W.B. Yeats
-
Yeats’s Tower and Coole Park
So having carried Yeats’s words about in my head for 40 years, it was amazing to finally get to look at Thoor Ballylee, a one time home of the poet, and a place which had an enormously powerful symbolic presence in his mind and his poetry. I went there with Lorraine, my wife, and our…
-
Rattling locked doors
I’m having a bit of a fanboy moment. I am off next weekend to Eire, and I hope to have a look at Thoor Ballylee where my all time poetic hero, W.B.Yeats, once lived. Although it is out of season and The Tower is not open to the public I hope at least to be…
-
What place has poetry in a post-truth world?
In a post-truth world, poets can be superheroes. We have special powers to illuminate the truth, and prick the bubbles of lazy fiction. We can bend words to say the right thing. This week, ‘post-truth’ was declared international word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries. I like new words, so I doff my cap to folks like Oxford-educated Michael…
-
Poetry: reasons to be cheerful
An imaginary helicopter is a valuable possession. When I finally stop ignoring the helicopter in the room, I clamber in and rise vertically to peer down at life. (Google Earth has diminished the freshness of this metaphor for ever, of course, but you get what I mean). I did it this morning, and this is…
-
In search of a new language
The poet Tomas Tranströmer died in March 2015. Six months before his death, I happened to buy New Collected Poems, translated by Robin Fulton and published by Bloodaxe. I immediately loved his writing. Here is a poem from that book which succinctly expresses something I have tried to define for years. From March 1979 Weary of all…
-
Among School Children
Last week I spent a day working with 32 more able 11-year old writers from schools in Brighton. This was organised by my friend Dawn Daniel with Clare Blencowe at Downs School. The day was themed around contrasts, and I worked with them on poetry in the morning session. The warm ups were about locating…
-
On being an astrologer
I taught myself how to be an astrologer in my teens. In Guernsey, with the endless summer holiday stretching ahead, I picked up a paperback about astrology. The book was, I think, my Grandmother’s. It should be noted she was not the normal sort of Grandmother, she claimed to have been a medium in her…
Peter Kenny: a writer's notebook 