Poem of the week: Solitude by Peter McDonald
A wounded bird becomes an image for much wider damage to our world
Solitude
Paraphrase on Saint-John Perse, Anabase IV
Category Poetry
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What we’re reading: writers and readers on the books they enjoyed in August
Writers and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments
One of my favourite reads recently has been Childish Literature by Chilean author Alejandro Zambra, translated by Megan McDowell. It’s a mixed-genre book of memoir, short fiction and poetry on the theme of parenting and new fatherhood, with lots of lucidity, humour and humility throughout.
Poem of the week: Search Engine: Notes from the North Korean-Chinese-Russian Border by Suji Kwock Kim
Kim’s meditation on the disruptions experienced by family members during the Korean war and North Korean dictatorship explores absence, searching and separation
Search Engine: Notes from the North Korean-Chinese-Russian Border
By which a strip of land became a hole in time – Durs Grünbein
Where to start with: John Burnside
Seán Hewitt, who introduces a new edition of the Scottish author’s final memoir, guides readers through his landmark works a year on from his death
John Burnside was one of those rare prolific writers whose quality and care was not diminished by the apparent ease with which words arrived. His life’s work is like a dark, glittering, ethereal yet earthy river of thought, full of angels, ghosts, nocturnes, animals. These are books as brimming with spirit and light as they are with eroticism and violence. If there is one word I would use to summarise Burnside’s work, it’s grace. He was a graceful writer, in terms of his elegance, but also one concerned with redemption and the moments of light that emerge from sorrow and great pain.
Burnside died in 2024 at the age of 69, not long after being awarded the David Cohen prize for literature, an award that recognises a lifetime’s achievement. Before that, he had won just about every award going in the poetry world: the Forward prize, the TS Eliot prize and the Whitbread book award among them.
Poem of the week: Autumn by Vidyan Ravinthiran
Keats’s famous ode speaks across time and space to a 21st-century Sri Lankan, whose turbulent history catches on its mellow mood
Autumn
(after John Keats)
The fallen yellow leaves now oftener
flare red. Embers. Blown-up chilli-flakes.
The burning of the library at Jaffna.
Foreign dead about to break
the spell of here and now. Phantasms steal
into the peaceful lives we seem to have earned,
telling tales about what happened
to them, not us, and in a tongue I never learned.
This is my garden, my spade of blood meal
and from our kitchen the time-travelling smell
of chicken curry floats to Walden Pond.
Alexandrian Sphinx by Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis review – the mysterious life of Constantine Cavafy
The enigmatic queer poet admired by EM Forster and Jackie Onassis takes centre stage in this unconventional biography
The second floor of 10 Rue Lepsius, tucked away in the old Greek quarter of Alexandria above a brothel, was, for three decades, the literary focal point of the city. Entering the apartment, out of the Mediterranean sun, visitors would need a minute to adjust to the dimness, gradually perceiving faded curtains and heavy furniture, every surface covered with antiques and whimsical objects. There was no electricity, only candlelight. The host, proffering morsels of bread and cheese from the shadows, was an older man with “enigmatic eyes” beneath round spectacles – the poet Constantine Cavafy.
What kind of person might be discerned amid the gloom? This is what Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis set out to discover in their deeply researched and engaging biography, the first for 50 years. They brilliantly recreate his world – two chapters about Alexandria are especially good – and investigate his place within it. Cavafy, whose admirers and champions included WH Auden, EM Forster, David Hockney and Jackie Onassis, has remained enigmatic since his death at 70 in 1933. Surprisingly, for a poet who never sold a book in his lifetime – and instead circulated broadsheets, pamphlets and sewn notebooks, building his reputation poem by poem – he now has “a global audience he could never have imagined”, thanks to poems such as The City, Waiting for the Barbarians and Ithaca, which Onassis asked to be read at her funeral.
‘I’m carrying survivor’s guilt’: Raymond Antrobus on growing up deaf
The poet reflects on his heritage, his new life as a father in Margate – and why his memoir is a call to arms
When Raymond Antrobus was a child, he writes in his new book, The Quiet Ear, his father would call him “white” when he was drunk, and “black” when he was sober. “White” was meant as an insult, the author explains over tea in his flat in Margate, where a pile of toys indicate the recent presence of his own young son. In his cruellest moments, it was a way for Antrobus’s black father, who died in 2014, to say “I don’t understand you. I don’t love you. You don’t understand my pain.”
Antrobus, 38, is calm and reflective when he talks about this. As a deaf person who relies on hearing aids and lip-reading to communicate, he says he has long had to “make sense of myself for other people”.
Poem of the week: Sea-Fever by John Masefield
A single missing word in the 1902 poem sparks a deeper look at rhythm, dialect and longing
Sea-Fever
I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by.
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face and a grey dawn breaking.
What we’re reading: writers and readers on the books they enjoyed in July
Writers and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments
The user-friendly short chapter format of Nicci Cloke’s Her Many Faces, designed for our internet-lowered attention spans, obscures the fact that this page-turning, multiple viewpoint thriller is actually a densely plotted novel full of amazing twists. This is the book you want to take on a long, boring journey you’re dreading. You’ll pray you finish it before you arrive at your destination.
Men in Love by Irvine Welsh is published by Jonathan Cape (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Faber has reissued Barbara Kingsolver’s titles The Lacuna, Flight Behaviour and The Poisonwood Bible.
Poem of the week: A Hundred Doors by Michael Longley
An atheist’s complaint at the scant room made by the church for his personal commemoration of the dead
A Hundred Doors
God! I’m lighting candles again, still
The sentimental atheist, family
Names a kind of prayer or poem, my muse
Our Lady of a Hundred Doors.
