Geoffrey Hill: Broken Hierarchies (collected poems 1952-2012)

Any would-be reviewer of this large volume is in danger of falling into abashed silence. What can one say about the life’s work of the person who is without doubt England’s greatest living poet, the only authentic carrier of the torch lit by Pound and Eliot? I imagine that those who first held the collected poems of Yeats in their hands must have felt the same way. As Yeats was the brilliant last, late flowering of the entire Romantic tradition in poetry, the same might be said of Hill as regards the hieratic high modernism of Pound and Eliot. Continue reading “Geoffrey Hill: Broken Hierarchies (collected poems 1952-2012)”

Editor’s Blog – thoughts on art, life and everything

In memory and celebration: Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney died on August 30th this year at the age of 74 after a short illness – he had taken a fall outside a Dublin restaurant. Physically he had been weaker since a stroke in 2006, but his last collection Human Chain (2010) showed no dimmunition in his powers of sensitivity and reflection. It was described by Ruth Pardell, poet and judge of the Forward Prize, as ‘a collection of painful, honest and delicately weighted poems… a wonderful and humane achievement’ (Human Chain was the first of his collections to win that prize – perhaps the only major poetry award he had not so far received.)

His previous collection District and Circle (2006) likewise contained several intensely moving poems with an elegiac mood. It was characteristic of the man, loved by so many – poets, writers and millions of others around the world – to have been preparing us, and himself, for his expected departure, with down to earth images of both mortality and on going life.Continue reading “Editor’s Blog – thoughts on art, life and everything”

Editor’s Blog – notes from an English village

A summer evening in Granchester

There have been times when I well might have passed and the ending have come–

Points in my path when the dark might have stolen on me, artless, unrueing…

Thomas Hardy, ‘In Tenebris’

Granchester Meadows - a grey and cheerless dusk which Hardy would have appreciated. — Granchester Meadows – a grey and cheerless dusk which Hardy would have appreciated.

It is cooler now and the meadows have lost the smouldering Tuscan gleam they had last week. As if to reinforce the changed mood the farmers have been around and mowed flat the long grasses and the dry thistles that baffled even the tough lips of the Redpoll herd. No doubt this will lead to fresher and sweeter leaves to eat for the cattle as the summer days shorten to Autumn. For the moment however, it is a somewhat dreary sight. Last night at dusk there was a grey wash over the sky as I walked out into the meadows. It was one of those summer evenings which are nonchalantly non-descript – the air was warm and thick with the sweet peppery smell of newly mowed hay, and a few a slightly darker rags of cloud banded the uniform grey above.Continue reading “Editor’s Blog – notes from an English village”

Elemental elegance, a walk in Clifton

Continue reading “Elemental elegance, a walk in Clifton”

New Documentary about Nuns in Tibet released

Just to let you know that an in depth documentary film about the life of a community of Buddhist nuns in Tibet is about to be released.

The London Premiere takes place on

30th June 2013, Sun

Bulgarian Cultural Institute, London

188 Queen’s Gate
Kensington
SW7 5HL

Urthona will be covering this fascinating and unique film in our next issue due out in the autumn.

William Blake and the technology of publishing

A page from Blake's Book of Urizen — A page from Blake’s Book of Urizen

Blake is virtually unique in European art for the way in which image and poetry are married in his visionary prophetic books. Early in his professional life Blake hit upon a novel method for printing his own books from etched copper plates, where hand written text and images could be combined.Continue reading “William Blake and the technology of publishing”

Zen and Ice

Without water no Buddhas!

Zen Master Hakuin says: ‘All beings from the very beginning are Buddhas, it is like water and ice, without water no ice, without living beings no Buddhas’. This suggests that metaphorically living beings are water and the Buddha ice. In one way this is appropriate because liquid water is the general case, the form we normally find, and ice is a special case under particular conditions. A Buddha is a special case of a sentient being, a sentient being who is awake and knows who they really are. However, there is much to be gained from reversing the metaphor. Continue reading “Zen and Ice”

Editor’s Blog – notes from an English village

In praise of a Victorian suburb

Red brick villas with the coal smuts long since polished away

Continue reading “Editor’s Blog – notes from an English village”

Editor’s Blog – notes from an English village

Bela Tarr – the ultimate director of European existential film-noir?

Are you a fan of long, slow European art movies with strong symbolic overtones, shot in black and white or at the very least shades of murky sepia, in which the main character walks down deserted white roads in the mountains at dusk, or through deserted city streets at night, where the occasional candle at an upstairs window seems to signify both their utter and final loneliness and the distant possibility of some kind of redemption mediated but not bounded by the outworn rituals of a discarded faith? Continue reading “Editor’s Blog – notes from an English village”

Chomsky, Seldon and authority

Last Tuesday night’s Night Waves, Radio Three’s intellectual discussion program was unusually good. Philip Dodd spoke separately to the philosopher Noam Chomsky then the biographer of Blair and Thatcher and Public School Headmaster, Anthony Sheldon. The theme in both cases was authority. What is it? Can it be a force for good? How can its abuse be prevented? The stance of the two interviewees made a very nice contrast and this made up for Dodd’s occasionally irritating interviewing style.Continue reading “Chomsky, Seldon and authority”