by Daniel Bosch In a recent New York Review of Books, novelist John Banville has written ecstatically on behalf of a new edition of the book known as Letters to a Young Poet (LTYP), one of Rilke’s most popular books — if we may call it his book, since it was assembled by Kappus after…
Read Moreby Daniel Bosch A dialogue on the poems of Frederick Seidel, especially Nice Weather Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012, 112 pp. and Poems 1959-2000 Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009, Scene Late morning. Faint sound of thunder and light rain falling on the roof, will fade to a stop in a few minutes. The modest home…
Read MoreCharon the Ferryman, Jose Benlliure y Gil, 1919 by Daniel Bosch “Ferry,” the English noun and verb, is derived from the Old Norse “ferja,” to move across a body of water. “Ferry” is related to German “fahren,” to ride, or to travel, the sense of which includes duration. It is richly cognate with the Latin…
Read MoreSelf-portrait, William Kentridge, 1988 by Daniel Bosch He had started the series from inside Plato’s cave, so when William Kentridge launched his sixth and final Charles Eliot Norton Lecture with a retelling of the story of Perseus, he gave familiar things back to his audience—the myth itself, and art’s gesture of circling toward origin at…
Read Moreby Daniel Bosch At readings, as in Greek triremes, We sit in rows, and row, and row, Facing the stern, red-rimmed, and doughy Face of someone Helen knows. All in one boat, we take our strokes As one, and make good time, reversed. “Mur-” is our word, and so is “rum.” Helen knows who used…
Read Moreby Daniel Bosch Fist hams, like bats, from rafters. Mouth meal ruminant in burlap sacks. Oxidized tongue silver. Eye beads’ caviar. Toe hammers crowding figure sticks. Leg bows like enormous upper lips Frown in tall stacks against wainscoting. Eye stars wink from cloudy amphorae At stuffed toe pigeons, mounted, “as in life.” Buckets of liver…
Read MorePringles are fun! Simultaneously convex and concave, Pringles mirror the society that demands them…
Read Moreby Daniel Bosch For the dead at Rana Plaza “So you’ve shifted much of the actual labor from more highly-trained employees to less-skilled and therefore less-expensive workers?” “They do a much better job than we could do ourselves, with our sophisticated technologies. And because of their effectiveness, the scientists and management professionals on our team…
Read MoreBerfrois is an online literary-intellectual magazine. Berfrois is free of adverts thanks to our supporters. Editor Russell Bennetts founded Berfrois in 2009. His work is featured in The Bookseller, The Coming of the Toads and the Poetry Foundation. Associate Editors Medha Singh is an author, translator and editor based in New Delhi. Her books are…
Read MoreBerfrois: The Book is now available at all good bookshops and a certain online store.
Read MoreWhat shocked me was how quickly I said to myself, in earnest certainty, that “We have today no American poet who is anywhere near as powerful and important to poetry as Nabokov is to prose fiction.”
Read MoreEpisode 8 features a spectacular short poem by Derek Walcott, number XXVIII in the sequence which became the book Midsummer published in 1985.
Read MoreIn the case of “An Arundel Tomb,” the work of art described is a funerary statue in Chichester Cathedral, in England. Ekphrastic poetry is a tricky and difficult thing, for a poem must be a work of art, an act of imagination in its own right, and not merely an account of another artist’s work.
Read MoreThis episode features a “Chorus” spoken late in Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy, a version of Sophocles’s Philoctetes. You can listen to it here:
Read MoreWelcome to Episode 5 of Human on My Faithless Arm, a series in which I recite from memory the same poems my infant daughter, Auden, hears me recite each night as lullabies. It is reductive to put it this way, because it so much more than this, but the poem featured in Episode 4, Sylvia…
Read MoreThe fourth episode features my recitation of Sylvia Plath’s “Blackberrying” and some commentary on the ways that a good poem will, as Derek Walcott used to say, “orchestrate” you—but only if you let it.
Read MoreIt is difficult for me to express the extent of my admiration for “Annabel Lee.” Perhaps this will do: no better poem has yet been composed by an American poet.
Read MoreWelcome back to Human on My Faithless Arm, a series of recitations of great poems composed in English.
Read MoreWelcome to Human on My Faithless Arm, a series of recitations of great poems composed in English.
Read MoreFor Tranströmer is ever conscious of the split between the fact of routine and a truth of the imagination.
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