#postwar british

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Gripping..... by Paul Malon Via Flickr: 1949; maybe the English were unhappy with post-WW2 rationing?

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barry macsweeney, the book of demons.

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don paterson, the dead

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Here Too Spring Comes to Us with Open Arms

& it looks like this:

a few youngers sprawled like a deck of trick cards on the back stairs

talking all that talk about any day now they’ll be taken under the wing of a dragon

little cousins unseen in the side pocket of the function plotting a sleepover

if you ask my mum and I ask yours they’ll say yes

twilight and three unbroken voices at the back of the bus

flat earth theories flat asses flat shoes – sweet nonsense chatting

wickedest whine from Chantel and the boy would’ve fell on the dance floor

if the arms of his bredrin didn’t hold him up (like scaffolding)

two men bouncing along the pavement

through another eye they look like young dolphins slicing coastal waves

two schoolgirls walking down the street laughing

nobody knows why

a room of unraveling ribbons reaching for the same microphone

to spit over an eskimo instrumental

a boy smiles at the mirror welcoming a new strip of muscle

breaking through the sheen of boyishness

a fresh pair of Air Jordans, clean like a smile

and everywhere they touch is hallowed ground

a boy who takes pain like a stone looks up and imagines

stars hanging in the night sky like meditating monks

a girl sends a risky text: the universe gasps and sound falls in on itself

a riskier reply is received

at dusk the boy walks through the park

no police no opps only the company of spirits

- Caleb Femi

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Christine De Luca

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this is my truth tell me yours

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Some time back, I wrote a blog about Chris Torrance's The Magic Door, in which I spoke about the way the poem drew on both modernist influences and on the peculiarly British version of the late 1960s/early 1970s counterculture.// Ever since, I've been thinking about this nexus and of the fairly numerous long poems that have been written by British poets who came into their own in this period, the Children of Albion generation[ii], for want of a better term. These poets tended to be interested in the Poundian line of modernism, but this interest was often tempered by a particular debt to British modernists such as Basil Bunting, Hugh MacDiarmid and David Jones.//Their indebtedness to the counterculture was apparent in an interest in the Matter of Britain: standing stones, ley lines, and other deposits of the island's Celtic and pre-Celtic cultures; the corpus of medieval and Renaissance ballad and courtly song; British folk art, music and dance; the Beat poets and their American predecessors, especially William Williams and Charles Olson, and so on.

Billy Mills, 'Iain Sinclair's hidden London in verse', the guardian

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Hawksmoor is the subject of a poem by Iain Sinclair called 'Nicholas Hawksmoor: His Churches' which appeared in Sinclair's collection of poems Lud Heat (1975). Sinclair promoted the poetic interpretation of the architect's singular style of architectural composition that Hawksmoor's churches formed a pattern consistent with the forms of Theistic Satanism though there is no documentary or historic evidence for this. This idea was, however, embellished by Peter Ackroyd in his novel Hawksmoor (1985): the historical Hawksmoor is refigured as the fictional Devil-worshipper Nicholas Dyer, while the eponymous Hawksmoor is a twentieth-century detective charged with investigating a series of murders perpetrated on Dyer's (Hawksmoor's) churches.

Both Sinclair and Ackroyd's ideas in turn were further developed by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell in their graphic novel, From Hell, which speculated that Jack the Ripper used Hawksmoor's buildings as part of ritual magic, with his victims as human sacrifice. In the appendix, Moore revealed that he had met and spoken with Sinclair on numerous occasions while developing the core ideas of the book. The argument includes the idea that the locations of the churches form a pentagram with ritual significance.

Nicholas Hawksmoor, wiki entry