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A tin flash in the sun-dazzle
I'm going to write about landscape in this book, but it needs a bit of explanation first. Here's the New Directions publisher's blurb:Rummaging through his papers in 1958, Ezra Pound came across a...
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Boating on Ruoye stream in the spring
The Government of Zhejiang Province have recently launched the Poetry Road Cultural Belt. There is a fascinating article on the literary sources for this, ‘Spatial patterns, causes and characteristics...
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Perspective of the Trevi Fountain
Office of Sir John Soane, Interior of Hagia Sophia (detail), c. 1806-19 Sir John Soane’s Museum currently has a small exhibition called 'Fanciful Figures', focusing on the evolution of staffagein...
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Bitter Rice
I was at the BFI this week to see Bitter Rice (1949), a classic Italian neorealist film that also draws on elements of film noir and (in its climactic scene) the Western. It has four fine, photogenic...
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The Angle of a Landscape
The renowned American poetry critic Helen Vendler died a few weeks ago; there was a nice piece in The Atlantic by Adam Kirsch comparing her to Marjorie Perloff, who also passed away this year. I...
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At the brink of dawn, the morne
At the brink of dawn, the morne, forgotten, forgetful of blowing up. - Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land Near the start of Césaire's long poem about Martinique there are five...
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Sealore
It is nearly a decade since I featured Laura Cannell on this blog soon after she released her debut solo album Quick Sparrows Over the Black Earth. In that time she has made records that respond in...
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Cry woe, you glades
Still thinking about the landscape of Sicily (above) which we saw on our holiday at Easter, I have been re-reading the Idylls of Theocritus, along with translations of other bucolic poems and...
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Mountains and Seas
Page from The Classic of Mountains and Seas in the National Library of China The Chinese Classic of Mountains and Seas, the Shanhai jing, composed between the third century BCE and second century CE,...
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A thickening flurry
Determined now to rid ourselves of Netflix and save some money, we have started watching a few last films that we hadn't got round to before cancelling: last night it was Charlie Kaufman's I'm...
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A grassy couch
I have written here often about the importance of a viewing point - one of the pleasures of any walk is finding a natural seat from which to survey the scene in comfort. On occasions, my family have...
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Sumava Virgin Forest in a Storm
We just got back from Prague, where there is a lot of interesting landscape-related art I could talk about. When I last went there photography in museums was prohibited; now I find my phone full of...
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View of Frankfurt/Oder
Last month we were in the The Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg which contains some wonderful Northern Renaissance art and the world's oldest globe. For the purposes of this blog though I was...
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From Art to Archaeology
Back in 1991 I went to a fascinating exhibition at the Towner Art Gallery in Eastbourne (in its old building) called From Art to Archaeology. It featured contemporary artists with work inspired by...
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Study of a rock-face
I was recently in Nuremberg and had been keen to see the Albrecht Dürer house, although I was a bit disappointed to be honest, hoping for something that felt a bit older and less-restored. You can see...
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Blue Sky
Fifteen years ago I started a blog post on Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet by explaining that I had just joined Twitter.Encouraged by Geoff Manaugh's defence of the practice, I have followed the...
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Cliff Crevice, Beachy Head
Emma Stibbon, Cliff Crevice, Beachy Head, 2023We went to Eastbourne at the weekend for the Emma Stibbon exhibition 'Melting Ice | Rising Tides', which combined paintings of retreating ice in Svalbard...
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Refulgent light in the Sonian Forest
Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens, The Vision of Saint Hubert, 1617-20I have been reading Woodland Imagery in Northern Art c. 1500-1800by Leopoldine van Hogendorp Prosperetti, published with...
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The temple’s firm towering
Years ago when I studied art history I was very taken with a particular passage in Heidegger's essay 'The Origin of the Work of Art'. He deliberately looks at a non-representational work of art: a...
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Summer storms, sea, light, silence
Fyodor Tyutchev (1803-73) is included in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry but his landscape poems are given rather faint praise: 'the themes of his nature poems are conventional - blazing sunsets,...
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Streams had burst their banks and sallied out
In 1809 Ivan Krylov (1769-1844) published his first collection of twenty-three verse fables - over time the book grew to include 197. Gordon Pirie’s translations of a few of these were praised in...
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Lagoon city
I enjoyed Martin Gayford's new book Venice: City of Pictures. Reading it felt like returning to a well-loved painting and finding new, interesting details. For example, he cites a book about Tiepolo...
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Lost in the sand
I've been on an Irish culture kick over the last month: first the film Kneecap, then Juno and the Paycock with Mark Rylance and then Arán & Im, a performance in which Manchán Magan talked about the...
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A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things
Last weekend we went to The Garden Cinema to see the new Wilhelmina-Barns Graham film A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things. There was an interview afterwards with director Mark Cousins which has been...
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The Willows
When I reached the point of sand jutting out among the waves, the spell of the place descended upon me with a positive shock. No mere “scenery” could have produced such an effect. There was something...
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