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

This wouldn't be an Eyewear blog without a review of a Simple Minds album. In rear-view, none of the recent, critically lauded comeback LPs have been truly as great as that run from the 1980s - but usually as pompous, majestic, grandiose, religious, and shimmering. My love for this band is in their sure-fire surges of greatness cranked up to 11, and utter refusal of irony - they are the sincerest, and most engaged of bands - emotive, political, passionate - lacking nothing in the way of conviction. In terms of launching into the crowd with dedication to songcraft, pulse of inspiration, and faith in a better future - this is maximum uplift. Now, 40 years after 1982's New Gold Dream 81-82-83-84 - the greatest new romantic/ new wave LP of the 1980s, tied with one by Echo & The Bunnymen maybe; and arguably one of the most romantic and religious works of Scottish poetry and music ever composed, their latest is back - more bombastic than ever. In terms of grandeur, and rock dr...

TERENCE TILLER’S LOVELY SHAPES OF RHETORIC : AN INTRODUCTION TO HIS COLLECTED POEMS   Terence Tiller died in 1987, in December; 29 years later this autumn his Collected Poems is to appear, on his centenary. His poems, often explorations of love and desire, and often set in Egypt during World War II, are almost the poetic equivalent of the Bogart-Bergman film Casablanca . Tiller, who is more or less a forgotten figure now, published three volumes with the New Hogarth Library in the Forties. Poems was the first of these, from 1941; his second was The Inward Animal , from 1943. His Third, Unarm, Eros , from 1947, completes a trilogy of wartime poetry arguably unequalled for its extravagant lyric modernism. One of the few contemporary critics to write on Tiller is Andrew Duncan, who emphasizes the sensitivity and sensuousness of mid-century poetry, especially Tiller’s. Tiller ‘seems to have devoted much time to writing poetry which was sexy and romantic’. [1] Duncan al...