E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Had this year been only about good songs, TV shows and movies, plays, concerts, seeing friends, swimming, reading and holidays, it might rank among my top ten favourite years since I was born. However, three major factors make me consider 2025 one of the worst years in my personal experience, and probably one of the very worst years of the past century geo-politically. 1. My mother died. I won't write more here about this, but as you can imagine, this has been the saddest and most upsetting personal life event since the death of my father. 2. Trump, the war against Ukraine, and war and suffering in the Middle East, not to mention other wars and tragedies and terror attacks, led to a geo-political instability "at home and abroad" - with American democracy being undermined as perhaps never before, not even during the Nixon period. 3. The environment. Without even considering the existential risk to all humanity from nuclear weapons, bio-weapons, nanotech, a new pandemic li...

As readers of my Swift Report 2025 will see, when it is posted, this was not what I'd consider a "great year" - for me personally, or for the world, ecologically and politically. However, just as 1941 WAS a great year for movies from Hollywood, in the depths of WWII, so too, 2025 offered some of the best popular/indie music, TV shows, and movies of the century so far. I won't be discussing theatre, opera, art, orchestral, or other works here, nor books. As a publisher that always seems awkward. Though I am on record as praising the posthumous collection by Irish poet Kevin Higgins from Salmon as a necessary book. And I found If anyone builds it, everyone dies a brilliant and thrilling propaganda work, sort of like The Communist Manifesto meets Terminator:2 . If it is even 25% true, as the authors put it, the world will likely be destroyed by superintelligent AI (ASI) by 2047, maybe even in the next 3 years. If accurate, the book is maybe the most important one ever...

I t has been 2 weeks and 2 days since my mother died. Such is the nature of mourning. Every day counts. Each days brings us farther from the incalculable mystery of when they were still alive, and able to communicate with us. There are few key messages to give to a parent, when there are few minutes left. I love you, or I am sorry - or maybe, I forgive you - but always, finally, I love you, and thank you. I want to write more about my mother, but she was very private. I will say, now, as Halloween nears - she was the kind of mother who would sew elaborate costumes for my brother and me. I once went as Kanga with Roo in my pocket (in fact of course my Roo was a Kanga doll). My mother was born in the Eastern Townships , Quebec, Canada, in a rural setting, though her parents were teachers. She had 3 sisters and one brother, and was the eldest sibling, which early on established her take charge approach. She spent some summers on the Gaspe peninsula, in Port Daniel, where her uncle and aun...

 My mother, Mary Margaret, has died. Three days ago. I'd like to write more now, but she was very private, and did not want public obituaries or death notices. In time, when her memorial is on the horizon, or sooner but not now, I want to write something about her, in prose. For now, I am simply devastated.

  Yeats was sometimes wrong. As maybe were The Old Masters. Not sure about them today. But Yeats, yes - sometimes a terrible ugliness is born. The last few months have seen ambassadorial resignations, assassination, slaughter of innocents, wars, aerial bombardments, mass arrests - while the West slips closer to authoritarianism, and the idea of democracy withers. Meanwhile, global heating is inexorably killing life as we know it, on our planet. This we know, yet we go to ballgames, TV awards, movies, clubs, restaurants, bars, and play away our cares, because, as Eliot another poet said, approximately, that too much reality is unbearable. If this blog has not commented on every event, poems have been written, tears shed, hands wrung, and despair felt, rest assured. Now Trump , our strange bedfellow, is here in the UK. The Age of Social Media is giving way to the Age of AI. Vast fortunes are about to be made, and millions made jobless. War and medicine, art and science, sex and reli...

A  poem for my mother, July 15 When she was dying And I was in a different country I dreamt I was there with her Flying over the ocean very quickly, And arriving in the room like a dream And I was a dream, but the meaning was more Than a dream has – it was a moving over time And land, over water, to get love across Fast enough, to be there, before she died, To lean over the small, huddled figure, In the dark, and without bothering her Even with apologies, and be a kiss in the air, A dream of a kiss, or even less, the thought of one, And when I woke, none of this had happened, She was still far distant, and we had not spoken.