‘Mirror’: not the most famous of Sylvia Plath’s poem titles, perhaps, but a fine example of her ability to inhabit some other person, character, or – as here – object, and imbue it with a clear, commanding voice which reveals things about us, and what it is to be human. […]
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle discusses the remarkable modernist poem, Paris: A Poem by Hope Mirrlees ‘April is the cruellest month.’ The opening line (although it’s worth remembering that ‘April is the cruellest month’ is not the full line) of T. S. Eliot’s 1922 […]
‘Telegraph Wires’ belongs to Ted Hughes’s middle-late period, before the publication of Birthday Letters shortly before his death in 1998 but after his classic earlier work such as ‘The Thought-Fox’, Lupercal, ‘Snowdrop’, and, of course, Crow. Published in 1989 in his collection Wolfwatching, ‘Telegraph Wires’ requires some close textual analysis […]