Up Late

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Dean Browne was a recipient of the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2021 and his pamphlet, Kitchens at Night, was a winner of the Poetry Business International Pamphlet Competition; it was published by Smith|Doorstop in 2022. Mendelson reproduces some of Auden’s explanatory diagrams to Isherwood—for example, about his ars poetica, The Sea and the Mirror—though he doesn’t include the extraordinary “comprehensive chart” of antitheses Auden constructed while teaching at Swarthmore and writing The Sea and the Mirror, which can be found in Later Auden. ↩ I’d mulled over something like this before, but Torrey’s articulation revealed to me a cruelty: people of colour, LGBT people, sex workers, anyone in the so-called margins, aren’t permitted to write fiction. Not really. Instead, our creativity must be ushered swiftly into the political.

In general it is true that the diagnostician took over, and in the later poems an urbane, benevolent, slightly smug Auden is forever lecturing, warning, or advising his readers. Also, the poems became very long indeed. “New Year Letter” (1941), “For the Time Being” (1944), and The Age of Anxiety might be rated partial successes. “For the Time Being” (subtitled “A Christmas Oratorio”) began life as a libretto for Benjamin Britten and has good bits—the wise men, the narrator—as well as long, indigestible passages, particularly Saint Simeon’s meditation:Anne Tannam has published three poetry collections. The most recent one, Twenty-six Letters of an Alphabet, was published by Salmon Poetry in 2021. More seriously in regard to that anthology, I would hope to be of the tradition. There's one and half million people in Northern Ireland so it is obviously over-represented as far as world-class writers go. And that is not a coincidence. Where there is a tradition in a culture of respect and application to an art form, then that art form tends to get good. Of course you want to be a part of it." Lucy Macnab, co-executive director of the Forward Arts Foundation, said: “We view this partnership as a significant step toward our future strategic vision: to move away from the dominance of London in the UK’s creative and cultural life; a drive toward working more inclusively with young people, emerging voices, and diverse audiences, putting them at the centre of our practice; and working with partners that put poetry at the heart of their creative offer.” The full shortlists Reviewing The Age of Anxiety (1947), Auden’s long “baroque eclogue” set in a wartime downtown New York bar with four characters, Quant, Emble, Rosetta, and Malin, who represent Intuition, Sensation, Feeling, and Thought, respectively, Randall Jarrell wrote:

The Book of Symbols – Reflections On Archetypal Images (Taschen), winds its way through creation and cosmos, animal, plant, human and spirit worlds, image after image, accompanied by their cultural and historical context. In this book’s company, the world beyond the everyday reveals itself in light and shadow, holding the tension between them. The last line is taken, as many have pointed out, from the Old English poem “Wulf and Eadwacer,” the monologue of a captive woman to her outlawed lover. It reads, “þaet mon eaþe tosliteðþaett naefre gesomnad waes” (One can easily split what was never united). This allusion casts Auden’s whole poem as one of frustrated love—but what exactly is parted? Lovers or the poet’s own body and soul, which were never joined? Is the poem referring to the impossibility of fully inhabiting his own desires, of matching the inward and the outward—the public and private faces he wrote about so much? I’ve admired Lydia Davis’s writing for many years, and keep a copy of her Collected Stories on my desk. She reminds me there are always new ways into things: her unexpected approaches turn the most mundane material into something complex and surprising. For a long time, though, her formal innovations and often dispassionate tone held me at a respectful distance. I considered her more a writer of the head than the heart. Ryan Bancroft has just finished his first year as the Principal Conductor for BBC National Orchestra of Wales, and this week he makes two appearances at the BBC Proms. He tells us how he became a conductor, his excitement for music by Welsh composers and his favourite aspects of American music. There is power in this work, though personally I find it too naked, too direct. The revelations are intimate, but of the speaker’s personality, and too often the poems don’t discover revelations for themselves, in their syntax or form, as before, but instead simply recount a clarity achieved in psychoanalysis:Sleepytime’ is seven minutes long. I only ever watch it when I’m alone. I can’t watch it with my kids, because I don’t want them to see me cry. Laird was born in Northern Ireland in 1975 and brought up in Cookstown, County Tyrone, where Martin McGuinness later went on to become the local MP. He says home was not bookish but by the age of 11 he had polished off his mother's Jeffrey Archer and Maeve Binchy novels. He always liked poetry at school and even wrote some: "soft Celtic twilights, Yeatsian wind among the reeds sort of thing". Then he studied Heaney's Death of a Naturalist for GCSE "and here were these very hard, clean-lined poems about things you could see out of the window". He says he had been sensible enough with his lawyer's income to buy a four-bedroom house in Dalston, London, specifically so he could let out three bedrooms, which allowed him to live and write in the fourth. He was then offered a visiting fellowship at Harvard, where Smith was already teaching, and where he prepared his first poetry collection, To a Fault (Faber, 2005), and debut novel, Utterly Monkey (Fourth Estate, 2005). Up Late is Laird’s fifth collection of poetry and his eighth book-length publication; he is the Seamus Heaney Professor of Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast: these facts make the significant lazinesses of the work difficult to skate over; the tonelessness of the collection prevents wholesale recommendation. It is obvious Laird has ability as a poet, and it is easy to imagine him having written better. The central long poem that gives the collection its title is perfect - an elegy for Laird's father, a meditation not just on death and grief, but on how we try to explain or capture death and grief and what's been lost; and how language always fails to do this, but it's all we have, so on we go. With each new segment of the poem Laird opens this up into more expansive, philosophical, spiritual spaces while keeping it completely individual, through details gathered about himself and his father. A masterpiece.