The latest issue of Arena Quarterly has just appeared, with a piece I was asked to write about what correspondences I could draw between the ninth- and tenth-century poetry I write about and character of current events. What came out could serve as an alternative introduction to Reading Old English Wisdom: The Fetters in the Frost. A little more fun, maybe! I had fun writing it, in any event.
The nice people at Cambridge Scholars Publishing are now offering Reading Old English Wisdom at a 25% discount, which you can claim using the code PROMO25 at the link below.
I will shortly be organising an online launch on the ZOOM platform, from which I’ll be offering signed copies that I will post from my own stash at the same discount, so if you’d like one, let me know and I will enter your email address into my invitation list.
. . . in my next book, Reading Old English Wisdom: The Fetters in the Frost, which discusses the major Old English wisdom poems. It has at last been published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, and I will be organising some kind of launch as soon as I can, though a degree of caution is still called for. I will post details as soon as arranging an event becomes feasible.
With his always-engaging playfulness, Borges can drive you crazy, but he never bores! Translated by Stephen Kessel.
A spare biography can be found here http://www.philipstclair.com/biography
Find out more about Muir and his work: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/edwin-muir
I’ve only recently become acquainted with the American poet C.K.Williams, whose work negotiates a delicate balance between sharply focused observations of common ‘reality’ and a sense of half-glimpsed alternatives by which it is haunted. ‘Light’ is a classic example, poising vivid recollection of a visit to a bat-filled cave with the underworld visions of Dante’s Inferno. The bats focus the meditation, both as common images of life’s dark, uncanny side (think popular Halloween imagery, and then remember Halloween is the Eve of All Hallows, the traditional day for commemorating the dead) and as reminders of how our literary culture has also invested those uncanny realms with unsettling presences (think Dante, of course, but notice too how the bats’ ‘squeaking and squealing’ recall Homer’s ‘twittering shades’ of the dead).
