RIP Peter Porter

Peter Porter has died. I'm ashamed to say that I am fairly unfamiliar with his work as of yet, but that will change as soon as possible. An undoubtedly great loss to British poetry, and poetry in general.

The Wonder Show of the World

For anyone who likes music which fuses beautiful acoustic/folk/country and blues styles, I can't recommend Bonnie 'Prince' Billy's latest, 'The Wonder Show of the World', highly enough. Will Oldham (under his 'Billy' pseudonym, among others) has released several albums now, all with different collaborators, the latest being The Cairo Gang. Among them was the classic minimal gloom of I See A Darkness. Wonder Show, in spite of being a brighter album (at least musically; lyrically it's equal parts radiant and dark), is at least on par with that other personal favourite of mine. The lyrics are as close to poetry as songs get, in my opinion. The songs also tie together a single moving narrative, as if it were a concept album, which it isn't, because the parts of the story aren't in a logical order (interestingly, the sleeve has the lyrics in a different order than they appear as you listen). Go and buy it. Now. Just do. Okay?

Hmmm...

Rowan Williams reviews Philip Pullman

Here is an interesting review by Rowan Williams on the Guardian website, in which he addresses the book The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by renowned fiction-writer and staunch atheist Philip Pullman. Anyone familiar with Pullman's position on (or against) religion is quite used to seeing the gloves come off on his corner of the ring. Well, it looks like Williams puts up a good fight here.

Ah, and look...

Here's Andrew Philip discussing his The Ambulance Box, another recent favourite of mine.

Tony Williams discusses his "Parsnips"

I haven't had time to write the review I promised of Tony's excellent poetry debut, and now I'm busy with NaPo. In the meantime, here's a video of Tony discussing The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street. Lots of the things he says about the book cohere with my own ideas, which is encouraging, isn't it? No?

eBook-e-wook

An interesting article posted on BBC'S 'Ouch!' website about how apparently progressive technology (the eBook) may be impacting upon disabled readers, for better and worse.

Art and Poetry Collaboration

A message posted on the blog of poet Andrew Philip, author of the brilliant The Ambulance Box:

It's turning into a year of collaborations with visual artists for me. Douglas Robertson, who interviewed me on my blog tour, has an exhibition coming up at the Scottish Poetry Library from 8 May to 14 June, which will include a sequence of small theatre-like assemblages entitled ‘Horizontals’, based on five one-line poems of mine under that title. Pop over to his blog to read the poems and find out what else will be in the show.

The blog he's talking about is the net mender.

Happy Birthday H.C. Andersen

Check out today's Google page, and you'll notice that it's the 250th birthday of Danish author and poet Hans Christian Andersen, famous of course for his children's stories (one wonders what he'd make of Disney's treatment of his Little Mermaid). For anyone who wants a good short bio about the man, with (probably) far less errors than I would have made, here's a Wiki.

Haiku Chickens

New Blog Title

I've just made a change to the blog's name, and added a pretty picture as well. The original name was sort of given on a whim, for the sake of a title. This one's more reflective of... well, something being reflected. Me, I guess.