At the British poetry world’s biggest annual prize, a strong shortlist including three former winners battle for the prestige and the cash. The victorious poet, however, comes as something of a surprise.
Dan Eltringham
T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize Readings, Southbank Centre, Sunday 17th January 2010
All quotation from the performances.
‘It was a cold coming we had of it/Just the worst time of year/For a journey,’ intones Simon Armitage, speaking as he walks onto the reading platform, northern vowels flattening the familiar lines from Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi.’ In the refined surroundings …

The Poets’ Gulf

Nicoletta Asciuto
Did sea define the land or land the sea?
This is the question Seamus Heaney asked himself back in the Sixties while standing on the wild, sea-tormented coasts of the Aran Islands, which have challenged proudly the Atlantic Ocean and its endless waves from time immemorial.
I always think of this line by Heaney when going back in mind to the Golfo dei Poeti, that is, the Poets’ Gulf, in Liguria, Italy. Liguria is very famous for its gulfs but the Poets’ Gulf is possibly the most closed and …

Dimitry Sayenko’s Absurd ABC

Ling Low
The Fine Press Book Association (FPBA) are a group of people dedicated to the art of fine printing.  Once every two years, they hold a fair, and then many people who know a lot about obscure, intricate printing techniques like “chromolithography” get together to display and discuss their publications.  As they were kind enough to invite The Literateur, I went along to have a look.
I very soon felt out of my depth.  I should have known even before I arrived that I was entering highly …

Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Allen Ginsberg, and the Inheritance of a Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry

Jess Chandler

Walt Whitman was a paradoxical figure. The (purportedly heterosexual) father of American poetry, progenitor of ‘a great original literature’[1] was simultaneously claimed by an emerging homosexual tradition as the creator of a discourse of homosexual poetics. The critical history surrounding Whitman’s work testifies to the persistent negation of a homosexual presence in literary standards. Critics consistently denied the possibility of Whitman’s homosexual poetics in order to preserve the stability of his position as America’s …

Wivenhoe Bookshop found here

Ling Low
When a branch of Ottakars opened up in my hometown about ten years ago, I was snobbishly high minded about its various distractions. Among the bookshop’s colourful and – I thought – superfluous diversions there was an interactive contraption in the children’s section, and shelves full of toys on prominent display. I thought all this a cheap and cynical ploy to get people to stay in the shop. But then, I was the kind of child who liked lining up Penguin Classics in …

Archaeology of Words: Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns
Louise Kemeny
‘I ran slowly; the landscape flowed back to / its source’ (VI)[1]
In Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns the concepts of time and space are vague, defined by their interaction with words and movement. History and memory are mixed in moving pictures, tugging always at the connections between the different planes of reality contained within the sequence. These are namely the life and doings of King Offa who ruled Mercia from 757 to 796 AD;[2] Hill’s own childhood and his experience of the Second …

The Lancelot Dilemma in Malory’s Morte Darthur: How Can the Greatest Knight in the World Have Sex with the Queen?
Eric Lacey
Sir Thomas Malory’s Lancelot was a ‘trew knyght’[1] because he was exemplary in all facets of his character. [2] Indeed, Malory was so eager to emphasize this, that Lancelot is referred to as a ‘trew’ knight four times within the first seven leaves of the Winchester manuscript (the manuscript thought to be closest to Malory’s original), three occurrences of which come from the knight himself in the repetition of “as …

Louise Kemeny
Bibliomania
: A rage for collecting and possessing books. (OED)
: An obsessive–compulsive disorder involving the collecting or hoarding of books to the point where social relations or health are damaged. (Wikipedia)
Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792-1872) was nothing if not a bibliomaniac. “He was quite bonkers, I mean he was completely barking,” Mr Horne* tells me. We are sitting in the bookcase-lined living room of the central London residence from which Mr Horne runs his antiquarian book dealing business. And he’s right; Phillipps referred to himself as “a complete Vello-maniac” (as the …

Guy Cuthbertson
Anyone and everyone wears red trousers these days, even women, but there was a time when they meant something. Red trousers were for showing off, for standing out, and they were for men. Yes, women have worn them in the past, but they were cross-dressing, wearing menswear whether they knew it or not. There’s a wonderful Henri Matisse painting from the 1920s called Odalisque in Red Trousers, in which a reclining woman stretches out in red trousers that end just below the knee. In another, …

A challenge to the old adage
Rebecca Hampson

I love those old books with the leather (or faux-leather, or fabric, or… etc) covers and thin pages that by smell alone make you feel magically smarter. They hold a certain gravitas, an unspoken understanding that with these dusty tomes comes a wealth of knowledge, a deep sense of history, and possibly some great fairytales.
But like everything once held sacred, the blaring consumerism of modernity has long controlled the aesthetics of newly published books. One is more likely, these days, to find neon colours, …