Geoffrey Heptonstall is the author of Heaven's Invention, a novel (Black Wolf 2017) and two poetry collections published by Cyberwit: The Rites of Paradise (2020) and Sappho’s Moon (2021). A new collection will appear soon.
Aldous Huxley began his career writing for Vogue. Assigned to write about the trivial and the transient was, he said...
There is an Old English poem, The Ruin, describing a city, generally believed to be Bath, as it was in the Dark Ages.
Words know their place. They seek a homeland. The location is never arbitrary.
‘Shadows are confused by sunlight,’ is the conclusion of The Conference of the Birds, Jean-Claude Carrière’s...
Paul Muldoon’s image is striking. The poet looks out of the window at an everyday scene...
‘Trees at night are like an army marching.’ So begins Nicholas Mosley’s novel Accident. Trees are not blocks of wood...
Curiosity, if not fate, invites us to find our way down. There, in the shadows of our thoughts, lies the feeling that...
When we go down into the heart of things what do we find? At first it is very dark. There are voices in the distance...
L’Escargot by Henri Matisse is large and immediately apparent to any Tate Britain visitor...
Dying, I lose all sense of time...
A songbird’s silent flight through the storm...
The door closes on the day...
Whereof one cannot speak...
The world is in a process of transformation whenever a poet’s fingers inscribe a word...
Places of learning attract poets, both as a source of income and as an environment sympathetic to literary activity...
One poet often evokes consideration of another poet...
Literary fame is generally confined to a small circle of associates. Few writers emerge into public awareness.
The craft of writing is learned through the practice of writing. It is necessary to write constantly in every spare moment. You may be writing inside your thoughts, but you are writing as surely as if you had paper and pen before you. Is this not obvious?
Writers are the eyes of a society that is blind, the ears of a society that is deaf, and the tongue of a society that is dumb. For their service to society writers receive no thanks, nor do they expect any. Literature matters because it offers the continuity of purpose and the depth of meaning that the surface spectacle cannot provide.
A line of Robert Frost’s read long ago retains its appeal to me: ‘May something always go unharvested.’ He is writing of the apples he picks from the trees in the fall. The fall - that resonant American word for the late time of year before winter closes everything down. It is a time of abundance, a gathering of fruit especially. The apples fall from the trees, followed by the leaves. Then it is winter.
It was an irresistible treat to read Virginia’s Woolf Genius and Ink, a collection of essays for the Times Literary Supplement, now published by that same TLS as they were originally written.
The Rites of Paradise, my first full collection of poetry, is in print. I have considered gathering my work for a while. Initial enthusiasm from one publishing house came to nothing.
Like a time of war, the deadly virus spreads changing everything. We are in lockdown when we might be elsewhere. What follows are diary entries at various times in various places.
