My favourite album of the year is from the prize-winning Australian band, The Jezabels, called Prisoner. As I wrote earlier this year at this blog, the album is limitless to me in its sonic pleasures - I have listened to it literally three hundred times this year, often before bedtime. Its shimmering generosity, and drumming panache, reminds me of the best of U2, or Simple Minds, with a dash of Siouxsie. But it has a radiance all its own. The high point of the album is 'Rosebud' with its romantic connotations, and hint of Citizen Kane. It lifts my spirits every time I hear it.
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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