#peter levi

[gustaving]

By Peter Levi

[seekingstars]

227 - Peter Levi

[verdantlyviolet]

No one waxes poetic about rivers or Harry Brewster himself like Peter Levi in The River Gods of Greece …

One begins to see in the mythology as well as the geography of all these rivers that they have distinct personalities and different tones.

I do not suppose anyone but Harry Brewster has visited all these rivers, and we shall be condemned to envy him until we have equalled him.

What gives life in these pages is the vigorous mobility of water, its speed and slowness and its charm in light and shadow, affecting us — as it affects so much of the best Greek landscape - by secrecy and by contrast.

[cithaerons]

Bodies and tears are useless; so few years are helpless; free creatures are never wild enough. 

Peter Levi, from The Gravel Ponds

[whisperthatruns]

Talk

You're a brave man they tell me. I'm not. Courage has never been my quality. Only I thought it disproportionate so to degrade myself as others did. No foundations trembled. My voice no more than laughed at pompous falsity; I did no more than write, never denounced, I left out nothing I had thought about, defended who deserved it, put a brand on the untalented, the ersatz writers (doing what had anyhow to be done). And now they press to tell me that I'm brave. How sharply our children will be ashamed taking at last their vengeance for these horrors remembering how in so strange a time common integrity could look like courage.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko, translated from the Russian by Robin Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi

[pesti-devota-futurae]

this stuff got published ... .. .. ..

[culturevulturette]

Alcaic 

Out in the deep wood, silence and darkness fall, Down through the wet leaves the October mist; No sound, but only a blackbird scolding, Making the mist and the darkness listen.

 Peter Levi

[artisticsoulsblog]