At the time of writing Hubby and I are in Greece. Year after year we holiday here and one of the reasons we keep coming back is the food. We both absolutely love Greek food! My favourite dish is Afelia, which consists of chunks of pork marinated in red wine overnight, then cooked until the … More The Kids by Hannah Lowe
Grief experts say grief has a shape; they have charted its pattern. First there is shock, then denial, then bargaining (for more time), then guilt, anger, depression, and finally acceptance. The experts disagree over the number and order of the stages but they all agree there is a pattern. The experts could probably track the … More Elegies by Douglas Dunn
Hoylake Community Cinema is no more. After 10-ish years and several awards it closed its doors in September, purportedly to make way for a commercial cinema that will almost certainly fail. HCC succeeded because it was like a film club with no membership subscription. It screened one film a month. The programme for the ‘season’, … More Emily Dickinson – poems selected by Ted Hughes
Last month I went with hubby to see comedian Richard Herring perform his F**k I’m Fifty stand-up show at Liverpool’s Hot Water Comedy Club. In one bit of the routine Herring compared being a child to being on the beach with your back to the sea. Then when you’re older, … More Inside the Wave by Helen Dunmore
My father hated DIY whatever its shape and size. He had an old, brown canvas bag of tools that lived on the floor of the shed and only he was allowed to open. It hardly ever saw the light of day. Occasionally, though, there’d be something needing doing that mum didn’t want to tackle, putting … More The Spirit Level by Seamus Heaney
I first remember hearing about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in an English lesson after reading an extract from Plath’s The Bell Jar. I was sweet sixteen, it was an all-girls school, and my teacher was young, female, and romantic; Ted Hughes (we all agreed) was not a nice man. Thirty years on, I’m old … More Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes
I have an uncle who fancies himself as well-read – with some justification, I’ll admit. I studied English Language and Literature at a good university, and had to learn Anglo-Saxon to read the Anglo-Saxon chronicle in the original, but graduating without even opening Beowulf? That left him underwhelmed. Heaney’s translation, which won the Whitbread Book … More Beowulf translated by Seamus Heaney
When someone we love dies we experience grief in four distinct stages. So it’s probably no coincidence that Reid’s poetry collection A Scattering, inspired by his wife’s illness and death, is in four parts. The first part, The Flowers of Crete, is concerned with a holiday during her final illness. However it is his wife’s … More A Scattering by Christopher Reid
Paradise Lost? Are you kidding? How can you tackle Paradise Lost in a blog? Where do you even begin to start? That’s the voice of reason banging on inside my head. And that’s why it’s taken me so long to get my bum on the seat to write the ruddy thing. So, why Paradise Lost? … More Paradise Lost by John Milton
Ten years ago I had to submit a poetry portfolio for an MA in Creative Writing and cite my influences. When my tutor, Professor Newman, read my list she said I wasn’t stretching myself enough, which wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know. You see, I’m more of a prose than a poetry kind of … More Of Mutability by Jo Shapcott
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