By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) is one of the greatest names in Palestinian literature. After publishing his first poetry collecting, Wingless Birds, when he was just 19 years old, Darwish went on to forge a formidable literary reputation.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Hawk Roosting’ is one of the best-known and most widely studied poems by the English poet Ted Hughes (1930-98). Published in his second collection Lupercal in 1960, the poem is unusual in that it is spoken by the hawk itself. This bird of prey asserts its dominion over the whole of the natural world, making no apologies for its predatory acts of hunting and killing other living things.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Cone’ is a short story by H. G. Wells (1866-1946), first published in Unicorn magazine on 18 September 1895. The story is one of Wells’s few works of fiction to be set in the Potteries in Staffordshire, England: a part of the country in which he lived for a short while. It’s also an early work, written in 1888 when Wells was only in his early twenties.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The American poet Allen Ginsberg (1926-97) is one of the most important writers associated with the Beat movement of the 1950s. The Beats tended to write in free verse, seeking a more direct and authentic poetic voice than the colder, more objective tone of earlier mid-century poetry. Ginsberg’s poetry, like that of many of the Beats, gives voice to a great sense of disillusionment in the immediate post-war years.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Moonrise’ is subtitled ‘June 19 1876’. It’s not one of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s best-known poems, and may have been left in fragment form; alternatively, it can be read as a short complete poem.
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