Canada - often described by the British media as "boring" - has the second most important single geographical structure (the first is the Amazon rain forest) to protect the world from apocalyptic global warming - the "white parasol" - and news today has it that around 25% of that has been lost - this year alone - in extreme calving of the Canadian ice-shelf.
THAT HANDSOME MAN A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought. Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that
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I read an article in the N. Geographic about what would happen if all the ice (glaciers, arctic caps etc.) melted. A rise of 100 meters they said. I wrote a little something about it:
A 100 METER RISE
Google Earth’s rounded Pacific, you get the picture:
every thing, every one we stood or lay down for
painted into corners, land’s blemish largely gone
below doodling, skywriting waves; gaunt
cities gridlocked in silence, occasionally lit
by a neon-bright school. A species’ name "writ
in water" – the scattered bone-pearls
sunken as old wrecks where "seaweed sways and swirls
as if swaying were its form of stillness". Pour
me another one. I guess I should get out more.
(The quoted lines are from Keats and D.H. Lawrence)