March 2012 – STUFF HAPPENS

Spring

Trees and hedges are greening up just now. It’s got me thinking about the electric opening lines of this (otherwise morbid) poem by Dylan Thomas. Click here to listen to Thomas reading it. THE FORCE THAT THROUGH THE GREEN FUSE DRIVES THE FLOWER The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green […]

by Alex Hickman

Russia’s middle class + a marvellous painting

Walking around the Tretakayov State Gallery I found Russia’s middle class. There they were sipping coffee among the tourists in the café, and tugging their young children past the 15th century icons. These people – the forward looking element of the Russian electorate – have been thrust to the centre stage stage of this country’s politics. Whether or […]

by Alex Hickman

Notes on Moscow

The drive in from Dormodedovo Airport through black and white forest and then, as the traffic bunches at the first of the ring roads around the city, the close proximity of hundreds of filthy cars queuing to get back inside the capital. The snow under its black crust is melting and flooding the road. This […]

by Alex Hickman

Notes on ‘A Bigger Picture’ by David Hockney (Royal Academy)

“Making a very small subject big”. The resumption of a relationship with a landscape – uncovering it – a stare at a single landscape maintained – the seasonal rotation but the accent on SPRING, and on summer. Spring: – The urgency of capturing the white hawthorn in (transient) flower – “as if thick white cream had […]

by Alex Hickman

Mont Blanc

Your pen is coffin-black, a casket for your dried ink which clotted into the thread, crackles when I turn the torpedo lid. The nib beaten gold, picked bone clean by the air, those mean years. Rolling up my sleeves I stand over a basin and with surgeon’s fingers sluice the pen. The water runs black […]

by Alex Hickman

38

38 is a collection of poems and prose. They describe the impact that my father’s death had had on me. He died when he was 38, and for a long time I assumed my life would also end at 38. This triggered various consequences, and made the crossing of this line quite significant. The poems […]

by Alex Hickman

Take Courage

On Thursday evening I met up with my friend Dave in the Stars for a long anticipated poetry reading session. We prioritised Louis MacNeice and Robin Robertson and Philip Larkin. Dave is the scholar and I am the student and buy the pints. The Stars has stopped stocking Timothy Taylor’s Landlord because they kept getting […]

by Alex Hickman

His twenties

He stayed at the Safari Inn, where a bare, stone-floored room cost $3 per night. The Safari was scented with smoke from mosquito coils which were lit each night in the stair well and which in the morning had each expired to curls of ash. Breakfast (coffee, omelette, toast and fruit jam, a pink slice […]