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

I am sad to read in today's Guardian that Alice Miller  has died.  Miller was the author of books that explored and explained the traumas of childhood and children, in ways that took their side against "toxic" parents.  As a poet whose early work explored child abuse, and the traumas of infancy and youth - and as a person who was in psychoanalysis for seven years in my twenties - I can only say that Miller's influential quarrel with Freud was significant.  However, some of her claims and extreme positions were themselves traumatic.  It will be important to sort out her legacy, now that she is gone.

I have been thinking lately of poets - and other writers - without children. The world is such a fertile place, and April's cruel green shoots are coming. Yet, T.S. Eliot had no children - a fact I find less commented on than might be, since it immediately casts many of his poems about barren and fertile ground into new light. Blake had no children with his wife, either. I note, too that Jane Austen and Karen Blixen did not have children. Neither did Mahmoud Darwish . Or of course, Larkin . Or Emily Dickinson . Or Hart Crane . Among the busy world, many go by without offspring.

Jack Swift was a Montreal lawyer and art collector, who died over Christmas, in the Eastern Townships, at the age of 72. He was also my father's brother, and my closest family friend. He was more than an uncle, but also my mentor, introducing me to many of the key interests of my life so far: Ireland, literature, theatre, music, film, and the genius of queer culture. Below is the eulogy I wrote for his funeral, edited a little, as some of the comments are too personal for a blog. ... Those who knew Jack Swift will know that, in his dying, the world has lost an extraordinary figure. We are so often informed by the media that X or Y is charismatic or larger than life that we sometimes forget to test such claims against our own experience. John A. A. Swift was truly larger than life - the sort of brilliant, compelling enthusiast, bon vivant and interlocutor who instantly dominated - no other word will do - almost any situation he found himself in. In his modes of personal and public ...

Pauline Baynes is one ofthe greatest of 20th century illustrators for children's literature - and one of the most loved. Sadly, she has died. Her drawings for the C.S. Lewis classic, The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe , literally added another dimension to that work, investing its imaginative reaches with new levels of intrigue and pathos. I loved her illustrations in the Narnia series, and for some of the Tolkien books, too. Other great illustrators of this kind would include Garth Williams, who transformed Stuart Little , and Jules Feiffer's The Magic Tollbooth . Peggy Fortnum's Paddington Bear is also delightful. And one also recalls work for The Wind in the Willows , by numerous hands. Eyewear welcomes reader's comments on their best-beloved illustrated children's works.