Language, Poetry and Rhetoric’, A Cultural History of Ideas in the Age of Empire, eds Johnson and Rosenfeld, Bloomsbury, 2022, pp. 135-162 Professor Charles Mundye is Head of the Department of Culture and Media at Sheffield Hallam University

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Editor, with Nathalie Aubert and Pierrre-Philippe Fraiture, La Belgique entre deux siècles: Laboratoire de la modernité, 1880-1914, Le Romantisme et après en France (Peter Lang, 2007) Specific details return, such as her accent (she spoke French: ‘The new accent is a brace, / doing its slow work on your mouth. / At night you take it out to let your tongue / go dreaming outside its cage’, ‘ New Accent).

The weaving of memory, landscapes and different times in these poems attests to the pervasive desolation of grief, and how it is in many senses a mode of being, more than a feeling. Things blur into each other, and the effect of this volume is nocturnal, not in a necessarily dreamlike sense, but rather in the way that the familiar material of life appears slightly altered, its dimensions subtly changed, and time more elastic. Tracing ambiguities in a twilight haze will always be a ready pitfall for a work of this sort, but it is avoided here, and the poet achieves a rare, brittle clarity.

Blood Feather by Patrick McGuinness - nation.cymru Review: Blood Feather by Patrick McGuinness - nation.cymru

It’s difficult – and useless – to impose a simple narrative on a collection of poems, particularly in this case. In lieu of a narrative, the images guide us. Grief is not the only theme here, but also the places that are like grief, which also tend to be those places haunted by something or someone. Lacunae of a sort. Editor, Symbolism, Decadence and the fin de siècle: French and European Perspectives (University of Exeter Press, 2000) Jorge Manrique, Stanzas for the Death of his Father, Shearsman Classics, 2021. Introduction by Geraldine Hazbun These examples may suggest a certain sombreness or melancholy, which could become tiresome, but these absence-laden poems, though tinged with longing, have a freshness about them. Maybe even a frisson, whereby the grey and fading things of the world suddenly reveal something beyond their taken-for-granted presence.

He takes his place among those singers and painters of the haunted, the melancholy, the diminished, the caricatural, the humdrum’ – Michael Hofmann Valloton and fin-de-siècle France, Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet, Royal Academy of Arts, 2019 The first section of this volume of poetry lays the foundation that guides the rest. The poet pursues the memory of his mother, and captures in images the disjointedness and out-of-sync-ness that the dead leave in their wake. The Ear’, Beneath the Skin: Writers on the Body (London: Profile Books/Wellcome Trust) and BBC Radio Three, 2018