Song of a Reformed Headhunter

RB and I are reading Julith Jedamus's The Swerve together over at PFFA , and posting our comments on the same thread. Born in Boulder, Colorado, Jedamus moved to the UK and has lived in London for sixteen years. It's fitting for her debut collection to open with a poem that tries to situate her American speaker in the English landscape. "The White Cliff," as of Dover, is as iconic of England as Mount Rushmore is of the United States, at least since Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach." It is, however, the physical feature that one sees while boating over from France, not while arriving by boat over the Atlantic. It is certainly not the Heathrow airfields, the more likely sight to greet the eyes of a new immigrant of the end of the twentieth century. As such, the white cliff is more literary than literal, more symbolic than actual. This literariness is appropriate because the poem is about the symbolism of England. The form of the poem also highlig...

TLS January 2, 2009 from Ali Smith's review of Sylvia Townsend Warner's New Collected Poems , and Valentine Ackland's Selected poems : But settling in with Ackland in Dorset in 1930 did bring Warner alive, out of "this death I have say so snugly in for so long", and the couple stayed together, with a couple of rocky periods, in their open relationship for four decades. As Bingham, Ackland's critical guardian angel, writes elsewhere, "the presence of Valentine in her work is one way in which Warner represented the possibility of an alternative society; the revolutionary ideal as she was actually living it". By comparison, though, Warner sublimated her poetry to Ackland in much the same way as she, a woman who loved musix, simply stopped going to concerts because concerts bored her lover. If her lover needed to be The Poet, then she wouldn't challenge her for the role.  *** from Mark Vernon's review of Mark Rowlands's  The Philosopher and t...