Literary reputations come and go, rise and fall like food fads and fashion. Marjorie Pickthall – once so highly regarded that she was considered the best Canadian poet of her generation – is now mostly forgotten. Pickthall was something of a child prodigy. At 15, she sold her short story “Two-Ears” – about an Iroquois boy who wants to prove himself a…
Hard to think of a better example of misplaced romantic nostalgia than yearning for the days before the era of modern central heating, double glazing, insulation and hermetically sealed homes. The fretwork of ice on the inside of the bedroom window in the morning; the eternal sliding off of the eiderdown in the middle of the night no matter how…
I’ve been reading the quite wonderful Tirzah Garwood memoir Long Live Great Barfield – a book that deserves several posts all its own. For now, here is her wood engraving Winter “1927 to accompany Marie Howe’s affecting and life-affirming poem about keeping going and carrying on after loss: What the Living Do. It’s in the form of a letter to…
We had just evacuated all the students to the playground, lined them up and done a head count. It wasn’t a fire drill but a bomb threat. We didn’t take it very seriously although bombs were regularly going off all over London. I think this must have been November 1973 because I seem to recall there had been a recent…
Langston Hughes wrote this in 1935. It had meaning and relevance then. It still has. Read it. Let America Be America Again Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be. Let it be the pioneer on the plain Seeking a home where he himself is free. (America never was America to me.) Let America…
I don’t think I peeled a clove of garlic until I was at least 21. It wasn’t because I didn’t prepare my own food. I cooked through most of college and acquired all kinds of ingenious, makeshift cooking skills using a gas-ring fueled by a penny meter in a narrow kitchen with no oven, no fridge and that I shared…
He went to school in Marlborough and loved to take long and sometimes solitary walks across the Wilshire downs. So – here is Charles Sorley.. October 13th is the anniversary of his death in 1915. All the hills and vales along All the hills and vales along Earth is bursting into song, And the singers are the chaps Who are…
Relativity There was a young lady named Bright Whose speed was far faster than light; She set out one day In a relative way And returned on the previous night. Einstein developed his theory of general relativity between 1907 and 1915, with contributions by many others after 1915. The final form of general relativity was published in 1916. This…
Some authors are blessed with illustrators who enhance their work with the distinction of their own. So it was in 1919 with Richard Aldington. When Images of War was first published it was with a cover design and eleven colored woodcut illustrations by Paul Nash. They are matched with poems and depict scenes from the western front – trenches, bombardment, ruins, barbed wire,…
Forgetfulness The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of, as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a little…
Before the Charge The night is still and the air is keen, Tense with menace the time crawls by, In front is the town and its homes are seen, Blurred in outline against the sky. The dead leaves float in the sighing air, The darkness moves like a curtain drawn, A veil which the morning sun will tear From the…
The Day That Summer Died From all around the mourners came The day that Summer died, From hill and valley, field and wood And lane and mountainside. They did not come in funeral black But every mourner chose Gorgeous colours or soft shades Of russet, yellow, rose. Horse chestnut, oak and sycamore Wore robes of gold and red; The rowan…
If we had some bacon we could have bacon and eggs but we’ve got no eggs. That First World War catch phrase came to mind as I was contemplating an idle wish to make blackberry and apple crumble. I imagine a Bruce Bairnsfather cartoon with Old Bill and Alf or Bert grousing about the food while the whizz bangs fly…
Farm work is one of the best jobs for getting to know people as they really are. The First Job and the Sweetest Sylvia Plath’s first job was on a farm in the summer of 1950. I am grateful to the inestimable Maria Popova (Brain Pickings) for these extracts from her journal and from an article in which…
Paul Nash’s fascination with aerial bombardment led him to an ecstatic vision of “the sky blossoming with floating flowers”. This, and William Blake’s poem “Ah Sunflower”, inspired his late paintings, in which an airborne sunflower glides over imagined landscapes. Nash was seriously ill with asthma (he died of heart failure in 1946) and his growing sense of mortality is reflected…