Source of book: NetGalley (thank you) Relevant disclaimers: None Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without Source of book: NetGalley (thank you) Relevant disclaimers: None Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author.
And remember: I am not here to judge your drag, I mean your book. Books are art and art is subjective. These are just my personal thoughts. They are not meant to be taken as broader commentary on the general quality of the work. Believe me, I have not enjoyed many an excellent book, and my individual lack of enjoyment has not made any of those books less excellent or (more relevantly) less successful.
Further disclaimer: Readers, please stop accusing me of trying to take down “my competition” because I wrote a review you didn’t like. This is complete nonsense. Firstly, writing isn’t a competitive sport. Secondly, I only publish reviews of books in the subgenre where I’m best known (queer romcom) if I have good things to say. And finally: taking time out of my life to read an entire book and then write a GR review about it would be a profoundly inefficient and ineffective way to damage the careers of other authors. If you can’t credit me with simply being a person who loves books and likes talking about them, at least credit me with enough common sense to be a better villain.
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Here I am, over-reaching again, in hoping I will have learned to talk about poetry since the last time I tried to talk about poetry.
Spoiler: I haven’t.
The poems in this chapbook offer perspectives on the complex interweaving of identity and grief, especially as wrought upon bodies and through families. Love and pain are almost inextricable here: the poet reflects on separation, on death, on domestic violence, on dementia, on his own coming out.
It’s difficult to capture your own emotional responses to poetry, especially when the subjects at hand are so harrowing. At first I struggled slightly with the fact the individual poems had an open-endedness to them, often ending on an ellipsis, an image less bold than those preceding it, or an idea more ambiguous. But in the end I came to, I think, understand more about what the poems were … doing? Sorry, I really am dreadful at talking about poetry. The thing is, there aren’t obvious conclusions to any of these things—our experiences of grief or violence or alienation are (for better or worse) part of an on-going journey. Language is a frail and uncertain tool here, especially when compared to the hard reality of suffering.
you have watched your father build a mansion of grief in your mother’s eyes (2004)
We return endlessly, and painfully, to bodies and places, to what seems like an impossible search for stability and meaning amongst familial, personal and cultural turmoil:
I become a boy rummaging through the sky for a hint of blue though light is a far-fetched answer to a body marred with turbulence. (Ruptured)
Basically, these are lost and restless poems, where even the consolation of poetry itself—control over language—is inadequate to address the scope of the speaker’s pain.
I relapse into brooding silence for I was carved on a disheartening day... (On Days I Want To Come Out)
Anyway, my useless at reviewing/talking about poetry aside, this is an incredibly impressive achievement for what I understand to be the poet’s first chapbook? Kei Vough Korede’s voice already feels distinct and unique upon the page. This is a powerful collection of poems that I know I will return to....more
Source of book: KU Relevant disclaimers: None Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent frSource of book: KU Relevant disclaimers: None Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author.
And remember: I am not here to judge your drag, I mean your book. Books are art and art is subjective. These are just my personal thoughts. They are not meant to be taken as broader commentary on the general quality of the work. Believe me, I have not enjoyed many an excellent book, and my individual lack of enjoyment has not made any of those books less excellent or (more relevantly) less successful.
Further disclaimer: Readers, please stop accusing me of trying to take down “my competition” because I wrote a review you didn’t like. This is complete nonsense. Firstly, writing isn’t a competitive sport. Secondly, I only publish reviews of books in the subgenre where I’m best known (queer romcom) if I have good things to say. And finally: taking time out of my life to read an entire book and then write a GR review about it would be a profoundly inefficient and ineffective way to damage the careers of other authors. If you can’t credit me with simply being a person who loves books and likes talking about them, at least credit me with enough common sense to be a better villain.
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I wish I understood, like, anything about KU? Like why does it only show me porn when there are things like Aoki's first book of poetry available?
Anyhow, this volume brings together Sometimes Too Hot The Eye Of Heaven Shines and No More Hiroshimas (which those familiar with Aoki’s work may recognise from elsewhere) with three new pieces, The Woman of Water Dreams, A Song of Someplace Yet to Fall, and After a Lifetime of Saving the World. For the record, I love Sometimes Too Hot The Eye Of Heaven Shines and No More Hiroshimas (which I’ve read before) but they did feel slightly out of place to me in this volume? Or perhaps they should have been at the beginning, rather than the end? I don’t know. I’m probably just being weird, but The Woman of Water Dreams, A Song of Someplace Yet to Fall, and After a Lifetime of Saving the World make such a perfect trio—and are clearly designed to be read as such—that I want them to have more space to breathe, instead of the reader then be sort of hustled along to the next thing.
This is picky bullshit about layouts though. I adore Aoki’s writing—painful though it can be—and these poems were no exception. As has been established over multiple previous attempts to discuss poetry, I am going to be a poor reviewer for this book. Basically, I feel like poetry the way I feel about music: I feel an intense longing for it and connection to it, but have zero capability to articulate anything about it. I should probably also mention to begin with that the collection covers some potentially quite triggering material (transphobia, queerphobia, violence abuse, death, grief) so do, as ever, take care of yourself first and foremost.
Ultimately the three new poem sequences in Why Dust Shall Never Settle Upon This Soul are united through themes of loss; the ways queer people, and trans people in particular, must forge identity from and around and through loss. Loss of self, loss of family, loss of history, loss of future. “The Woman of Water Dreams” weaves itself around the Transgender Day of Remembrance, situating experiences of personal loss (Steam rises from the stockpot / like the stories of spices, songs / and all the home this girl will never know) alongside the relentless cultural expectation of loss that surrounds trans people in general (With another November / the names of trans people / change color and fall).
“A Song of Someplace Yet to Fall” circles loss again, this time of cis friends and family members, unable to accept the poet’s transness. Like “The Woman of Water Dreams” the tone is bitter, melancholy, and bitterly resolute: carving spaces for selfhood amidst rejection, isolation and rejection.
But I am not cruelty-free. I do not offer a gluten-free option.
I won’t talk like a pirate. I won’t pump up the volume, get wasted, have sex with you at Burning Man. I won’t dig your hip-hop, save the planet at this badass rally, talk Chinese, support your Greenpeace, stop eating sushi forsake animal proteins watch Glee ride a fixiedonatetoIndiegogoleggoyourEggo.
And then there’s “After A Lifetime of Saving the World”. While not devoid of pain nor completely free of the losses that haunt the previous two poems, it’s honestly just … gorgeous. An offering of solace—the blissful banality of domesticity—amidst and because of the pain, not because of it.
And with you I light a candle. And with you I reheat the noodles. Or so we hope we hope when we are weak we can say we know what it feels like to truly love.
Which, unfortunately, brings us back to my inarticulate poetry flailings. I can’t remember if this is, like, a famous thing a famous person said or a thing a friend of mine said that I liked and am now stealing, but the friend who I think said it (or the friend who told me that it was a famous thing a famous person said once) described poetry once as an inherently sculptural artform. A novel, she said, is like a painting: you, as the writer, present a single perspective, albeit one that can be interpreted multiple ways by different viewers. I mean you can’t choose to read a novel from the POV of a different character, just like if you peer behind a painting, all you’ll see is canvas.
A poem, though, a poem you can walk round. And I guess where I’m going with this is, I feel that these are poems I can walk round. The language is, at once, so matter-of-fact and so intricate, presenting terrible and beautiful and heart-breaking and hopeful things with astonishing depth and clarity.
I mean, even the fucking foreword is ridiculously moving:
I realized that my favorite poems did not run away from their pasts—they transformed them. After trying to write poetry from a perspective and privilege I never had, I finally stopped trying to be somewhere and someone else […] And gradually a type of poetry finally began to come from a hand, heart, and voice I could truly call my own.”
Source of book: NetGalley (thank you) Relevant disclaimers: none Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without Source of book: NetGalley (thank you) Relevant disclaimers: none Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author.
And remember: I am not here to judge your drag, I mean your book. Books are art and art is subjective. These are just my personal thoughts. They are not meant to be taken as broader commentary on the general quality of the work. Believe me, I have not enjoyed many an excellent book, and my individual lack of enjoyment has not made any of those books less excellent or (more relevantly) less successful.
Further disclaimer: Readers, please stop accusing me of trying to take down “my competition” because I wrote a review you didn’t like. This is complete nonsense. Firstly, writing isn’t a competitive sport. Secondly, I only publish reviews of books in the subgenre where I’m best known (queer romcom) if they’re glowing. And finally: taking time out of my life to read an entire book, then write a detailed review about it that some people on GR will look at would be a profoundly inefficient and ineffective way to damage the careers of other authors. If you can’t credit me with simply being a person who loves books and likes talking about them, at least credit me with enough common sense to be a better villain.
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This collection is kind of like being at a party: you’re glad it’s happening and you’re glad to have been invited, you feel warmly towards the hosts, and you can kind of figure out broadly why this group of people has been brought today. It’s lovely to run into some dear old friends. There may, however, also be the occasional frenemy. And while most of the new acquaintances you make are exciting and leave you curious to spend more time with them, you’ll also just fail to connect with others.
It's a poetry anthology is what I’m saying.
It also a wonderful pair of introductions from the editors—this would be the sort of thing I normally skip over but, in this case, they serve as a kind of mission statement for the collection (and the line right at the beginning from Andrew McMillan about the poems of Thom Gunn make him feel, for the first time, that “who I was might be worth of poetry, worth of literature” hit me hard and immediately in the feels). Specifically, the editors interrogate what a queer poem is—what it means to call something a queer poem—before reminding us that the collection is 100 Queer Poems, not 100 Poems about Queerness, a distinction that one that helped me guide through the collection as it moves thematically through various spaces of queerness, from ones that feel very rooted in selfhood (like adolescence, domesticity and relationships) to ones that look outwards, into the world and into the future (the last section explicitly being called Queer Futures).
The other thing the introductions note is 100 Queer Poems is the first anthology of it kind put out by a Big However Many It Is Now (4? 5?) publishing for four decades. I suspect the previous text it’s referencing is The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse, a collection with a very, very different approach, that feels as rooted in its time as Sappho does in hers. In this context, then, the release of 100 Queer Poems feels long overdue: it is modern, expansive, disruptive and diverse in ways that The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse simply … uh isn’t (although it might well have been at the time).
Also I’m aware I’ve spoken more about the approach of the anthology as a whole than any individual poem but … it’s hard to know how else to speak about an anthology. Plus it felt weird to read 100 poems one after the other for a review, when—all things being equal—I would have more naturally engaged in a book like this by dipping and out, reading by mood and moment (I am not, for example, the sort of person who moves linearly through a museum). The sections that spoke to me most directly to me upon a first reading were, somewhat predicably, Queer Relationships, Queer Landscapes and Queering Histories. But, in general, I found the flow of the poems really fascinating and found the loose thematic framing around aspects of queerness, both as part of the self and part of the world, really resonant.
This was also not a book to read digitally, at least not for me. I love ebooks—I’m all for democratisation and accessibility of texts—but there is something about poetry that feels like it needs paper. Or I feel like I need to hold it in my hands.
In any case: this is a truly wonderful book. While not every individual poem worked for me, the collection as a whole offers something bold, expressive and kind of even … necessary? I am so happy it exists.
And please forgive how rubbish I am at reviewing poetry. ...more
Okay, so this collection is brilliant and fascinating, and I am going to flail through trying to talk about it because I’m not great at talking about Okay, so this collection is brilliant and fascinating, and I am going to flail through trying to talk about it because I’m not great at talking about poetry anyway. And there’s always this slightly complicated dynamic when you’re talking about work by Black creators, in that you want to support and celebrate the work and meet it where it’s at, without appropriating it or trying to make where it’s at all about you and your whiteness.
I guess a good place to start with this is that SFF has long had a Lovecraft problem: in the sense that his writing is seen as fundamental to our understanding of horror and has shaped the genre inescapably. (My favourite goddamn boardgame is Lovecraft-inspired) But he’s also, and there’s no way of saying this sensitively, like … racist. Like next level racist. Which I’m not saying to demonstrate my amazing sensitive allyness: it’s just kind of … a fact that, while we’ve got better at pretending it isn’t there, or it doesn’t matter, must be all kinds of fucked up to navigate around if you’re a Black SFF writer. Though, of course, there’s an also a burgeoning collection of work that exists directly to address this (The Ballad of Black Tom, She Walks in Shadows both spring to mind) and I think it is to these texts (as well as to Black art and culture more generally, for example in its hip hop influences), over and above Problematic Uncle Howie, that Can You Sign My Tentacle is most explicitly in dialogue.
There’s a lot going on, both whimsical and serious, in Can You Sign My Tentacle but its central conceit is this: what if these unspeakable monstrosities that exist primarily as manifestations of some white guy’s fear of the known were just, like, super fans of Black artists? The opening poem is called ‘Hastur Asks for Donald Glover’s Autograph’. Which, y’know, if that amuses the hell out of you, then this collection will not disappoint. For all the significance of its themes, essentially positing Black significance as both defense against and answer to Lovecraft’s terror of cosmic insignificance, these poems are deliciously playful. Unabashedly weird. It is rare, I think, to find something that engages so uniquely—so transformatively—with the mythos (and I say this as someone who often digs through Lovecraft’s pockets when I’m writing).
I think the other thing that this collection serves to highlight—and the author discusses this in the note at the end (something that white readers will probably find illuminating to read first)—is, like, just how fucking privileged do you have to be for “fear of the unknown” to have such an overwhelming effect on you. I mean, the rest of us have plenty to fear from the shit we do know. Couple this with the idea that insignificance in the face of arbitrarily powerful ‘others’ that aren’t like you and don’t care about is, when you get right down it, what living with a marginalised identity is like. And so what you get here are a collection of poems that speak far more to human nature, identity and the monsters we create for ourselves than Lovecraft ever could.
It’s always really difficult to play favourites with a poetry collection because I feel if a collection is put together carefully enough the placement becomes, well, kind of its own poem really: there’s another journey here, with its own rise and fall, and its emotional resonances. And this is definitely true of Can You Sign My Tentacle. There is such precision here, not just in the construction of each poem individually, but in how the poem is placed among its fellows. But, for me, some of the highlights include: because who she is matters more than her words; the lagahoo speaks for itself; That Business They Call Utopia, Part Two; time and time again; Young Poet Just Misses Getting MF DOOM’s Autograph.
Really, this is just a stunning piece of art. While every poem is unlikely to work for every reader—and if you’re white then they’re explicitly written within and speaking to a cultural framework that doesn’t include you (and, y’know, that’s okay, we’ve apparently got Lovecraft)—there’s still something really bold, charming and very much worth experiencing here. It will take me a while, I think, to fully understand the depth and breadth of these poems. But given how much Lovecraft shit I’ve consumed down the years? That feels fair enough....more
I never did get round to writing up my feels about CRUSH but I have similar unwritten-up-feels about Wunderlich. They're not particularly similar poetI never did get round to writing up my feels about CRUSH but I have similar unwritten-up-feels about Wunderlich. They're not particularly similar poets but there's an intensity to them, a focus on queerness, and the erotics of power that works on the same bit of my brain.
[This non review brought to you by GR determination I will read 12 books this year, regardless of my feelings on the matter]...more
Definitely my favourite repressed Catholic homosexual.
Bring it Gerry.
Seriously, GMH is the fucking king of the long dark night of the soul.
His beautifDefinitely my favourite repressed Catholic homosexual.
Bring it Gerry.
Seriously, GMH is the fucking king of the long dark night of the soul.
His beautiful poems are stunning, but I love his misery more. Carrion Comfort is ... just perfect. It's shocking to see the extraordinary music of something like Pied Beauty twisted into this wail of grief and fear.
NOT, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can; Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be. But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan, O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?
Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear. Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod, Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer. Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.
I also once highly erroneously named a book The Leaden Echo & the Gold. Thankfully I was saved at the last minute. But this guy has a lot to answer for....more
I think it's just ... one of those things that you can either like Spenser or you like Milton.
There isBrought to you courtesy of Reading Project 2015.
I think it's just ... one of those things that you can either like Spenser or you like Milton.
There isn't really space in a sane human's brain for both.
And I'm #TeamSpenser. Cos more boobs and boys disporting in fountains. And monsters vomiting frogs and Catholic propaganda.
There's just no way Milton can live up to this.
Also I get epically bored with Satan-wanking. Um, that is not Satan himself rubbing one out in the pit fire (though I might have been more engaged in Paradise Lost if he had...) but over-sympathy for him as some kind of glorious rebel figure.
When he is stupid and fucked and futile and knows he is stupid and fucked and futile.
It is however all dense and impressive and I'm sure an important achievement of literature 'n' stuff. ...more
I love this so much I accidentally dropped it in the bath one time, and now it is all wibbly and curly. It's exactly what it says on the tin - a colleI love this so much I accidentally dropped it in the bath one time, and now it is all wibbly and curly. It's exactly what it says on the tin - a collection of poems and songs by Leonard Cohen. If you love Leonard Cohen, then you'll love it. It's really that simple. I find him utterly enthralling - he's profound, beautiful, bitter, melancholy and exquisite by turns, occasionally simultaneously.
From Beneath My Hands:
When you call me close to tell me your body is not beautiful I want my body and my hands to be pools for your looking and laughing. ...more
Falling in love is glamorous hell, the crouched, parched heart like a tiger ready to kill; a flame’s fierce licks under the skin. Into my life, larger thFalling in love is glamorous hell, the crouched, parched heart like a tiger ready to kill; a flame’s fierce licks under the skin. Into my life, larger than life, beautiful, you strolled in.
Another modern cycle-- sensing a theme in what I like here.
This follows the course (or perhaps disintegration would be a better term) of a love affair - and is clearly massively, massively personal.
Which always fills me with this guilty squirm -- how would it feel being the 'you' of these poems? Literature is full of these invisible, voice-less people who are supposed to what ... be quietly proud of have Inspired Art? Become pieces of fiction for anyone to pick at? Inspiration it sometimes seems to me is a large part violation.
But nevertheless there's no denying the effectiveness of it here: love captured in both the universal sense and the particular, from the opening to close. The poems are characterised by Duffy's usual accessibility of language and a strong aural component. Traditional and overworked love poem themes (flowers, kisses, summer etc.) are re-worked into something that feels genuinely fresh.
There's some weaker poems. Tea is is kind of banal despite being on a subject that deeply appeals to me.
Hour is my favourite.
Love’s time’s beggar, but even a single hour, bright as a dropped coin, makes love rich. We find an hour together, spend it not on flowers or wine, but the whole of the summer sky and a grass ditch.
For thousands of seconds we kiss; your hair like treasure on the ground; the Midas light turning your limbs to gold. Time slows, for here we are millonaires, backhanding the night
so nothing dark will end our shining hour, no jewel hold a candle to the cuckoo spit hung from the blade of grass at your ear, no chandelier or spotlight see you better lit
than here. Now. Time hates love, wants love poor, but love spins gold, gold, gold from straw. ...more
I wouldn't normally gendered language so I apologise.
But ... he just was.
Wilde called him a "a braggart in matterSwinburne was kind of a little bitch.
I wouldn't normally gendered language so I apologise.
But ... he just was.
Wilde called him a "a braggart in matters of vice, who had done everything he could to convince his fellow citizens of his homosexuality and bestiality without being in the slightest degree a homosexual or a bestializer."
And he's kind of right. Swinburne got a lot of mileage out of sexual ambiguity until things got socially nasty whereupon he DENIED EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME. And was randomly mean about people.
I think he and Burton were kinky as fuck together though. I mean, just as mates y'know. A little friendly flogging.
He's kind of a shrill, one note poet. But it's a good note. Technical precision and peculiar, occasionally morbid eroticism. I can dig that.
Could you hurt me, sweet lips, though I hurt you? Men touch them, and change in a trice The lilies and languors of virtue For the raptures and roses of vice; Those lie where thy foot on the floor is, These crown and caress thee and chain, O splendid and sterile Dolores, Our Lady of Pain.
(Also part of the thing that makes me love GK Chesterton more than any reasonable human being should is that he resoundingly takes the piss out of Swinburne)....more
Lovesong, The Wasteland & Four Quartets I come back to.
Usually rather irritatedly because Eliot is annoying and pompous and self-conscious obscurantisLovesong, The Wasteland & Four Quartets I come back to.
Usually rather irritatedly because Eliot is annoying and pompous and self-conscious obscurantist. Also he's the High Priest of Modernism and I feel that should be Mina Loy. Just sayin'.
I'm weirdly into Dowson, though he died young (I think literally in a Parisian gutter - so he's a good one for Tragic Poet Bingo) and left very littleI'm weirdly into Dowson, though he died young (I think literally in a Parisian gutter - so he's a good one for Tragic Poet Bingo) and left very little behind. He was fragile and alcoholic and melancholy and I've filed him under 'queer' I think erroneously because I'm not sure there's any actual evidence of it. Or interest on his part.
He just looks like a gayer to me:
[image]
In fact, I think he was kind of into little girls.
Not in the, uh, active sense. Just in the sense of writing creepy poetry about the beauties of lost innocence.
Like the dude himself, Dowson's verse is fragile and sad and sensual and usually about the LOSS OF ALL THE STUFF. But there's a technical precision and a musicality to him that I find really rather lovely.
His most famous poem is probably this one:
Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae
Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine; And I was desolate and sick of an old passion, Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head: I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat, Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay; Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet; But I was desolate and sick of an old passion, When I awoke and found the dawn was grey: I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind, Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng, Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind, But I was desolate and sick of an old passion, Yea, all the time, because the dance was long: I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
I cried for madder music and for stronger wine, But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire, Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine; And I am desolate and sick of an old passion, Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire: I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
Its most famous line, of course, being 'gone with the wind'.
To me this epitomises decadent poetry - the juxtaposition of the fleeting (pale lost lilies) and the decidedly base ('bought red mouth'), the deep themes of loss and disappointment, coupled with an overwrought sensuality that at once seduces and wearies. ...more
Review brought to you courtesy of Reading Project 2015.
Kay.
So.
I’m gonna leave this one to Hazlitt.
On the subject of the Earl of Rochester, he wrote 'hReview brought to you courtesy of Reading Project 2015.
Kay.
So.
I’m gonna leave this one to Hazlitt.
On the subject of the Earl of Rochester, he wrote 'his verses cut and sparkle like diamonds' while 'his his contempt for everything that others respect almost amounts to sublimity'.
[image]
Rochester is my man. That is all.
I mean, he’s a construct of a semblance of a person who lived a ridiculously long time ago, composed of stories (many most likely apocryphal) and fragments of poetry and prose.
But he’s still my man.
This is my favourite story about him.
So, the Earl of Rochester was hammered one day, carousing with his mates through Whitehall, whereupon he (I nearly wrote ‘comes upon’ but one has to be careful with one’s language around Johnny Wilmot) spots this enormous, ornamental sundial. Now Charlie II (who we know was the King of Bling) was super into astronomy and cosmology – he collected clocks and astrolabes and the like, and this sundial-come-orrery thang he’d stuck in the Privy Garden was the most extravagant, most expensive piece of science-bling in Europe. It had been designed by some mathematics professor at Liege and it was ... to put it bluntly the shit.
And the King was crazy about it. He probably bored the hell out of his friends talking about it all the time. Now, there aren’t many surviving records about the sundial – but it seems to have consisted of kind of spire, below which hung a set of large glass spheres.
Anyway, Rochester spots this monstrosity, this marvel, this paragon of time-keeping and just flips the fuck out. “Dost thou stand there to fuck time!” he roars, draws his sword and falls upon it like a wild beast.
Needless to say, it doesn’t survive.
His poems are variable, rough and merciless, occasionally tender, occasionally brilliant. I like them for their relative informality, their intertwining of sex and politics, their deconstructions of masculinity and gender, and for the fact they are full of naughty words. ...more
I'm not actually a huge fan of Ted Hughes as a writer.
As a human being--whose life and misdeeds are basically publicly property--I have no comment.
I lI'm not actually a huge fan of Ted Hughes as a writer.
As a human being--whose life and misdeeds are basically publicly property--I have no comment.
I like this, I'm almost afraid to say, because it is ugly. Self-justifying and painful and tender and unpleasant. An raw mixture of unspeakable things....more
I've always secretly thought you can like Spenser or Milton, but no both. So I guess that makes me Team Spenser. This is honestly a ridiculous book - I've always secretly thought you can like Spenser or Milton, but no both. So I guess that makes me Team Spenser. This is honestly a ridiculous book - monsters vomiting Catholic frogs, fountains full of desporting naked boys, more lovingly described breasts than erotica written, by a 14 year old boy - but, yeah, I kind of have a fondness. It does, however, have a female knight, Britomart (sounds like a supermarket to me), the embodiment of chastity who sets out to rescue her dude from a bad guy, and the knight of temperance, Guyon, goes seriously Medieval on a garden ... y'know, whatever Spenser was smoking, I'd quite like some. The Mutability Cantos are pretty striking though and the rest of it is ludicrous if entertaining....more
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