A poem on words as faltering tools in the quest for truth, which are not the answer but are what survives from loss; the note records the poet Christopher Hampton’s death in 2012.
Christopher Hampton argues that Beethoven’s last quartets, especially Opus 131 and Opus 135, take music to the edge of the transcendent, and that ‘Muss es sein? Es muss sein’ ends as an affirmation of life.
Christopher Hampton’s poem on whether angels exist: a busy fishmonger offers no comment, and angels belong in Fra Angelico’s art rather than at the dinner table.
Christopher Hampton responds to Dinah Livingstone’s ‘Down to Us’, arguing the Christian myth has served power and that justice needs a rational, materialist humanism rather than a visionary gospel.
Christopher Hampton reviews Anne Beresford’s Collected Poems 1967-2006, praising their spare syntax, vulnerability and persistent search for identity and meaning.
Christopher Hampton reviews Arnold Rattenbury’s poetry collection Mr Dick’s Kite, praising poems rooted in Welsh landscape, memory and dissent, and a sequence responding to Mozart.
A poem on the speaker ‘I’ in poetry: it begins from the self but is shaped by other voices and history, as Mandelstam speaks for the dispossessed, and is vulnerable when it claims to stand...
A poem honouring the anonymous millions who worked the land, whose labour went uncredited while the powerful took the glory. Their presence remains in the fields as a wordless record.
