On Friday night I was on the bill with Joolz Sparkes at Fourth Friday at the Poetry Café, reading a bunch of poems from our London Undercurrents project. There's more about the event on our dedicated LU blog here. I'd been looking forward to this and practising for quite a while, and, as the reading …
Category: reading
underground reading
One of the few up sides of my enforced break from cycling was the extra reading time on the journey to and from work. I found poetry particularly suited to short bursts of reading, and also loved how individual poems could quickly plunge me into a completely different emotional and linguistic space to the squash …
a story about a novel
Once upon a time, I came across a collection of short stories titled Suck My Toes in a second-hand bookshop in Melbourne. I bought it, for the title, and the cover, which featured a pair of Blundstone boots, my favourite footwear for many years. I'd never heard of the author, Fiona McGregor, and if you're …
a short idiosyncratic list to round off 2014
The year is nearly out. Here are a few of my highlights of 2014. Ravel Day on BBC Radio 3 Friday 7th March was dedicated to the music and life of Maurice Ravel. I marked the day on my calendar as soon as I heard about it. His 139th birthday, so not a traditional landmark …
Continue reading a short idiosyncratic list to round off 2014
bright star by heart, sort of
The theme of this year's National Poetry Day was 'Remember', encouraging people to share a poem they know by heart. With about a week to go before the big day - Thursday 2nd October - Nick and I decided to try to memorise John Keats' untitled sonnet, reputedly the last he wrote, which starts 'Bright …
I’m still thinking about
Familiar by J. Robert Lennon, which I finished reading just over a fortnight ago. The premise of the novel is intriguing: 40-something Elisa Macalaster Brown is driving home on one of those long straight American highways on a hot day in July. She's returning from her annual visit to her younger son's grave in the …
doing the antipodean Shuffle
No, it's not a dodgy dance move. This was a special antipodean edition of the monthly poetry event The Shuffle, which took place last night at the Poetry Café. Co-hosted by Cath Drake and Gale Burns, the evening featured eight Australian and Kiwi poets, and I was very pleased to be one of those invited …
Melbourne scrapbook
Here are some snaps and snippets from my recent trip home. Home? To the city where I was born, where I grew up, that I made a conscious choice to leave many years ago. London is home now. Melbourne is family, a few friends, home-but-not-home. What's that line from a Gang of Four song? 'At …
difficult reading
A few thoughts on two recent reads that deal with difficult subject matter. I've just finished The Watch Tower by Elizabeth Harrower. Set in Sydney in the 1940s, it's a compelling psychological novel centring on a manipulative and abusive relationship. The novel begins as sisters Laura and Clare Vaizey are withdrawn from boarding school by …
bye bye LRB
Yesterday I cancelled my subscription to the London Review of Books. I'd been considering this for a while, ever since For Books' Sake raised the issue of the completely skewed gender imbalance in the LRB's pages, both in terms of the percentage of books by men reviewed compared to books by women (74% male authors …
Hilaire 