Tag: History

  • On ‘Two Songs of War and a Lyric’

    This year I wrote a cycle of poems relating to war and to women. I titled part of it Two Songs of War and a Lyric for the SouthWord Journal, although it is intimately related to an earlier sequence of art poems, and to the 75th anniversary of Guernica which was marked in 2012.  The…

  • Mallika Sengupta 1960-2011.

    The death of Mallika Sengupta , poet, academic, feminist, and polemicist  has been announced.  “Sengupta has consistently refused to be squeamish about mixing her activism with her art. As she tells poet, critic and translator Sanjukta Dasgupta in the interview included in this edition, “Ideology ruins poetry, but not always. Rather every poet has to face this…

  • Le Personne et le Sacré, by Simone Weil

    Whilst awaiting this morning for a sheaf of three poems from my Saturday Woman Writer, I thought to add in an excerpt from the Notebooks of Simone Weil, whose Necessity is the most sought after poem on the Poethead blog. I will include at the end of the excerpt a link to Necessity in stand alone format (without…

  • ‘No Earthly Estate’, Patrick Kavanagh

    I am recommending, today a book called  No Earthly Estate: God and Patrick Kavanagh, an Anthology, ed Tom Stack, Columba Press 2004. Excerpted , ‘No Earthly Estate , Kavanagh, Colum and Strong’ (December 2010) . ‘The wordsmiths mentioned above , Kavanagh, Strong, and Colum are but a tiny example of the triumph of art and literature against what amounts to…