<div>Wales's best-loved contemporary poet, one of our major poets of our endangered environment, returns to prose in Roots Home. As in At the Source (2008), she does something unusual with form. She combines two elements. Seven vivid essay-meditations, informed by (among others) Dylan Thomas, George Herbert and W.B. Yeats, explore the ways in which poetry bears witness to what is and what might be, presence and transcendence in a threatened world. The meditations precede a journal that runs from January 2018 to December 2020, concluding with a poem entitled 'Winter Solstice' - three years of living close to animals, mountains, and (in particular) trees, in human intimacy and lockdown. The flown, the fallen, the golden ones, the deciduous dead, all gone to ground, to dust, to sand, borne on the shoulders of the wind. Listen! They are whispering now while the world talks, and the ice melts, and the seas rise. Look at the trees! Every leaf-scar is a bud expecting a future. The earth speaks in parables. The burning bush. The rainbow. Promises. Promises. This is necessary work. As she declares in 'Why I Write', the first meditation in Roots Home: 'Morning begins with my journal. I write in it most days, though not every day. It is friend and listener, to record, remember, rage and rhapsodise, a place for requiem and celebration. Words hold detail which might be forgotten - the way the hare halted as it crossed the lawn, the field where a rainbow touched down across the valley, the different voices of wind, or water, the close and distant territorial arias of May blackbirds.'</div>

Roots Home

Literature & Fiction

CLARKE, Gillian

Essays & Correspondence

Lives and Letters

Following on the explorations of culture and politics in his previous collection The Good European, the writings in Zest delve into less obvious but important aspects of social life--into manual work and 'dolce far niente,' into ancient vernacular craft traditions, and the data stockpiles of modernity. Early in the book we visit the Garden of Eden with Hieronymus Bosch, where we share with him the first fruit. It takes us by way of writers, artists, philosophers, travellers, photographers, musicians, and flavours into the world of Zest--how we can find it and what its discovery does to us. Bamforth's sensuous, richly nuanced essays affect us as stories do, each one creating a world in which its arguments live and breathe, laugh and explore. His diverse interests, from Bible studies to communication theory, from photography to the impact of globalisation, and his shifts from botanising in the Garden of Eden to 'botanising on the asphalt' (Walter Benjamin) always keep in sight the philosophical issue that provides Zest's subtitle--'the art of living.'

Zest: Essays on the Art of Living

Bamforth, Iain

Last Post has a double life; it both sounds for the gallant fallen and recalls what spurred freelance journalists, in all those yesterdays before e-mail, to get their copy in the pillar-box by deadline time. Frederic Raphael's compendium, written in the lively equivalent of the French epistolary second person singular, is a rare mixture of loud salutes, occasional raspberries and affectionate farewells.Its intimacy delivers frankness that formal biography, however plumped with proper sources, seldom achieves. As the parade goes by, Last Post becomes what classicists call a 'prosopography'. Raphael's own versatility shows up in the varieties of tone and vocabulary in long letters of tribute to the two Stanleys Kubrick and Donen, Ken Tynan, Leslie Bricusse, Tom Maschler, Dorothy Nimmo the known and the less known but no less valued; finally, above all, in farewell to his beloved daughter Sarah.

Last Post

Raphael,Frederic

Humor & Entertainment

The Devil Prefers Mozart: On Music and Musicians, 1962-1993

Arts & Photography

BURGESS, ANTHONY

Music

Alexander Goehr, Composing a Life: Teachers, Mentors, and Models

Biographies & Memoirs

Van Zandt, Jack

Goehr, Alexander

Arts & Literature

Library Lives: A Constellation of Books and Objects from the Rylands

Halkyard, Stella

Cancer

Raworth, Tom

A vivid account of the people and places that inspired so much of Spark's work--Edinburgh of the 1920s; her Jewish father; her Presbyterian, English mother; and of course the original Miss Jean Brodie. "A short cracker of a book, full of love and malice, black wit, intelligence and sharp perceptions and judgments".--The Times (London). Photographs.

Curriculum Vitae

Elaine Feinstein

Community & Culture

If This is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?: Finding Common Ground

Chamberlin, Edward J.

History & Criticism

In this text, Eavan Boland meditates on being a woman and a poet in modern Ireland. In prose, she talks about the challenges of speaking honestly and truly in Ireland - where to be a woman (especially a surburban married woman with children) and a poet has seemed in the past a contradiction in terms. Boland focuses on "obstinate details" that represent larger meanings. The autobiography is not confessional, the facts connect with other voices, other lives. She is uneasy with Modernism and concerned with the erotic. A sense of continuities mark the book, the portrait of a critical imagination moving among history's obstacles, finding itself in the lessons of objects and poems.

Object Lessons

BOLAND, Eavan

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