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Category Archives: Poetry

The Raft of the Medusa – Sodomy and the Lash

Sunday, July 25, 2010

‘O stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start; You shall love your crooked neighbour With your crooked heart.’ It is possible for life to be a bowl of shit. Or it can be a much smaller saucer of shit. Conventional wisdom holds the latter to have the edge over the former, [...]

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Gerard Hopkins: The Manley Burden of Responsibility

Sunday, November 1, 2009

‘Enough: corruption was the world’s first woe. What need I strain my heart beyond my ken? O but I bear my burning witness though Against the wild and wanton work of men.’ Minutes from the Annual General Meeting of Julian Richards’ shareholders, backstage at their old haunt, the Gaiety in Times Square; it’s now an [...]

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The Pube Bush Wild – Keats in Love, Miller in Nashville

Saturday, May 23, 2009

And so another languid excursion through the Italian homeland has run its course and we find ourselves pottering about the conservatory at Lickham Bottom (yes, we bought the Smithy’s Cottage) dabbing at the spots on our succulents. Once again we were thwarted in our efforts to attain a private audience with Pope Benedict, despite having [...]

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Noah Sheldon and the View from Lickham Bottom

Saturday, April 11, 2009

The British are, in their own words, queer buggers. It all begins on the Virgin Atlantic Airbus with the ding-dong doorbell voice of somebody calling herself the Cabin Service Manager interrupting your search for the item on the in-flight entertainment menu most likely to make your neighbour shift uncomfortably in her seat (way-past-her-prime Meg Ryan [...]

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All Flaxen was his Pole – Aubade for Chris Buck

Sunday, January 4, 2009

He is dead and gone, lady, He is dead and gone; At his head a grass-green turf, At his heels a stone. (Hamlet, Act IV, Sc. V) There are agents weeping, wandering the corridors of 609 Greenwich Street like a feral pack of Ophelias. Julian Richards, who can be easily identified by his cockle hat [...]

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John Betjeman, Early Draft – Meet Sarah Wilmer

Friday, December 12, 2008

Sparkling news from The Betjeman Society’s Annual General Meeting in Canterbury. President Emeritus The Reverend Norman Darkling provided details pertaining to an early draft of the poet’s definitive A Subaltern’s Love Song recently unearthed in the gents’ public conveniences in Regents Park, London. Apparently the folio had been rolled into a loose scroll and used [...]

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