Mary Oliver, 1935-2019: one wild and precious life
The poet Mary Oliver, who has died at the age of 83, wrote some of the poems I cherish most. Born in 1935 in a small Ohio town, she often found escape from a hard childhood and an abusive father by...
View ArticleOld December: seasonal tidings
Let’s sing for old December. Thea Gilmore’s 2009 album, Strange Communion – one of the best ‘Christmas’ albums ever – has been reissued this month in an expanded form. Christmas is in quote marks there...
View ArticleFox and badger: two remarkable encounters
In the summer of 1983 we were holed up in a cottage in the rolling Shropshire hills just outside Clun. Walking along a woodland track one evening, we encountered a badger, a meeting so rare and magical...
View ArticleCatrin Finch and Seckou Keita braid tales of Wales and Senegal
After seeing Catrin Finch and Seckou Keita once again last night at the Liverpool Philharmonic Music Room, and to celebrate an outstanding concert, here’s a repost that records the first time we saw...
View ArticleOn the road to the last resting place of Wilfred Owen
Wilfred Owen died on 4 November 1918 – seven days before the guns fell silent. Yesterday the centenary of his death was marked in the village where he died by a ceremony in which the Last Post was...
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Yves Klein at Liverpool Tate: vision of cosmic infinity – or a crock of shit?
In 1961, Piero Manzoni filled ninety tin cans with his own excrement. A label on each can identified the contents as ‘Artist’s Shit’, contents 30gr net freshly preserved, produced and tinned in May...
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Grenfell Tower, June, 2017: a poem by Ben Okri
No words of mine are necessary to supplement Ben Okri’s superb, impassioned poem on the Grenfell Tower fire – and its implications for our politics. InOkri’s words, ‘cladding: a decorative exterior...
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Backtracking: jazz encounters in the room of dreams
It’s a curious thing, but just as I was entering the time of sleep lost after the arrival of the new pup, I began listening to the new release on the ECM label from the Tarkovsky Quartet. Not only was...
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One for Jamal: Not everything is lost
Behind the counter at the newsagent, Jamal looked a little worse for wear: ‘I didn’t get much sleep last night,’ he said, explaining that the start of Ramadan always tended to knock his body rhythms...
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Days of indolence: reading Geoff Dyer and trying to make progress
I have never had any problem sleeping, losing consciousness within minutes of laying my head on the pillow. Yet, paradoxically, I have always been a light sleeper, snapping awake at untoward sounds and...
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Manchester: the reciprocity of kindness
In the aftermath of the Manchester bomb atrocity there were so many stories of the kindness offered by strangers to those who were victims, or were caught up in, the attack – the guy who drove through...
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I Am Not Your Negro: James Baldwin’s words remain as urgent and relevant as...
I Am Not Your Negro is not a film about James Baldwin: more like a séance presided over by director Raoul Peck in which he summons up from beyond the grave Baldwin’s voice ventriloquised by Samuel L....
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The poet Edward Thomas died 100 years ago today at the Battle of Arras
On the road to the last resting places of three WW1 poets: https://t.co/r6KgGKQOHJ His notebook pages are still rippled by the blast that killed him. His war diary, 1 January – 8 April 1917, is held in...
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Fear Eats the Soul: Fassbinder’s film is still relevant after 40 years
Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Fear Eats the Soul has been re-released nationally as part of a retrospective at London’s BFI Southbank. Thanks to the MUBI streaming service I got a chance to watch again...
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Pat Collins’ Silence: the sounds of wind, water, bird song, and the past...
Two films with the same title were released in 2016. Martin Scorcese’s Silence (which I have not seen) received all the attention, but there was another Silence, directed by the Irish documentary...
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Spring again, and our neighbours are restless
We have been entertained these past few days by the busy bustle of spring among the birds in our garden: a blue tit has found a hole in the sandstone wall and flies back and forth carrying nesting...
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Familiar strangers: the black radicals who civilised Britain
When the story of radical politics in Britain during the second half of the 20th century comes to be written by future historians, pride of place will surely be given to the black activists drawn from...
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To plant a tree: a love song to a magnolia planted thirty years ago
Sitting in a darkening room yesterday as evening came on, I sensed snowflakes falling beyond the window. Torn by a western wind and rain that had fallen throughout the day, the falling shards of...
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Die Andere Heimat: a yearning to travel far from home
Having already spent 54 hours in front of our TV screen watching Edgar Reitz’s monumental trilogy Heimat (more, in fact, since we watched the first two series twice), last week his four-hour prequel,...
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Triggering Article 50: a historic moment of delusional madness and national...
‘This is a historic moment from which there will be no turning back,’ crowed Theresa May in her completely mad speech to the Commons this lunchtime. Yet in her speech and in the Article 50 letter to...
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