Emily Dickinson: The Gorgeous Nothings
Emily Dickinson: The Gorgeous Nothings is both a lovely book, and a handy resource if you’re teaching the poet.
Read MoreThe Most Important School Subject
A provocation: studying poetry is the most important activity in school.
Read MoreOn Victoria Kennefick's 'Egg/Shell'
Victoria Kennefick’s second collection Egg/Shell builds on and deepens the achievements of Eat Or We Both Starve.
Read MoreOn Teaching Gerard Manley Hopkins
Thoughts on teaching the extraordinary poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Read MoreOn Eclectic Reading
A reflection on reading eclectically, and on how books connect to each other in surprising and fruitful ways.
Read MoreJason Allen-Paisant's 'Self-Portrait as Othello'
Jason Allen-Paisant’s Self-Portrait as Othello is a thought-provoking collection of poems.
Read MoreOn the Importance of Studying Poetry
The argument for the most ‘important’ subject in school being … poetry.
Read MoreEmily Dickinson Face to Face
Martha Dickinson Bianchi’s Emily Dickinson: Face to Face is a brilliant evocation of her aunt’s life next door in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Read MoreAn English Lawn, July 1871
A poem based on the opening of Henry James’s masterpiece The Portrait of a Lady.
Read MoreJonathan Bate's 'Bright Star, Green Light'
Jonathan Bate’s Bright Star, Green Light, a parallel-biography of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald, is essential reading for English teachers.
Read MoreSeamus Heaney and the Classics
The UCD Special Collections exhibition ‘Heaney & the Classics’ has been launched, with Roy Foster (pictured) giving the key address.
Read MoreThe Wild Swans at Coole, by W.B. Yeats
A talk on Yeats’s poem ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’.
Read MoreAnthony Joseph's 'Sonnets for Albert'
Anthony Joseph’s Sonnets for Albert deals with the troubled heritage of his father’s past with honesty, control and grace.
Read More'The Wife of Bath: a biography' by Marion Turner
Marion Turner’s The Wife of Bath a biography is a thrilling follow-up to her major biography of Geoffrey Chaucer, placing the fictional character in her literary and cultural context, and then looking at her many and persistent ‘afterlives’ through history.
Read MorePatterns of Poetry podcasts
15 short talks on elements of poetry, using one or two poems in each case.
Read MoreTerry Dolan on Geoffrey Chaucer
An audio interview with the late Professor Terry Dolan about the Middle English poet Geoffrey Chaucer.
Read MoreMolly Twomey: 'Raised Among Vultures'
Molly Twomey’s collection ‘Raised Among Vultures’ is an impressively accomplished début.
Read MoreKatherine Rundell's 'Super-Infinite: the transformations of John Donne'
Katherine Rundell’s Super-Infinite: the transformations of John Donne is a thrilling revisiting of poems that may be 400 years old, but are still fizzingly alive.
Read MoreR.F. Foster's 'On Seamus Heaney'
Roy Foster’s overview of the life and career of Seamus Heaney is careful, balanced, and skilful, covering a lot of ground in a relatively short book.
Read MoreZadie Smith's 'The Wife of Willesden'
Zadie Smith’s The Wife of Willesden is a lively and enjoyable drama, bringing Chaucer’s Wife of Bath into the twenty-first century.
Read More