Wednesday night was blowing a gale in London, but the threatened tube strike had been suspended, and the day's lashing rain finally dried up. So, given the circumstances, there was a good turn out for Loose Muse at the Poetry Café, where I was billed as one of the two featured writers. Unfortunately, Sally Spedding, …
Category: London
first Tuesday, second Wednesday
So my new year's not-quite-resolution to do less, to go out less, got off to a flying start this week when I went to two poetry events on successive nights. It was my second visit to Beyond Words in Gipsy Hill, which takes place on the first Tuesday of every month. January's star attraction was …
dot dot dot
I am struggling to articulate my response to the Australia exhibition at the Royal Academy, which ends next Sunday. I've visited three times now. It's a big show. Each time I've spent around two hours in there. It definitely has the sense of a journey. There are some interesting echoes or counterpoints as you wander …
Curlew River
Thursday 14th November. A cold clear night. A three quarters full moon rising above the city of London. We cross from the brutalist Barbican Centre along a raised concrete walkway, down some steps and join the short queue waiting outside St Giles Cripplegate. We're here for Benjamin Britten's chamber opera Curlew River - A Parable for …
admiring Mira
Last Saturday I avoided the mayhem of the fireworks display in Battersea Park and instead took in the Mira Schendel exhibition at Tate Modern. And a thoroughly rewarding experience this was. I hadn't come across Schendel's work before, and the Tate show is a wonderful introduction to her prolific and varied output. Schendel emigrated to …
wine, women, words
That's a recipe for a convivial and enriching evening, and that's exactly what we got last Thursday at the launch of the fourth Loose Muse anthology, downstairs at Cottons on Exmouth Market. Once again, Agnes Meadows and her co-editors have put together a varied and top-class collection of writing by women who have attended one …
poetry panic attack
I spent Saturday morning sitting at my desk, thinking about a new poem, jotting down words and phrases, delving into dictionaries and reference books, nurturing that little knot of something in the back of my brain that I hope will evolve, take shape, emerge slowly onto the page. So I was already in a rather …
encores galore
I'm listening to a blistering performance of Glazunov's Piano Concerto No.2 live on the radio from the BBC Proms, performed by Daniil Trifonov and the London Symphony Orchestra. As the piece finishes, there's sustained and rapturous applause until the audience is rewarded with a thrilling encore. For the last five or so years the BBC …
posters and coasters
Biblical weather last night as we ventured far north, deep into zone 3 and along the Seven Sisters Road, to the private view of an exhibition of posters at G511ERY. A fabulously unlikely location for a gallery, next to a kebab shop in Tottenham, but just the spot to showcase some maverick printmaking. The work on …
not i . . . but i was there . . .
in the pitch black . . . a mouth emerges floating . . . words begin . . . she speaks fast unstoppable a terrible troubled disembodied outpouring . . . snatches of memories cowslips tears falling into a palm realisation they must be hers . . . the one time she cried . . …
Hilaire 