I keep returning to Unquiet Landscape: Places and Ideas in 20th Century British Painting because it’s that kind of book – one that invites rereading. Neve’s introduction is a guide to h…| Rattlebag and Rhubarb
A recent post had the Rev. J. Alfred Prufrock at East Coker, dressed in plimsolls and meeting a merry band of assorted poets in East Coker. He commented on the season ( a cruel April) and suggested some stout to go with their lunch sandwiches. It seems a good time to give the T.S. Eliot comedy files an airing. Eliot…Continue Reading→| Rattlebag and Rhubarb
“For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?” – Mr Bennet in Pride and Prejudice Nicola Sturgeon, the divisive former First Minister of Scotland,…| Rattlebag and Rhubarb
Poetry and the landscape are changing – and the poets are on the move. On a train leaving Paddington, to be precise, on a Sunday in April c.1943, in a special carriage stuffed with them. Joseph Gurnard’s Poets’ Excursion is an extended metaphor of the shifting tide of British poetry and of the changing face of the landscape poets wrote…Continue Reading→| Rattlebag and Rhubarb
What if the man you’re rooting for in a wartime darkly comic thriller is also a serial killer? In Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper (1943), Donald Henderson gives us just that: a shabby, lonely public-sc…| Rattlebag and Rhubarb
My book arrived – hurray! Now I can get to work figuring out just whose noses Joseph Gurnard was tweaking in this delightful little burlesque from 1943, which pokes fun at the poets of the day and the shifting fashions of poetry. First, let’s be clear: this is no Roy Campbell-style slash-and-maim, burn-their-crops, ransack-their-houses takedown. It’s a good-natured piece of…Continue Reading→| Rattlebag and Rhubarb
Refugees They have no need of our help So do not tell me These haggard faces could belong to you or I Should life have dealt a different hand We need to see them for who they really are Chancers and scroungers Layabouts and loungers With bombs up their sleeves Cut-throats and thieves They are not Welcome here We should…Continue Reading→| Rattlebag and Rhubarb
So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets,…Continue Reading→| Rattlebag and Rhubarb
All this week The Daily Poem from The Paris Review has featured work by Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis. In other words, it is featuring the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa (18…| Rattlebag and Rhubarb
Some of this. And some of that.| Rattlebag and Rhubarb
You know how it is when a line of a song or chunk of a poem gets stuck in you head. It’s there when you wake up and still buzzing at you days later. This post is an exorcism of sorts although…| Rattlebag and Rhubarb
