Literature

I entered without words: Poems has been described as “landscape oriented” in every sense. Originally a photographic term, now applied to a horizontal page, landscape orientation is, for me, a poetics. A poetics that begins by questioning the term “landscape” itself.

Ever have the feeling that you should know something, but you don’t yet know what it is? But wait, if it is unknown to you, then how do you know that you should know it?

The darkest times often feel unprecedented, but as almost any historian will tell you, they’re not.

In the last years of his life, the writer Amos Oz talked regularly with Shira Hadad, who worked closely with him as the editor of his final novel, Judas. These candid, uninhibited dialogues show a side of Oz that few ever saw. 

When he first began to publish poems, Seamus Heaney’s chosen pseudonym was ‘Incertus’, meaning ‘not sure of himself’. Characteristically, this was a subtle irony.

I took an Old English module on a whim during my first year at university. I came across it at a foreign language informational session, and having never seen or heard Old English before, I was astonished to learn that my own mother tongue could be considered ‘foreign’ to me.