• A Saturday Woman Poet- Farrideh Hassanzadeh

    THE FORGOTTEN UMBRELLA. Upon the sound of rain she took a pad of paper, a pen and a few words about a youngness, a loneliness and a next day; then rushed out. Her heart just as an umbrella left on the corner and was forgotten.’ -by  Farrideh Hassanzadeh Last week I published Nelly Sachs in translation…

  • “Why Not?” by Farideh Hassanzadeh (Mostafavi)

    Some day I will find someone and will tell him in silence all the words I told others in my poems and nobody got them. Then I will let him hold my head in his hands and kiss my eyes full of tears. Full of the waters of dream we will go to open the…

  • from “Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti

    The poem too long to publish here, so this is an excerpt, Goblin Market. Morning and evening Maids heard the goblins cry: “Come buy our orchard fruits, Come buy, come buy: Apples and quinces, Lemons and oranges, Plump unpicked cherries- Melons and raspberries, Bloom-down-cheeked peaches, Swart-headed mulberries, Wild free-born cranberries, Crab apples, dewberries, Pine apples,…

  • “Comes Somebody” by Nelly Sachs.

    “Comes Somebody” by Nelly Sachs.

    Comes Somebody    Comes somebody from faraway with a language which perhaps locks the sounds with the neighing of the mare or the chirping of the little blackbird or even as a screeching saw that cuts up all that is near—   Comes somebody from faraway with the movements of a dog or perhaps a…

  • Hildegard of Bingen

    I read the story of Hildegard many years before I had heard the music. I have published a link to the ‘irupert’  Hildegard site on the right column of links, and an image of ‘ O Vos Felices Radices’. I first heard ‘The origin of Fire’ in Mayo at a point just South West of the Reek, which is the…

  • XLII- Sonnets From the Portuguese By Elizabeth Barrett-Browning

    XLII- Sonnets From the Portuguese By Elizabeth Barrett-Browning

    My future will not copy fair my past — I wrote that once, and thinking at my side My ministering life-angel justified The word by his appealing look upcast To the white throne of God, I turned at last, And there, instead, saw thee, not unallied To angels in thy soul! Then I, long tried…

  • The Game. Page 123.

    ‘To finish this chapter on Padre Eusebio, here is a small tale involving him. Like so many  others, it is interesting only because of its protagonist; but having  accepted that, I think it is a pleasant one. One day in the monastery Padre Pio and he were having a semi-serious argument.’

  • Rosalind/Ganymede

    ‘Make the doors upon a woman’s wit and it will out at the casement; shut that and ’twill out at the keyhole; stop that , ’twill fly with the smoke out at the chimney’. From ‘As you Like It‘ though many pals think that Bacon wrote Shakespeare or something like that . Rosalind dresses as a…

  • Light Play in Celan

    ‘Instants whose eyewink no brightness sleeps. Increate, in every place, gather yourself, stay.” From ‘Fathomsuns and Benighted’. Trans, Ian Fairley. Carcanet.2001.

  • too tired to write

    I have spent much of the day learning to use a documents service, in order to make homes for the ‘longer’ discussions on poetry. then they can be added in as active links (along the right side of the blog). Current Preoccupations include: Difficulties with internet dissemination, from translation through copyright; and the issues of faithfulness to the…