Two of the finest spirits, artists of our era have died:   Clive James (see Guardian obituary), whom I admire mostly for his poetry, though I know he wrote remarkable witty essays and literary criticism, also about Australia, and was a TV presenter (is that the word?), and Jonathan Miller, whom I remember mostly for his direction of operas and ( Read more... )

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I'm remembering tonight how Ann Radcliffe said (rightly) after she and her husband had crossed a battlefield where thousands of horrifying deaths had occurred only recently:  it's not true that war ends when a peace or truce is declared. War carries on long after the first overt demands of those who win: lost forever people, maimed bodies, troubled ( Read more... )

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Tell me again
How the white heron rises from among the reeds and flies
forever across the nacreous river at twilight
Toward the distant islands.

---  Hayden Carruth


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Two months since I last wrote here.  I don't want to lose this space by not writing here (it's the source for many of the older pictures on Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two) so for today, a favorite poem from which I took what was my first epigraph for this blog, a list of some of the blogs I've bee writing on Wordpress, and a still from a ( Read more... )

Pace the poets
Time is our friend
This too shall pass
blessed true words
permitted byTtime
Time is our friend

*************

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"He's a pussycat and he's okay, he sleeps all night and he sleeps all day." Thus the admiral singing a Monty Python spoof tonight over supper as Ian (our boy cat) attempted to climb on said Admiral's lap. Good news to friends. Yvette's job renewed for another full year. Toasts all round. Yvette orange juice, Duchess & Admiral port.

Like all animals ( Read more... )

Dear friends and readers,

It's not by her, but a tribute. The poet is August Kleinzhler whose occasional prose diaries & poems I really like (they appear in the LRB regularly):

A History of Western Music, Chapter 63: Whitney Houston

They follow you around the store, these power ballads,
you and the women with their shopping carts filled with eggs,
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