosophical Mercury’:

December ‘E’ Electra
essence white essence Euphrates|
Eve Fada Favonius
foundation of art diamond lime
precious stone of Givinis white gum
hermaphrodite hoe hypostase
hyle enemy insipid milk
known stone mineral stone unique stone
moon full moon white magnesia
alum mother menstrum
unique matter of metals preparatory mean
setting mercury oil oleum-vivum
vegetable egg phlegm

And so it goes on, a propulsive and hypnotic ‘celebration of the richness of alchemical language,’ as Colquhoun’s biographer Dr Richard Shillitoe puts it. This is a poet drunk on occult dialect, and the moments of apparent bathos, the ‘vegetable egg phlegm’, do not puncture the mood when it is remembered that ‘the philosophical mercury’ is, in alchemy, the female principle. What more concise evocation of the mysteries of the female innards could there be than ‘vegetable egg phlegm’?

And yet, in the same collection, Osmazone, there are pieces that seem to intrude like a whoopee cushion on our attempt to cultivate the reverent, ritual frame of mind that ‘Ode to the Philosophical Mercury’ demands. These intrusions include a prose piece about enemas at Champney’s weight loss spa, a piece of doggerel about the anus (‘it can only speak / when there’s something to say / and then it gives voice / to the belly’s mind’), and an objet trouvé poem about types of condom (‘featherlite fiesta / french tickler / Extrasafe Unison / Long Love Delay…’).

This is no longer the world of the tesseract, the grimoire, and assiduous thumbing of Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie. This is the world of sniggering schoolboys and prophylactic wrappers trodden into the mud. Does the second world destroy the first? To return to our original question, are we permitted to laugh?

What is bad for magic may be good for surrealism. The anus doggerel may be part of the hordes of mischievous words that ‘Dada and Surrealism set about to let loose as though opening a Pandora’s box,’ as Breton put it in his second surrealist manifesto (1929). Awkwardness is the aim of the game.

Perhaps Colquhoun, in injecting small doses of mundanity, grubbiness and humour into her poetry, was fortifying her more rarefied magical material as if with a vaccine, showing within Osmazone that these two worlds could co-exist; that alchemy had a place in the Britain of ringroads and condoms. She is pre-emptively getting in on the joke. ‘In a world where everything is ridiculous, nothing can be ridiculed,’ as GK Chesterton put it. ‘You cannot unmask a mask.’ 5 IM

Ithell Colquhoun: Between Worlds (Tate St Ives, February 1 to May 5, 2025; Tate Britain, June 13 to October 19, 2025)

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Review of the week:

Numpties

Most people seem convinced that patriarchy has always prevailed, that men have always ruled the roost from bedroom to boardroom, mansplaining their way between the two. Sure, patriarchy has had a good run over the last 5,000 years, but scholars such as Marija Gimbutas, Elizabeth Gould Davis and Chris Knight suggest the previous 200,000 (that lengthy period cunningly dismissed as prehistory) were conducted along much more egalitarian lines. Remnants of matriarchal cultures persist even now – besides neolithic artefacts, there are ancient culinary practices, rare matrilineal customs, Mother’s Day, and the Catholic church’s Madonna cult. But matriarchies that cherished the arts and the common good were destroyed by the advent of metallurgy and, in consequence, the delight in weaponry. In place of creativity we got macho bombast and a suicidal campaign against nature itself.

Men so effectively seized power that they can no longer even conceive of female worth. They can’t hear us. Barbara McClintock’s crucial discovery in 1950 of ‘jumping genes’ was completely ignored for 30 years. Acknowledgement of her work only came when a man found similar evidence that genes mutate. The biologist Rachel Carson, too, told everybody to stop wrecking the environment 60 years ago. Nobody listened. It’s like talking to a brick wall.

In Our Blood (1976), Andrea Dworkin recalled the shock of being censured by her publishers for the forthrightness of her writing. ‘I had been brought up in an almost exclusively male tradition of literature, and that tradition, whatever its faults, did not teach coyness or fear: the writers I admired were blunt and not particularly polite. I did not understand that – even as a writer – I was supposed to be delicate, fragile, intuitive, personal, introspective.’ Nobody was ready for Dworkin. My mother Mary Ellmann’s book, Thinking About Women (1968), exposes a similar strain of difficulty exhibited by male literary critics, who assume only male writers can speak commandingly, with thrust, authority and aplomb, while women writers produce soft, sloppy, slippery, disorderly, passive, unfocussed stuff, in accordance with the supposed characteristics of female anatomy. This confusion of female writing with women’s bodies, she writes, reduces the critical appraisal of women’s literary contributions to ‘an intellectual measuring of bust and hips’. But these days, men don’t even read women’s writing. They find it dull, flimsy, timid, unexciting, irrelevant to their lives, or (the numpties) emasculating.

An aversion to listening to women – an abhorrence of what women have to say and how we say it – is so built into the patriarchal system that it’s become vital to the retention of male rule. Men want us to behave like grass, screaming silently as we’re mown. It has serious consequences: think how rarely rape victims get heard.

The Canadian poet Anne Carson’s witty, deft essay The Gender of Sound (first published in 1992 and gratefully received again now) shows the ways the words and voices of women have been denigrated and placed apart from those of men since ancient times. A classicist and word-collector, Carson walks us through the creaky moves of an age-old oppression, starting with know-it-alls like Aristotle and circling nimbly back through Greek mythology, as she pinpoints the coagulation of many unhelpful ideas. Luckily for the non-classicist, the carefully chosen references to ancient Greek terms are entrancing rather than alienating.

Ingrained misogyny allies the Ancients with the modern era of patriarchy. The Greeks and Romans attacked women’s utterances for both form and content, Carson reports, and often mixed up the two. It was not just the quality of the voice (too high-pitched, too chatty) that so bugged these guys, but the things women said (too subversive, too angry, too jokey, too obscene). They seem to have been affronted that women spoke at all, and longed for silence. ‘Greek women of the archaic and classical periods were not encouraged to pour forth unregulated cries of any kind within the civic space of the polis [city] or within earshot of men.’ It sounds eerily close to the way things are going in Afghanistan today where, among other oppressive edicts, women’s speech and singing in public are banned.

For the Greeks and Romans, objectionable female voices were handily exemplified by a wide array of cantankerous mythic figures, from the Gorgon, known for her guttural howls, to the shrieking of the Furies, the fatally seductive tones of the Sirens, the babblings of Kassandra, the verbal incontinence of Iambe (who kindly gave us iambic pentameter!) and Echo, ‘the girl with no door on her mouth’. Women made Aristotle uncomfortable. In Metaphysics, he cites ‘The Pythagorean Table of Opposites’, in which formlessness and evil are associated with the female, and honesty, goodness, rationality and stability with the male. Men are never slow to pat themselves on the back. The Greeks viewed women as savages in need of the ‘civilising hand of man’. Ah yes, that great big civilizing hand. Tiberius’ groping digits, perhaps? The civilizing hand of Genghis Khan, Henry VIII, Adolf Hitler? Or is it Trump’s bruised hand we think of, caked in concealer as he signs yet another sadistic presidential decree?

For thousands of years men seem to have lived, or imagined themselves to live, in terror of the female voice, poor ducks. It was the thing about women that was most out of men’s control, and therefore undermined patriarchy. Carson writes that ‘the women of classical literature are a species given to disorderly and uncontrolled outflows of sound… shrieking, wailing, sobbing, shrill lament, loud laughter, screams of pain or of pleasure and eruptions of raw emotion’ – the oral equivalent of menstruation, that process so perturbing to men that it has been vilified as a curse. (See 1978’s The Wise Wound by Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove for a more generous approach to this bodily function.) The wistful notion behind men’s womanfright, one assumes, is that life would be much more quiet and peaceful without women around. The basis of male clubs and steam baths, this sweet, innocent view of male chumminess and benevolence got even less persuasive after Oppenheimer unleashed the atom bomb.

Just as the cervix closes up after impregnation, a closed female mouth has long been applauded as a sign of decorum. (Could this be why my elementary school gym teacher in Illinois used to yell at us all for panting? But we were hot!) The Greeks decided women have two mouths, seeing them as very leaky vessels, likely to pour forth at either end. Carson describes fourth century BC terracotta statues that depict women as merely two mouths ‘welded together into an inarticulate body mass’ with the vagina at the top and the face at the bottom. Made interchangeable, both of these mouths become monstrous, ferocious as a vagina dentata or Sheela-na-gig.

The oppressor knows he’s never quite secure in his paradise, his man-cave built on slavery, because whatever you try to repress will out in the end, venting its wrath and frustration all over you. According to Carson, the dreaded result of ancient Greek sexism was kakophony, with women speaking the unspeakable – drat, after all that work! And our incorrigible bodies only add to the din. The female body could even be used as a weapon: in The Story of V (2003), Catherine Blackledge notes the ancient tactic of using female genital display strikes fear into military opponents. Women sent Bellerophon packing in this way, ‘vanquished by vulvas’.

How did men ever manage to get a word in edgeways amid this female cacophony? Through hard work and determination, that’s how – and millennia spent badmouthing goddesses, belittling, bullying, and exploiting women, segregating the sexes, wreaking general havoc, drinking beer, playing poker, and lurching home afterwards to berate their wives. Under the incessant antagonism, accompanied by brute force and a lack of female education as well as the vote, women have largely gone mute. We still speak, we can waffle, we can witter, we even make ourselves heard now and then, but we’ve been cancelled so many times we’re now queens of self-censorship.

What’s the point of speaking, when men still hold the floor? Carson speaks up for us though, and very pleasingly too (nothing shrill), in this subtle, playfully damning bundle of historical evidence. Closer to the present day, she cites Freud for his use of hypnosis to expose women’s repressed (‘unspeakable’) thoughts, and Thatcher, on account of her canny efforts to make her voice lower (more manly) through speech therapy – a scheme that worked so well, Thatcher went on to plunder Britain with impunity. Gertrude Stein is remembered for her laugh, ‘laughter like a beefsteak’, while Hemingway’s friendship with her ended, Carson claims, ‘because he could not tolerate the sound of her voice’. I think he tired of his own too. (I sure did.) But the rest of the male world chatters on, fathers, teachers, CEOs, coaches, role models, sports legends, tycoons and tech bros, doctors, scientists, shock jocks, TV chefs, tattooists, drummers, guitarists, composers, conductors, Brutalists and movie moguls; knights, admirals, kings, princes, rabbis, lamas, gurus, imams, ayatollahs, cardinals and popes; oligarchs, autodidacts, wiseacres, wits, wags, windbags, birders, blackguards and braggarts; politicians, pundits, pedants, propagandists, pimps, plodders, porn kings, pigeon-fanciers, and pub bores – masters all, of the blah, blah, blah. 5 LE

The Gender of Sound by Anne Carson (Spiral House, 2025; £7.99)

Poem of the week:

The Dice

Five of them, which sit
along the shelf above my desk:
clear plastic with blue pips,
ensemble cast.
The faces facing out
are three, two, two, one, six,
just like the day I put them there
(though when that was
and why I did, I’ve no idea).

Well, I say, I guess that’s
where you live. You live right there.
(I have a mirror too.
Well, I say. There’s you.)
Which totals all the sense I have
of having landed anywhere,
of facing these six faces with my one. AAP

In this week’s many-splendoured newsletter:

• How to eat like a great author

• Odes to Frank Sinatra and Whitney Houston

• ‘Bells and weeping, horns and flutes’

And – as today is January 29th – a very happy/irascible Curmudgeon Day to all who celebrate. If you haven’t yet subscribed to The Little Review in print – go on, you might as well. It's quite frighteningly cheap.

Insolence & Triviality:

Ursula K Le Guin’s boozy crab nebula

I have no desire to read the villanelles of Gordon Ramsay, nor Heston Blumenthal’s haiku. Yet morbid curiosity led me to fork out – so to speak – for Sylvia Plath’s Tomato Soup Cake (Faber, 2024; overpriced at £12.99), a ‘Compendium of Classic Authors’ Favourite Recipes’ blurbed by Nigella Lawson.

Poets cannot live by poetry alone. Angela Carter’s potato soup sounds spartan – ‘Potatoes are cheaper than leeks so, if poor, use more potatoes’ – even compared with Alan Ginsberg’s cold summer borscht (‘sweet & sour like lemonade’) or Jack Kerouac’s pea-green soup (made with dried soup-mix).

Stephen Spender’s pâté maison with chicken-livers and brandy is more appealing than Robert Graves’s mock anchovy pâté, which calls for ‘a covering of small jellyfish’. (He adds: ‘Nobody at the table will know what he is eating.’)

M&S-ishly, Vladimir Nabokov’s boiled eggs are not just boiled eggs; they are ‘Eggs à la Nabocoque’. Walt Whitman’s coffee cake is made with pork fat, obviously.

I only really started paying attention when Ursula K Le Guin cracked open the sherry to flavour a dish that the sci-fi great called her ‘Crab Nebula’. The recipe is a delicious, maddening mixture of the vague and the loftily dictatorial:

... Add about one cup grated Tillamook cheese (or more – or less... if you are unable to obtain Tillamook you may use any inferior American Cheddar, but the difference will be noticeable, unless you have a calloused palate). Now add about ½ pound? 2 cups? – Well, add enough crab. (If you are unable to obtain Pacific crab, you may use those flabby little Atlantic ones, or even lobster; but if you are reduced to king crab, forget it.) […] Serve on rice, or wild rice if you are J. Paul Getty, or English muffins, or whatever.

Or whatever. I was left unsatisfied. The book is not a meal. It is barely an amuse bouche. There is no context. Barbara Pym’s marmalade recipe just comprises just four ingredients (oranges, lemon, water, sugar) and one line of instruction: ‘Boiling time for set 30 minutes. Made about 5 lbs.’ When, and where, and for whom, did she write this down? What was happening in her life at the time? We have no clue. Why does George Orwell begin his plum cake recipe with a full page explaining the concept of ‘high tea’?

The selections are a little disappointing – cribbed from other books with very similar premises and titles like Celebrity Cooking for You or Literary Eats. The fact that there is no named editor should have been a red flag. Where is Emily Dickinson’s justly famous 19-egg Black Cake!? (Look to 1976’s Emily Dickinson: Profile of the Poet as Cook.)

Depressingly, TS Eliot is here represented only by his half-hearted transcription of some dull pudding recipe ‘from a book called Wishful Thinking’. Not even an original recipe! A wasted opportunity, a crime, when Eliot’s secret recipe for salad (‘which I have never released to anyone before,’ he confided in a 1936 letter to Enid Faber) is one of the very best things he ever wrote, and certainly the funniest. The experienced salad-maker, Eliot declares, develops ‘an instinctive psycho-physical co-ordination’. He gives detailed instructions on everything, right down to drying lettuce (‘Artificial methods of drying, such as blotting paper or electrical fans, are to be avoided’). Salad, he believed, ‘is a matter of inspiration’. When composing a poem, Eliot thought one must be impersonal; when composing a salad, however, ‘Personality plays a large part.’ The full recipe runs to a thousand words; you’ll find it buried in Vol VIII of his Letters.

I was annoyed. To calm myself down, I took a deep breaeth and reached for an old Folio edition of that superior culinoliterary grimoire, The Alice B Toklas Cookbook (1954) – another notable omission here – which contains a recipe always guaranteed to raise low spirits and soothe fraught nerves: ‘Haschich Fudge.’ Eat a few, she advises, and ‘Euphoria and brilliant storms of laughter; ecstatic reveries and extension of one’s personality on several simultaneous planes are to be complacently expected.’ (Toklas later claimed that she had been given the recipe by the artist Brion Gysin, had never made it, and had no idea what ‘Haschich’ was.) TFS

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Review of the week:

Over the rainbow

While we’re there with August Kleinzahler, we’re there with the rest of them too. Look, there’s Judy Garland, hiccuping and howling and pretending not to be famous. Look, there’s Dvořák and his uncountable children, their mouths agape, the ‘clank of steam pipes in the recital hall’ approaching, a chorus of Kleean Angeli Novi with the storm caught in their wings. Look, there’s John Coltrane, slouched by the radio, largely expressionless (because game only recognises game, and neither Monk nor Davis gets on air all that much these days). Look, there’s Frank Sinatra, waddling in circles like a boat with a broken rudder, his diminutive frame fatally encumbered by, well... (‘He only weighed 130 pounds / Ava Gardner was said to have remarked, / soaking wet. / But a hundred of those pounds was cock.’) Look, there’s Johnny Mercer – the songwriter from the last century, not the politician from this one – composing the world’s earwormiest ballads with 5% (3%, 1%) of his brain:

Moooooon river
Wiiiiider than a mile

Music is, in Kleinzahler’s view, ‘impossible’ to write about. His latest A History of Western Music, succeeds in large part because he rarely tries to do so. Music is the negative space at the centre of this collection, which concerns itself instead with everything peripheral to music, and everything music is peripheral to.

Kleinzahler wrote the first of these poems in the nineties, and instalments of AHWM have been steadily appearing ever since. It was an unlikely tag team of Mahler and Sinatra that got things going: ‘I was in Ireland and everywhere I went they were playing the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth. It seemed so odd in that context of airports and supermarkets. Then I went to London and in every pub there was Frank Sinatra. So I began writing about Ireland and London through the filter of Mahler and Sinatra.’

The collection’s opening poem, ‘Chapter 63 (Whitney Houston)’, transposes the debilitating weirdness of supermarket muzak, but rather than Mahler’s horns and trumpets, it’s Houston’s power ballads that provide the backdrop to the protagonist’s panic attack (or something that resembles one):

What sort of life have you led
that you find yourself, an adult male of late middle age,
about to weep among the avocados and citrus fruits
in a vast, overlit room next to a bosomy Cuban grandma
with her sparkly, extravagant eyewear?
It’s good that your parents are no longer alive.

t’s appropriate that the focus of this opening poem is not Houston, but one of her songwriters, unnamed in the poem but clearly meant to be Diane Warren, labelled the ‘Emily Dickinson of pop’ for her reclusive habits and extreme productivity (Warren has nine number ones and 33 top ten hits to her name, for Cher, Celine Dion, Aerosmith and Taylor Swift). Kleinzahler has a wonderful instinct for where on the periphery to stand, which peripheral figure – which spouse or child or bandmate or hanger-on – will best elucidate the poem’s subject. ‘Chapter 60 (Little C.R and Judy)’ poeticizes an anecdote related to Kleinzahler by Christopher Reid, in which Judy Garland gets pissed on an aeroplane headed to Oman, where she will perform a private concert for the Sultan,

a monster and a fool like the rest,
but rumoured to have been a great fan of American pop culture
on a visit to the country in 1938 where he enjoyed a guided tour
of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lot and the filming of the Wizard of Oz.
He had never been so moved, that lovely child singing the theme song,
a beautiful contralto, even then. It had stayed with him all those years:
Somewhere over the…

A combination of a long gestation period and its gradual unspooling in the pages of London Review of Books makes AHWM as neat a record of Kleinzahler’s development over the past three decades as any collected or selected would be. Certain enthusiasms emerge (tropical landscapes, pop divas) and others wane (crooners, jazz). But the most obvious change is to the length of his line, which has grown longer and longer, so that the most recent ten or so poems tend to fill the width of the page or spill over the edge. Kleinzahler grew fed up with the ‘short (William Carlos) Williams-esque line’, feeling that a longer line (‘alexandrine… or longer’) allows ‘more room for voice and musical variety’.

Sometimes these longer lines introduce a near-prosaic fluency, which allows for a kind of narrative directness missing in some of the earlier entries. The tone shifts around, going from the detached, almost historical, to the intimate and gossipy in a trice, but there is a story-telling impulse which runs through the whole collection and it’s a lot of fun watching Kleinzahler work out the best vehicle for it over the years.

At other moments, the longer line achieves almost the opposite effect, allowing the chopping and changing of registers that Kleinzahler had always enjoyed fuller expression, giving his desire to startle the reader free reign. Changes in voice, perspective and vibe come at you fast, with neither a line nor paragraph break. Here’s a different section from ‘Chapter 60’, on Judy’s trials:

poor thing, poor, poor thing –
the horrible stage mom, Sam Goldwyn, Artie Shaw, I’ll spare the litany.
Judy Davis, the divine Judy Davis, gave a splendid performance of her
as she began to come apart in 1960 (which is right about now, isn’t it?),
swollen, nearly broke, the marriage to Sid on the rocks.
And then the 2018 bio-drama with Renée Zellweger: OH MY GOD.
– What’s with the tears, sweetie? We are 30,000 feet above America…

You have to keep a hold of the strands as they peel apart, to not be rushed by the frantic pace into incomprehension, but the overall effect is pleasantly manic. This is a collection which allows itself to get carried away. It doesn’t take itself too seriously; nor does Kleinzahler, who cheerfully admitted in an interview that in compiling the collection, he simply ‘threw everything involving music into the hopper’. Given that, there are remarkably few missteps in AHWM. The few there are tend to arise when Kleinzahler breaks with form and tries to write poems that imitate their music subject. The Mercer parody (‘Chapter 29’), for example:

I took a trip on a plane
And I thought about you
I lunched alone in the rain
And I thought about you

Even readers with a fairly high tolerance for the sentimental (guilty) might find this a little much. It helps that this poem is dedicated to Thom Gunn, a close friend of Kleinzahler’s, but no such excuses can be made for ‘Chapter 44 (Bebop)’, which manages to be very silly without being all that much fun to read (‘At Rapunzel’s Fungible Ball / The most glittery jittery gala of all’).

But such stumbles are few, and such moments of overenthusiasm forgivable. For A History of Western Music is that precious thing: an artistic triumph in its own right that magnanimously leads us towards a host of further aesthetic pleasures, each song’s delight compounded by its poem, and each poem’s by its song. LD

A History of Western Music by August Kleinzahler (Faber, 2025; £12.99)

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Poem of the week:

Picturesque

I liked to walk past the village square, the trees
draped like ribbons over the piecrust tiles.
Blackbirds, delivery vans unloading iced buns
at the gate where the unhoused man turns rings.
Lavender, brushed with a hand, gave a smell
of sleep and baking. If there were church bells,
there were church bells. If it was a church day,
there would be bells. And if not, there were other bells
to chime in place of the bells of the church.
East of here, the poorly laid-out dance
of the mini-roundabout had come to a halt,
clogged, the number 63 wedged in its throat
like a fishbone. And I was at odds too,
walking past the village square at the wrong hours
with the pram inside the cacophony of village,
bells and weeping, horns and flutes, a processional
that led nowhere but in circles, nowhere out. MJS

A newsletter heaving with riches this week. Inside:

• ‘A dislike of language’: Britain’s largest poetry prize

• Conversations with JH Prynne’s barber

• Where’s Wystan?

• A bad thought like a bad tooth, from FL

If you haven’t yet subscribed to The Little Review – whyever not? It’s only £12 for a full year of little yellow magazines. And now, on with the usual nonsense…

News:

‘A dislike of language’

On Monday, The Little Review was at London’s Wallace Collection – but not to admire the gurning cherubs, gilded clocks or pink wallpaper. We were there for the 2025/6 TS Eliot Prize ceremony.

We find award ceremonies very dull. Still, there were canapés, and we were hungry.

The low-point of these rituals is usually a speech by the prize’s judge, or more often – since judges, like sheep, seek safety in a flock – a speech by the chair of the judging panel.

(Why should panels have anything to do with literature? In our experience, they tend to be thick, square, and in need of a bit of rough sandpapering. But we may be thinking of the wrong kind.)

By age-old tradition, the judge’s speech is designed to say nothing whatsoever. It begins by saying nothing about the role of poetry, proceeds to say nothing very politely about the prize’s corporate sponsors, and concludes with the most ebullient nothing about each of the shortlisted books. ‘Now more than ever,’ fiction judges remind us, we must celebrate ‘the power of storytelling’. For poetry judges, CTRL+F and replace with ‘the power of language’.

One very small joke is permitted: this is to suggest very gently that the members of the panel got jolly cross with each other at times. This is to remind us that they all worked awfully hard: they had to read so many wonderful books, and those books were so uniformly wonderful that it was impossible to choose.

This venerable tradition was ignored on Monday by ‘panel’ chair Michael Hofmann. Breaking protocol, he insinuated that not all of the ‘ten thousand pages of poetry’ he and his colleagues had read were good. He even went so far as to list a few irksome trends:

Books starting on page 1 (something I deprecate). Books longer than I remember books being. What happened to 48 pp? Or even 64 pp? Books coming with pages, sometimes many pages, of notes. More thanks in them than an Oscar speech. Ultimate perfectibility of layout has been attained, a kind of visual bullying, even visual cant, I think. What Randall Jarrell called poems written on typewriters by typewriters. And of course too, as per Jarrell, the stacks of signed plaster casts, with the awful unvarying refrain: it hurts here. At the same time, poets and books all desperately presented as going concerns. I miss the absence of fluff and puff, a kind of austerity, demureness of representation. Dignity.

It seems too that there’s been a turn to abstract speech, inhuman speech, impersonal speech. Something randomised, a distrust of language, even a dislike of language. Arnold’s criticism of life has devolved to a criticism of language. A poem is now the home for randomised and intelligent and inorganic speech. A conveyor of information. A kind of insider trading…

Strong stuff. In the end, the £25,000 prize went to our contributor KS, for her book Wellwater, a couple of poems from which – neither fluffy nor puffy – made their first appearance in The Little Review No 1.

Speaking of the state of poetry – our editor has written another of his wretched little articles, ‘The state of British poetry’, for something called the TLS. We assume it was written for TLR but sent to the wrong mag – we have such similar initials, these mistakes often happen.

The original headline, ‘The absolute state of British poetry’, was trimmed down slightly so the words could be squeezed in beside this charming photo of a Sheffield tower-block. It is a handsome building – or was, before it was ‘tagged’ by up-and-coming graffiti artist and occasional rapper Sir Andrew Motion. TLR

Insolence & Triviality:

Primping with Prynne

Somehow I mentioned to my hairdresser that I was a poet, perhaps to justify my split ends, or my lack of plans for Friday night. My hairdresser told me that he cut the hair of ‘a poet, Mr Prynne’. Did I know Mr Prynne’s poetry?

I said I did.

My hairdresser asked me if I was ‘a poet like Mr Prynne’.

I said that Mr Prynne was a renowned and distinguished poet, and that I was not. That Mr Prynne had probably published about 50 books of poetry, and that I had not.

At this point my neck was strained backwards over the washbasin and my head was being sluiced with water.

I told the ceiling that in fact I had published zero books of poetry.

How many? said my hairdresser.

None, I said.

My head was thoroughly scrubbed now, and I was led back to the stylist’s chair. My hairdresser asked me to describe Mr Prynne’s poetry. I opened my mouth.

He asked me to keep my head straight, because my asymmetric cut risked becoming symmetric.

I said that Mr Prynne’s poetry was hard to describe.

It’s quite experimental, I said.

What does that mean? he asked me.

I tried to think of what I knew about mid-century poetry movements and the relationship between the Cambridge School and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry.

My face stared back at me from the light-rimmed mirror. It was the face of someone realising they knew nothing about any poetry later than Des Imagistes.

My hairdresser snipped swiftly around my head. Hair fell asymmetrically around me.

Fragments, I said. Mr Prynne’s work is fragmented.

To either side of me were other people being snipped at. It was central Cambridge. No doubt they were all Professors. Probably ninety percent of them had written books on the British Poetry Revival. One of them at least was clearly the world expert on Deleuze. They had all stopped reading Take a Break and were listening to me fail to know about poetry.

Fragmented? said my hairdresser.

Yes, I said. His work is fragmented, self-reflective and metaphorically asymmetric.

And your own poetry? prompted my hairdresser.

Isn’t, I said, and asked him about styling mousse.

I had the same conversation at three month intervals until my hairdresser retired to a beach in Italy.

Since then, I have grown my hair long, and do my best to avoid discussing poetry. HT

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Review of the week:

Audenance Survey

In 1980, John Ashbery told an interviewer that he found it ‘odd’ to be asked about WH Auden’s influence on his work. ‘Forty years ago when I first began to read modern poetry no one would have asked – he was the modern poet.’ Geoffrey Grigson concurred: Auden, he wrote in Poetry of the Present (1949), ‘arches over all’.

That kind of patent supremacy feels impossible now. It’s hard to imagine a contemporary poet warranting the definite article, let alone their whereabouts being discussed in Parliament (as was Auden’s emigration to the United States). When he came back to Blighty, in 1972, the BBC aired a half-hour special called Auden in London. For all his aspirations, Simon Armitage is lucky to get fifteen minutes on Radio 3. From 1967 until his death six years later, Auden was wheeled out to give an annual reading for the last night of the Poetry International. He drew a reliably large crowd, so much so that Charles Osborne called him the festival’s ‘mascot’.

You have to wonder how this most restless and self-critical of poets felt about becoming a national treasure. (He was considered for Poet Laureate when John Masefield died, but rejected on account of having assumed American citizenship.) This isn’t to say Auden disliked being famous. But there are different kinds of fame, or notoriety, and he sometimes seemed happier as an enfant terrible than he was in the role of camp, avuncular ‘mandarin’ – as he called himself in a poem of 1971 – into which he settled, later on. Settle he did, though, and things have only got quainter since his death. After John Hannah recited ‘Funeral Blues’ (‘Stop all the clocks’) in 1994’s Four Weddings and a Funeral, Faber rushed out a pamphlet of Auden lyrics, for which they picked the syrupy title Tell Me the Truth About Love. It sold a quarter of a million copies.

All this is well-worn: the absurdly fast rise (TS Eliot published Auden’s 1930 Poems a couple of years after the latter had left Oxford), the vague but compelling leftism that turned to a strange deep religiosity, the abandoning of England on the eve of war. And this is the problem. The Auden story is so much a story, so uncannily representative of its epoch – he went to Spain! He was quoted by Lyndon B Johnson, and hated it! – that the real person vanishes. We’ve inherited a mythos, a mass of relics, some labelled ‘bitter poetry of imperial decay’ and others ‘property of Richard Curtis’. The dazzle of the name – Samuel Hynes wrote of an ‘Auden Generation’ – blinds us to the real, slightly dishevelled poet slinking out the back door. Almost everything I read about Auden leaves me feeling like a panting detective charging into the room to see an open window, curtains billowing. Auden eludes. Zoom out too far, and you make him the shapeless allegory of a century. Go microscopic, as Nicholas Jenkins does in his new book The Island – I now know which flight Auden caught to Copenhagen in January 1935 – and you risk losing some of a human being’s necessary holism.

Jenkins, in fairness, does also propose a big picture. (It was ‘the KLM morning flight from Croydon Aerodrome.’) The Island, roughly equal parts biography, social history, and close reading, reconstructs Auden’s life and work, and their various contexts, across his first three decades. (At over 500 pages excluding notes, this works out to about, and only occasionally feels like, six weeks a page.) The argument is that Auden’s early career, up until about 1936, is best seen in the light of his conflicted and changing idea of ‘Englishness’ – a word which, as is nicely observed, doesn’t show up much in newspapers until the 1920s.

Born in York in 1907 and raised mainly in Solihull, Auden spent the first decade of his writing life trying out various visions of nation and nationality. After an undergraduate Eliot phase, his first canonical poems are set in a blasted Northern landscape, scarred by abandoned mines and weighty with foreboding. ‘The bridges were unbuilt and trouble coming.’

Jenkins, mostly convincingly, reads these early works as indirect reactions to the trauma of the First World War, and the subsequent little-England period as a response to this response, a new and self-consciously idealistic pastoralism salvaged from the ruins of 1918. Auden himself had been too young to fight, but his father, a child psychologist, was on medical duty for the disaster at Gallipoli, and his absence hung heavy in the family home.

This kind of contextualising, interesting in its way, is at times informed by a loose Freudianism, in which things are all the more important because they aren’t on the surface – or anywhere at all. ‘Just as the apparent national evasion of the subject of the war created a false calm’, says Jenkins, ‘[…] so Auden’s poems are superficially silent on subjects they continually dwell on.’ Fair enough, but arguments of this kind necessarily depend on whether the reader agrees that the ‘silence’ in a given case is indeed ‘superficial’, or whether they feel that the absence of evidence is really just that.

The Island is an exhaustive, precise, and hilariously well-documented piece of scholarship. Scholarship it is: out with Faber in the UK, in America it’s a Harvard book, subtitled, much less sexily, War and Belonging in Auden’s England. Edward Mendelson, by some distance the leading Auden scholar and the poet’s literary executor, calls it a ‘Copernican Revolution in Auden studies’. Yet for all its fact-hunting, careful historicising, and extended analyses of individual poems, not to mention its alarming knowledge of Auden’s sex life, I didn’t come out of it with a particularly good sense of what Auden, person or poet, was actually like.

While Jenkins provides some sharp critical insights, most of these come in an apt phrase – ‘haunting tawdriness’, ‘genteel dissidence’ – with much of the remaining analysis consisting of a patient decoding of sources and symbols. (It is somehow a little dispiriting to be told that a poem ‘mixes the themes of eroticism and war’.) We see Auden dressing, undressing, teaching, reading, travelling, eating, drinking, writing, crying (a lot); we find out which cosy guidebooks and dubious psychoanalytical tracts he nicked lines from; we’re shown someone troubled and delighted by his sexuality, frightened and energised by the political developments of his time, and allured, against his better judgement, by a vision of the poet as the redeeming ‘healer’ of his insular, essentially conservative nation-state. But I want something more, or other. What I really want to know is why, for instance, the final lines of Part III of ‘1929’ are so obviously written by Auden and nobody else; how it is that, aged twenty-two (twenty-two!), he found himself in and giving voice to a ‘winter, winter for earth and us, / A forethought of death that we may find ourselves at death / Not helplessly strange to the new conditions.’

Maybe these are unanswerable questions. Still, if Auden can be found anywhere, it might be in lines like these: in the King James cadence of ‘that we may find ourselves at death’, the dry deflection of ‘Not helplessly strange’, the unplaceable tone, either a bored god or an office manager, of ‘the new conditions’.

‘The real “life-wish”’, he wrote in his journal, ‘is the desire for separation’. One of the few things that remained constant across his poetic career was this desire for dislocation, a sudden change of scene. Jenkins records (‘As far as I can tell’) the first poem Auden wrote outside of England, a sonnet beginning ‘On the frontier at dawn getting down’. The poem ends:

Miles away
A horse neighed in the half-light, and a bird
Cried loudly over and over again
Upon the natural ending of a day.

If the last line is a bit underpowered, the note struck in ‘Miles away’ is one Auden replayed obsessively. In his elegy for Yeats (of ‘poetry makes nothing happen’ fame), ‘Far from his illness / The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests’.

Again, that sudden vision of distance, an archaic elsewhere, and the sense of release that comes with it. It’s as if, finishing a poem, Auden needed to imagine himself capable of not being where he was, of disappearing into the silence beyond his sentences. Eight years later, in ‘The Fall of Rome’, he nailed the effect:

Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

Reading through the collected poems, I found myself feeling that if I could only understand why this final stanza was anything other than appallingly bad – was in fact unforgettably good – I would have discovered some secret clue to Auden. (There are scores of bad Auden poems, but what is so unnerving is how often they seem to be bad for the same reasons that the good ones are so good.) ‘Silently and very fast.’ It has the ‘large generic clumsiness’ that Barbara Everett saw as characteristic of Auden the man, but in a poem, shrugging banality is transmuted as sheer confidence, a full and cinematic insistence that, yes, the reindeer are moving very fast, and no verbal prettification is needed to bring the shot into focus.

That dual sense of linguistic obduracy and visual disorientation sits at the core of Auden: a commitment to the flinty, evocative strangeness of words (‘verbal images’, he wrote, ‘have auras of meaning’), concurrent with a relentless desire for poetry to transport him and us, as if instantaneously, ‘altogether elsewhere’. One of the reasons that ‘Auden country still feels unchartable’, as Matthew Bevis puts it, is because in visiting you might at any moment find yourself somewhere completely different. He was, as he wrote in his ‘baroque eclogue’ The Age of Anxiety (1947), ‘Avid of elseness’.

For this reason, some of Jenkins’s explications seem just a little immobile. The ‘1929’ sequence ends ‘deep in clear lake’, with a haunting image of ‘The lolling bridegroom, beautiful, there’. Jenkins walks us through personal context (Auden’s recently abandoned engagement to one Sheilah Richardson), intertexts (Eliot’s ‘drowned Phoenician Sailor’), and broader symbolism (‘the theme of water’), concluding that ‘It is right aesthetically that it should end with a submerged figure’. This is pristine scholarship and difficult to argue with, but to call that last line ‘right aesthetically’ neglects just how equally and wildly wrong it is, from its repellent adjective – ‘lolling’ – to its punctuation and its inscrutable amorality. Auden, devout Christian that he became, was nonetheless ‘Impelled to giggle / At any Crucifixion’ (‘Ascension Day, 1964’). To be ‘Impelled’ to blasphemous laughter isn’t mere back-pew sniggering: Auden’s endless gags often seem to surface out of some deep discomfort, a belief or worry that he really was born at the wrong angle and the only thing to do was make a joke of it.

We all know the famous lines, the ones that end up on posters, in op-eds. ‘About suffering they were never wrong’; ‘Let the more loving one be me’; ‘We must love one another or die’ (Auden first changed ‘or’ to ‘and’, and then in a fit of disgust renounced the poem completely). But Auden is weirder than that, less tractable, and he liked to drop rocks into the still water of his most drowsily gorgeous lyrics. ‘Out on the Lawn’ has its ‘lion griefs’, ‘On This Island’ its unsettling ships – ‘Far off like floating seeds’ – on their ‘urgent voluntary errands’. On This Island, the collection which Jenkins takes as his terminus, was first published under the title Look, Stranger!, and the more time I spend in Audenland, the more that second word starts to shimmer into an adjective: stranger and stranger, the closer you look. I’m grateful to Nicholas Jenkins for his deep and illuminating study, but you won’t find Auden in it. He’s somewhere else. BP

The Island: WH Auden and the Last of Englishness by Nicholas Jenkins (Faber, 2024; £25)

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Poem of the week:

Headland

here is a bad thought: stale tooth, protruding.
hell is the height of a wave. white as a wave.
and it falls, like a stone from a sling. here is
the hill of the fort, the mouth of the ford. yr
shoulder, a hurdle, turned to the wind. here
is yr name. to stage its small cremation in
the mouth. it is yr name, thrown and told.
black spreads of earth. a votive rag, tied to
the tall unbending of yr body. the minutiae
and magnitude of loss: ladder of feathers, yr
woozy formulae of bone. here is a thought:
yr fingers imposing a rosary, three loops
of covert rowan over the door. faith. would
seal and exhaust the very saying of it. here,
by necessity, inflexible proclivity. pace out
the rank circumference of sabbath, complete
one shallow circuit of the night. inhibition’s
fingernails bit bloody. where god pursues u
like music. in the ronde. in the rite. his one
motif is sleep: a darkness u draw down
like a wet dress over yr head. here’s a place:
with the wind frailly abetting a sail. god.
the dull authority of emptiness. underfoot,
a continuum of thistles, martyrs’ nard. yr
face is knapped and fractured, mounted
to an arrowhead. walk out into the annals
of air. here there is smoke. the bedrock is
charcoal. fulacht fiadh. full of fear. hearth
and trough. shattered stones, sharpened
stones, hammerstones. yr narrow back
a hostile oar, making the silence foam
like the sea. and god sees us. is balor,
his incendiary eye. u r my bad thought:
the tranchet turns towards tribute. cattle
pile up at the head of the stream. a withy
of twigs and twisted chords. gold gorget,
fastened tight. but i am here. i am still
here. perforated, fixed to a nail. here.
where flesh outstrips its mirage. where i
outgrow the idea of myself. where i grow
through these cottage walls. where rocks
roll away from me like sweat. my body
is a mirror, will transmute and not reflect.
all that it receives. yr face, yr force, this
land tonight. environed under eclipse. FL

In this week’s newsletter: three highlights from The Little Review No. 2, for a cold grey Thursday afternoon.

If you haven’t yet subscribed to the magazine, there’s no need to apologise. You’ve been so busy lately – proof-reading affidavits, lassoing wild buffalo, learning Hungarian – and it happened to slip your mind. We understand.

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The Little Interview:

Looking hard at Luke Kennard

‘I wonder if I will destroy myself with an over-ambitious project nobody really cares about,’ Luke Kennard wrote in his last poetry collection, Notes on the Sonnets, a sequence of 154 prose poems set at an awful house party, all subtly layered with references to Shakespeare. His other books include Cain – which featured 31 episode synopses for an imaginary TV sitcom about the Biblical murderer, each of which formed an exact anagram of the same brief passage from the Book of Genesis – and Holophin, a sci-fi novella narrated by a small, glittery, dolphin-shaped sticker. His new collection The Book of Jonah is a ‘madcap picaresque’ about the reluctant Old Testament prophet. Kennard is quite tall, floppy-haired, verbose and apologetic, with the air of an erudite labrador retriever. This conversation has been edited for clarity, for concision, and out of sheer devilment.

In the Bible, Jonah preaches in Ninevah. The people listen to his prophecy and repent – which makes him furious. Why?

There are lots of theories – it’s one of the mysteries of the story. I think, in some ways, he doesn’t enjoy being popular. Generally, the thing we think is going to make us happy isn’t. Whether it’s financial success or critical acclaim, it’s empty.

Your last collection won the £10,000 Forward Prize. Is this the kind of book a person writes after finding financial and critical success to complain about the whole thing?

Yeah, maybe.

What are the downsides to success?

Obviously, there are things you really appreciate…

Sure. But what are the downsides?

To use Mo Szyslak from The Simpsons as an example, there’s an episode where he gets thrown onto a bin and it cures his terrible back pain that he’s been living with his entire life. And he says something like, ‘I’m cured! I’m not in pain anymore! Now I can focus on my terrible emotional problems.’ Getting what you want can break the work a little bit. This is an odd thing to say – because my writing is 75% about being hampered by your own self-consciousness – but I think it can make you too self-conscious.

How does Jonah’s story relate to your own religious beliefs?

I’m drawn towards things that undermine the notion of faith. I’m always on the verge of jacking it all in and thinking, ‘This is obviously a terrible lie, a terrible waste of time and mental energy.’ I don’t know how one could have faith without feeling like that. You know the Kafka phrase, ‘faith is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light’. But it’s not like I go around in paroxysms of doubt all day every day. In fact, quite the opposite.

I joined the Orthodox Church in the 2000s – I didn’t have the terrible zeal of the convert. I was just like, ‘This is something I feel is worthwhile, and intellectually rich.’ It’s great because it asks a lot of you. You have to stand for three hours at a time. It’s a real effort. It’s physical.

The Orthodox church has become this weird thing now – it’s taken over from the TradCath movement in America. All of these terrible patriarchal incel types are joining. So often ‘faith’ is a horrible distortion, an awful bastardization of what it was supposed to be.

People end up with all kinds of terrible ideas. For me, one of those things is the fundamental slippage between the parable and the historical account. The parable is the messianic form of the joke: an allegory to help you take something complex on board that’s hard to put into words any other way. But I’ve heard sermons where people will take the Prodigal Son or whoever and talk about them as if they were people with names and with deaths. To me that’s a heinous misreading, a misunderstanding of life and of language.

But scholars disagree about how to read Jonah, don’t they? Some think he’s as real as Isaiah, others imagine him as something more like an allegorical figure from a parable.

Jonah was one of the last books to be added to the Old Testament, and it references the others. In the psalm he delivers when he’s within the great fish, a lot of those phrases are taken directly from older psalms – it’s a little collage of maritime references. This book is quite clearly a joke against the other prophetic books. It’s curious that it was included in the Bible, given that it is almost a satirical text.

If parody is a form of parable, I guess a book in the Bible could offer comic relief, while also making a serious point.

It can absolutely be both. Don Quixote is parodic, and it’s seminal to our idea of the novel. Most great works of literature are quite funny. That’s something we’ve lost sight of in some contemporary poetry, where it’s rather humourless.

Your The Book of Jonah includes a series of ‘Lectures’. A lecturer is a bit like a prophet – declaiming from on high at people who might not be listening. You lecture at Birmingham University. Has that changed your poetry?

We like to think we’re not defined by our jobs – though we assume other people are. If someone’s a lawyer, that’s one of the main things about them. It’s our individuality bias: we think, ‘I’m just doing this to make a living, it doesn’t affect who I am.’ But of course it does. Part of the element I float around in, for better or worse, is academia.

I get a lot from being forced into public speaking up to 10 times a week, for an audience of up to 200. It’s good for my nerves, good for my tendency towards introversion.

You don’t seem nervous on stage.

I get really nervous beforehand – and then, when I’m on, I’m happy to be on stage. But I think it’s a different kind of self on stage – or who we are on stage is an exaggeration of ourselves.

I always used to advise students: be yourself, but worse. Don’t try to be better than who you are. Lean into who you are naturally, and make that part of your stage presence.

I get more nervous about teaching than I do about readings. In a poetry reading, people are only going to be with you for 15-20 minutues. You’re sort of basically engaging; you can even be slightly insulting. You can deliberately read quite bafflingly opaque work. Sometimes with Cain, I used to just read the anagrams without much context. I quite enjoyed that.

Did the audience?

I don’t know. I think some people did.

You’ve joked that The Book of Jonah is your ‘major-label debut’, as it’s your first book to be published by Picador. Have you gone mainstream?

I’ve always been aware of this tension in poetry between the mainstream and the avant-garde – I’ve admired work on both sides of that divide, and felt vaguely dismayed at people who want to make it as cliquey as possible. Perhaps I’m from a generation that wasn’t quite comfortable with defining ourselves as one or the other.

A lot of the writers people are influenced by now are less binary – Anne Carson, Claudia Rankine – but there’s still a certain dominance of the ‘trad lyric’, and the lyric ‘I’. Pick up eight out of ten volumes of poetry from the last 15 or 20 years, and it’s mostly just uncomplicatedly about the poet. We are to admire them for their insight and perspective. I’ve always been a bit suspicious of that. ‘Wow, look at this person, look at how compassionate and wise they are.’

But are avant-garde poets any more likely to flaunt their worst selves? Or are they still trying to be compassionate and wise – just in opaque fragments?

Sorry, I’m slightly cranky today… I’ll end up running my mouth off and saying things that irritate literally everybody.

Good.

I think it can be too opaque. Sometimes the avant-garde can homogenize in the same way traditional lyric poetry does. If your position is to say that feelings are inherently suspect, your work is obviously going to lack feelings you’re uncomfortable with. No one lives their life that way. I imagine these people have lovers, friends and possibly children, and I imagine their feelings towards them are not avant-garde feelings.

Jonah isn’t your first time channelling an Biblical prophet. Your book A Lost Expression ended with a riff on Jeremiah.

That book sold about 70 copies – but, to me, that is one of the poems I would save of the last 20 years.

Seventy copies, really? Poets are rarely open about how many copies their books sell.

It’s a fair estimate. The highest – either Cain or Notes on the Sonnets – was upwards of a couple of thousand. That’s the absolute high watermark, I don’t feel I’ll see that again. But a lot of the books before that, it was like more like 100. Even if you end up being on a major shortlist, we’re still talking about 500. It’s similar to talking about money in the UK, we’re squeamish about it. I think people should talk about this. We should talk about our disappointments and frustrations.

I once met an author at a festival who had sold more than a million books. She seemed to hate her own novels, and to hate the very small handful of people who had turned up to hear her read from them.

I think the experience of going and having an audience of five people is quite good for everyone. If humility doesn’t come naturally to you, then it will find you anyway. And it will hurt more – like people who aren’t used to being ill.

It’s 20 years since your first book appeared. If you could go back to 2005, what would you tell young Luke Kennard?

I really have had periods of thinking I think I should just give this up, this is so horribly self-indulgent. Nobody’s even really paying attention to it anyway. What am I doing? Thinking about how my style is evolving – it’s completely irrelevant. I might as well be playing tiddlywinks against myself and saying that my style is evolving. All of those doubts sometimes would go on for a whole year – and I’d be quite despondent about the one thing that I want to do in my life.

So I think I would just say to him that that is part of your work. The things that you see as your worst flaws and problems and insecurities are central to what you’re doing. TFS

The Book of Jonah by Luke Kennard (Picador, 2025; £12.99)

Review of the week:

Death by a thousand commas

Let’s pull apart a poem called ‘Sub Rosa’ from David Harsent’s Skin. It’s the first one in the eponymous sequence, ‘Skin’ (everything in Skin is part of a sequence), so we know it must be important:

The upper floor of the whorehouse carries scents
that swamp the corridor. You go knee deep
in Nuit d’Amour and rut, a stench you’ll hold
in memory and soon come back to as you try the door
to a room where your wife lies naked in a drench
of sorrow, whose life of want is now a life of prayer.

A player piano hammers non-stop ragtime. Burattino
waves you through…

Read aloud, the poem pulses to a web of internal rhymes and assonance: ‘floor’, ‘whore’, ‘Amour’, ‘door’, ‘corridor’, ‘knee’, ‘deep’, ‘Nuit’, ‘memory’, ‘stench’, ‘drench’, ‘scents’. It’s supposed to be artful, and it’s a technique that Skin lays on thick. Inside ‘knee deep’ we hear the word ‘need’, while the verb ‘swamp’ takes us back to the primordial stew of base human instinct. The ‘hammered’ ragtime of course refers to the percussive nature of the piano as an instrument, but it also puts us in mind of joyless, functional fucking. And then there’s the title, which (I didn’t know) has the meaning of ‘clandestine’; at the same time, ‘sub’ encodes a lowering, a stooping, while ‘rosa’ plays on the image of the flower at its most vulval.

Do you like it? Me neither. As a standalone piece, ‘Sub Rosa’ might have found some kind of pungent identity. But by this point, on page 143 of a 193-page book in which there are no standalone pieces, the reader has long been bludgeoned into despair, just not the despair that Harsent wants us to feel. All the poems are populated by the accusatory accusative ‘you’, or a pitying ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘they’. Or, if we’re lucky, a bird:

A bird or shards of light. A bird. Its wings clatter the walls. It lifts to come, then veers away. It skims the roof, goes side to side.

One doesn’t sense a poet in love with language, or a poet in love with anything except a verbal dourness that goes further back than Skin; by now, after 14 volumes, it seems part of Harsent’s DNA, stretching at least as far back as Fire Songs (2015). Few of these songs have much fire. Most of them don’t have much song. Instead, heaped clauses unravel to no end, as in ‘The Angel of Delinquent Poetries’ (ahem): ‘we learn a leg-

end / among her kind, its windows and mirrors, roads drawn / to a vanishing point, white skies, a driven silence’. Or ‘The Angel of White Silences’, another instance of cumulative syntax in a book that amounts to death by a thousand commas:

an echo – your name – emptied
into itself, that nerveless silence which is the silence
of the mad, a dream narrative broken, a word
in the mouth of the unearthed skull, a man
in the soundless acres of his leap from the parapet.

But leaps into the dark, as we discover after 200 pages of more-or-less indistinguishable poems, are not Harsent’s thing. Why leap into the dark when you could wallow in it? Sadly, he gives us no reason to wallow with him. HC

Skin by David Harsent (Faber, 2024; £12.99)

Poem of the week:

The Prater

Such skies and such apricot schnapps
Like the ones we drank in Vienna
That just melt backwards through your face, like Time.
Now a half shot in his glass, I saw it every morning.
Is that all right, I asked my friend, the doctor.
Too gold to be blood, isn’t it?

The concierge, at the desk, trying to keep a straight face
As we totted up how many minibottles we had drunk.
Becherovka! Would you say you drank – ten?
He asked, solemnly. Oh, many more than that,
Jason said, more solemnly still. Their inner gems

Were laughing, laughing. It was like a contest between
Delight and delight. Who could flash more in that moment.
I was wearing a T-shirt we had bought at the Prater:
The famous Ferris wheel, with Marilyn Monroe
Laughing beneath it. Where that shirt is now
I have no idea. Some things are too good for this world.

That was the last Ferris wheel we rode without
Being frightened. I had thought of a novel set in the Prater,
Peter Altenberg, electrified with coffee, and the girls
From the Gold Coast. But it was too sad. They were cold,
And could not move freely, and kept asking him
For necklaces. Sometimes he would bring them
And sometimes he would forget. They were not
The first thing in his life – that was Philosophy,

And the life of the mind. I’ll show you the life of the mind!
While the women shivered and their necks went unringed.
You try to hold on to what really happened.
The right detail is smaller than a stitch,
A blue bead. There were rhinestones
On the shirt, I remember now. Falling
Through the air, in streaks of beholding.
Ten? Oh many more. PL

Does good poetry struggle to make it across the pond? It’s the question JBW raises in a sharp book review, below.

The small, odd selection of new American poetry that ends up in British bookshops leaves us wondering whether the really good stuff was torpedoed somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. (And does any new British poetry make it into American bookshops? If you’ve seen any examples of it in the wild, let us know: mailbox@thelittlereview.co.uk.)

Also in this week’s newsletter: a London luxury development gobbles up a small slice of literary history, while LW is – like Elvis Costello – ‘watching the detectives’.

Also: if you submitted work for The Little Review No. 3, and haven’t heard back yet, do not panic. Our lazy and slapdash editor is still in the middle of sending out responses; you will have heard from us by this time next week, if not sooner.

Off-topic plug: a free competition

Our editor is judging this year’s Telegraph poetry competition. It’s free to enter, as ever. The winning poem will be printed in the UK’s largest newspaper,1 and recorded in a stirring dramatic performance by some affable old ham familiar from a TV period drama. (In past years, Harriet Walter and David Suchet have kindly leant their plummy tones to this enterprise.) The deadline for entries is Jan 16: details here.

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So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright:

(It rhymes with kennel)

‘This property is owned by GOLDEN MANDARIN DEVELOPMENT CO LIMITED.’ The notice on the boarded-up front door threatens TRESPASSERS with ARREST. Underneath is a door-scraper which vibrated to the moderately priced but elegant footwear of Alice Meynell (it rhymes with kennel), the slender Victorian / Edwardian poet, essayist, suffragist, disliker of Jane Austen and Catholic convert. She suffered from dentistry of the era and migraine – possibly connected – and was, like this Grade II-listed Queen Anne Revival house bearing her blue plaque, lofty and rather beautiful.

Ping-pong, concerts, Aubrey Beardsley – all departed. 47 Palace Court, Bayswater, is being converted to four luxury flats. Its barred basement windows, of the type Alice called ‘London guillotine sash’, opened at the start of redevelopment, let out a mouse-tinged reek of damp.

Alice and her husband Wilfrid commissioned the house from architect Leonard Stokes in 1889, when speculative builders’ stucco was rife. In her essay ‘Cloud’ she wrote:

It [cloud] is always great: above the street, above the suburbs, above the gas-works and the stucco, above the faces of painted white houses – the painted surfaces that have been devised as the only things able to vulgarise light, as they catch it and reflect it grotesquely from their importunate gloss. This is to be well seen on a sunny evening in Regent Street.

They chose decorative red brick instead, in a broad road which Pevsner called a ‘haven of the Aesthetic Movement’. From the listing description: ‘Irregular composition. Crowned by full width stepped gable. Polychrome bands to ground floor. Round headed entrance to left, recessed panelled doors. Canted bay window to first floor centre with continuous mul lioned window and parapet.’ And so on.

The memoir by Alice’s daughter Viola says the drawing-room ‘was beautifully proportioned; it was panelled with old Japanese gold-thread embroideries, and a little collection of Venetian glass was bestowed on an inlaid Spanish table that had belonged to Lord Leighton.’

Palace Court leads to Bayswater Road where nowadays a Westminster City Council street sign saying KYIV ROAD confronts the Russian embassy. Further along is the business end of Kensington Gardens: coach park, dogs’ toilet and Diana Princess of Wales Memorial Playground, where a friend once glimpsed two men apportioning white powder inside a nicely built wooden cabin on stilts.

In the house’s heyday, architecture students came to admire it. Others came to admire Mrs Meynell, including laudanum-addled poet Francis Thompson (‘Wilfrid, the Palace Court food is shocking’) and importunate Coventry Patmore, acknowledged by Alice as her greatest friend, who called her body ‘Soft as a rope of silk’ and got barred.

In 1905 the Meynells moved to a flat and rented out the house, which later sheltered some of their descendants until, according to family lore, two members concluded after WW2 that there was no future in London property. The house was sold to Catholic missionary orders more concerned with expediency, glue and wholesale remodelling than with preserving original features. The developer acquired it in 2021 for £6,373,000.

Superfans will enjoy the house’s planning and heritage statement on the council’s website. IW

47 Palace Court, London W2 4LS; Selected Poems and Essays by Alice Meynell (Carcanet Classics, 2025; £16.99)

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Review of the week:

With horrifying slowness

When it’s not being shared on the internet, most poetry moves across borders slowly and at great expense. The process by which some American poets and not others are received in the UK, for instance, is opaque and unpredictable. The trade in the opposite direction, meanwhile, doesn’t bear speaking of, which is to say it doesn’t exist.

I first came across Matthew Buckley Smith’s poems on the platform formerly known as Twitter. Smith is an American poet, living in North Carolina. You won’t find his second collection, Midlife, on bookshelves in England. It might take some time to get to you in the post. I am grateful to the publishers for sending me a copy for review.

The poem I came across online was ‘Poem Without Metaphors’. It does what it says on the tin: it is a list of things which are exactly as they are, without metaphors. I thought it was one of the best poems I had read in a long time, because it had the guts to rhyme, and to stick to its conceit (‘The rain against the glass is only rain, / Your heart is just a muscle in your chest’), and because the end was both devastating and ambiguous.

Somewhere a car is racing through the night
No faster than a swiftly moving car,

A brace of deer glance up at something bright –
Gone still, exactly like the deer they are.

And as for you, you could be anyone
Who’s done, who’s said, the things you’ve said and done.

I don’t quite know what this means, but I know that I am implicated.

America is the land of extremes and this is true for its poetry as much as anything. Its ‘formal’ poets are more self-consciously formal than ours are; its ‘free verse’ poets avoid metre like the plague. From a distance, it looks like there are two traditions reacting against each other. Increasingly, the divide seems to be experienced and/or perceived as ideological, to everyone’s detriment; conservatives write in metre, liberals write loosely (this is a general observation: I don’t know anything about Smith’s politics and wouldn’t guess from his poems). This is a bad and boring situation. Sometimes I think we are heading in a similar direction on this side of the Atlantic. This would be a very bad and very boring thing for British poetry. You can’t write an honest poem while looking over your shoulder. You can’t write well while leaving half the tools in the box.

One of the reasons ‘Poem Without Metaphors’ is so successful is that the final line slows the whole thing down. It reads as though it has more stresses than it should. Often the poems in Midlife are a little neater in their rhythms. Often they are a little too neat. The same holds true for the rhymes. There can be the sense, which I often get from American formalist poetry, of something snapping into place:

When we hear the news your neighbour shot herself,
I’m slow to link her name to the smiling face
We see every Christmas at your parents’ place
And each morning on our fridge, dressed as an elf.

At best, the strict form is in productive, unsettling tension with the subject matter. At worst, it is funnier than it means to be.

The poems in Midlife range from shorter lyrics, often rhyming A/B/A/B, to dramatic monologues – yet the ones I liked the most create their own forms. Subject-wise, as the book’s title suggests, Smith is very good, cold and clear on parenting, love, and regret. ‘Object Permanence’ masterfully inhabits the perspective of a baby being put to bed (I don’t recommend it for new parents), unable to understand that the night isn’t a kind of non-existence, and dragged

Upstairs into the reeling hall that slides
With horrifying slowness to that room
Peopled with deaf-mute mammals on all sides,
Dim as the womb…

Form works with meaning, pushing us into ‘the dark, which, closing with a latch, / Becomes complete’. The final stanza is hard to parse at first – Smith effectively sacrifices the penultimate line to the final one, but I think it’s worth it. In four syllables, the whole ordeal is repeated, yet also redeemed:

No one can hear, but you cry anyway
For more time in the world you hardly knew,
Here in the body one momentous day
We loved as you. JBW

Midlife by Matthew Buckley Smith (Measure, 2024; $25)

Poem of the week:

Detective Shows

Let’s sink together, baby, feet up
on the poof, cup of rooibos and
murder in an area of outstanding
natural beauty. Are you still watching?

Damn straight we are, this ends
tonight. Nothing helps me escape
like gritty realism. So many
paedophiles, dead children,

psychos. Here comes the haunted
cop. He clutches his coffee like
a crucifix. He eyeballs
the Clyde Estuary. This all means

something. However bad your day
has been, that DI has got it worse,
half his scenes in misty flashbacks.
The Super breathing down

his neck. It scatters our problems to
the peripheries. When I’m feeling powerless
there’s no better place to be – my hand
in yours, as something gets resolved at last. LW