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

SPOILER ALERT SOLDIERS NOT BATHING Dunkirk by Christopher Nolan (not the 1958 film with John Mills and Richard Attenborough ) may well be the summer movie event of 2017, just as Saving Private Ryan was the autumn event of roughly 20 years ago (the same year Nolan's Following debuted). However, whereas the earlier WW2 classic featured a bravura beach invasion of Europe scene unrivalled in contemporary film, and was directed by the leading blockbuster film-maker of our time, Spielberg , this new movie features death on a beach where the soldiery are seeking to escape the beachhead and the seabed, equally, and exit Europe (at least mainland). It was the first Brexit, as it were, and as endless pundits are muttering, and that forsaken politics does shade some of the gung-ho little England flag-waving at the end. More pointedly, the new film is an attempt to outdo Spielberg, but also Kubrick , James Cameron , and Ridley Scott , potential rivals to Nolan, whose immaculate, ...

Dominic Leonard Runner-up, Meg Eden Dominic Leonard is an undergraduate studying English at Christ Church, Oxford. His poems have appeared in IRIS, the Oxford Review of Books, The Kindling and the Poetry Business Book of New Poets (forthcoming), and in 2017 he won the Poetry Live competition. He is the President of Oxford University Poetry Society for 2017-18.   a new poet with a future Judge's Citation (by Oliver Jones ) This fortnight's raft of submissions contained many poems remarkable in their willingness to push their poet's expressive range to the very edge of non-sequitur.  None did so with such superb panache as Dominic Leonard 's winning submission, which stretched personification to its logical limit  - as did our runner up, Meg Eden in the highly effective 'Alzheimers, In Which My Grandmother Is A Blueberry Bush'.   Dominic's gift for accelerating his abstractions up to an impressive tempo is typical of a cluster of emerging Br...

SOME PEOPLE HAVE POEMS ON THE TIPS OF THEIR TONGUES THE EYEWEAR FORTNIGHT POETRY PRIZE is now into its 4th iteration, this time judged by Oliver Jones , and the shortlist is cheekily extended by 2 to 16! Who will win the £140? Stay tuned until tomorrow's announcement... congratulations to all these fine poets, from Australia to America, and in-between... Alison Palmer for‘Felling Trees’ Cassandra Cleghorn for ‘Drunkle, After Rehab’ Dominic Leonard for ‘No God Is Like A Vapour’ ... Eliza Mimski for ‘At Seventy’ Ellen Girardeau Kempler for ‘Inauguration Blues’ Emily Osborne for ‘Four Drawers’ Greer Gurland for ‘Chapter Three’ Kate Ennals for ‘Heidegger's Truth’ Lynne Burnett for ‘It Rains For Him’ M.E. MacFarland for ‘A Halo And Some Doves’ Masa Torbica for ‘Landscapes’ Meg Eden for ‘Alzheimers, In which My Grandmother is a Blueberry Bush’ Phill Provance for ‘Triangle’ Sarah Carey for ‘Accommodations’ Seanin Hughes for ‘Pink Is A Sister Sick’ Wes Lee for ‘They Say We Made...