some LANDSCAPES

Jean-Antoine Linck, The confluence of the river Valsereine with the river Rhône, c. 1800-20 The British Museum currently has a small tempor...

The NYRB Poets series has a volume devoted to Li Shangyin (c. 813–858) contaiing the work of three translators. All of them have a go at his...

This is The Book of Taliesin , which I have been reading in the new translation by Gwyneth Lewis and Rowan Williams. Authors and dates for t...

  For various reasons it's much harder at the moment for me to go to exhibitions than it used to be, but I did pop down yesterday to the...

  Last year Princeton published this collection of Roni Horn's Iceland writings. The cover image beneath the yellow titles is one of 23 ...

I was recently given the splendid Thames & Hudson volume STRATA: William Smith's Geological Maps , which has contributions from a r...

  The oceans and deserts of Vija Celmins are monochrome patterns of pencil marks and brush strokes - no landmarks, just abstract surfaces. S...

Paul Claudel (1868 - 1955) joined the French Ministry for Foreign Affairs after university, where he had begun writing poetry and attending ...

Yosa Buson, Travels Through Mountains and Fields, c. 1765 Source: Wikimedia Commons I've been reading The Collected Haiku of Yosa Buson ...

     Edward Lear, The valley of the Shkumbin River near Elbasan in central Albania , 26 September 1848  Edward Lear's travel writing is,...

Last year Carcanet published The Threadbare Coat: Selected Poems by Thomas A. Clark, a writer I have often referred to on this blog. There ...

I have been looking back at some books I read before starting this blog and have never got round to mentioning. One of these is Simplicissim...

When I look back on this period of lockdown I think the 'highlight' will probably be the fortnight or so we spent as a family watchi...

In these interminable lockdown days it is easy to get sick of walking the same streets over and over again. Of course there is always Google...

In his poem 'On a Winter Morning before Sunrise', the twenty-one year old Eduard Mörike (1804-75) wrote of his emotions on seeing th...

Joseph Beuys, 7000 Eichen Photograph taken in 2003, from Wikimedia Commons   Following on from my last post I thought I would briefly mentio...

herman de vries in the Steigerwald (source: Vince de Vries, Wikimedia Commons) The meadow planted near Eschenau in Upper Franconia by herman...

  The Coat of Arms of Alland, Lower Austria I like the way that when you look somewhere up on Wikipedia you tend to get given its coat of ar...

A recent edition of The Early Music Show on Radio 3 focused on the music of Latin America and had a segment on the soundscapes of ancient m...

In between the first and second waves of coronavirus I managed to get to an art exhibition - the Royal Academy's Léon Spilliaert retrosp...