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

Tim Liardet 's new pamphlet from Shoestring Press, Priest Skear , was launched last night in London.   Priest Skear is a collection that explores images of drowining, rescue, hope, and hopelessness, with profound humanity and poetic ability - not always combined as movingly as here.   Eyewear is very glad to be able to showcase two poems from this work, below. R I D I N G   T H E   G H O S T L Y    V E L O C I P E D E It’s said that drowning can be beautiful (…though the ones who said it were not the ones who had to drown). The surrender, perhaps, to the arms of water Shelley was gripped by—able to fly, but not to swim. And this my bid to join the fellowship of the drowned— more terrible than beautiful—these the fathoms striped with a route-map of light, this my bicycling down and down on the pedals of my feet with my arms thrown out wide as if to steer through imploding water the velocipede whose handlebars I tried to grip, but cou...

Atmospheric Pressure: A Work-Week Planner   Monday   Exercise, then add polka-dots to my raisin bran thighs. Later, bake a strawberry ocean of onions chiseled from tiny birdseed. Remember to flatter each page.   Tuesday   Organize a fight club. Put some fickle in my forensic kinship then spit polish it. Take the eye glass back to to mall and exchange it for an Albanian bee hive. One I can easily recognize.   Wednesday   Do a quick inventory of every bruised locksmith using a zip gun. Leave my galoshes at home. Pretend the previous spelling bee has derailed and wakes up in solitary confinement. And do it in the dark.   Thursday   Call-off the impromptu hailstorm and replace it with a photographer’s darkroom instead. Before dinner, mix vermillion devilment into the Vatican wine.   Friday   Take a shower with a fresh bar o Norte Dame then quietly die in the petting zoo just before a parenthesis cuts its way through the...

I was fortunate to read with Mark Boog , pictured, one of Holland's best younger poets, at the Maastricht International Poetry Nights end of October.  Below you will find two of his poems, in the original, and translated, taken from h is  De encyclopedie van de grote woorden  ( The Encyclopaedia of Big Words ) which won the prestigious VSB Poetry Prize in 2006.  Also a novelist, Boog was born in 1970 and is married with children.  It will be clear from these poems that, while Boog follows the Dutch poetic tendency to employ a strong, near-surrealist bent in imagery, he forgoes the avoidance of the personal, the playful, and the narrative, opening up Dutch poetry to new tones and directions. GELUK Het geluk is overkomelijk. Men plaatst het in een vitrine en gaat aan het werk. Wie ernaar vraagt krijgt het te zien, onder weloverwogen commentaar. Het is gebruikelijk om ’s avonds achterover te zitten en het geluk, zoals dat beschaafd verlicht tentoongesteld staa...

Who is Oliver Reynolds ?  We might still be asking that - but a new review of his latest book, by David Wheatley , partly rescues Reynolds from something closely resembling benign neglect.  Odd, since he had four books with Faber, starting in the mid-80s, after winning an Eric Gregory Award, then the Arvon Prize - proof that nothing is sure in the house of poetry.  Now, Reynolds, perhaps eccentrically working, in middle-age, as an Opera House usher, has a new collection out, Hodge . He deserves readers.  Why does he not have them (much) anymore?  I suspect that the poetry world's indifference to many good and even excellent writers is partly connected to the social networks that, naturally, flow about publications - going to a launch one is reminded that most books receive the reception not of all their peers, but those known to the editors, publishers, and authors - if lucky.  And, as poetry circles widen and contract, with age and circumstance, some poe...

Sad news - one of the greatest graphic designers of the 20th century has died - Neil Fujita .  Fujita made a stylish, indelible mark on the 60s and 70s with his album covers for classics like Brubeck 's Take Five , and the book covers for hugely-bestselling paperbacks The Godfather and In Cold Blood .  Fujita overcame racism and internment to become a vital part of post-war American culture, and is a remarkable figure, if not a household name.

Eyewear is very glad to welcome to these pages, today, the Icelandic poet and novelist   Gerður Kristný (pictured). Kristný was born in 1970, and has a degree in French and comparative literature from the University of Iceland.  She is a successful children's novelist, as well as one of her country's leading poets.  She is married, and has a family. She travels widely to international festivals, such as the recent Maastricht International Poetry Nights (October 28-30) where I met her as a fellow reader.  I was impressed with her reading style, and the look of her spare, decisive poems on the page.  She explores the Sagas, religious images, myth, feminist concerns, relationships, and the icy landscape of her home, in her minimalist, clipped, ironic, and suggestive poems, which contain the proverbial nine-tenths of their force and heft beneath their surfaces.   Departure At the end of the ramp I inadvertently glance back but you have vanished...

We have all noticed this, but somehow, inexorably, we don't stop it - the definition of a dream that is a nightmare: the very financial system that brought the West to the brink of collapse has now generated the crisis-as-excuse (national debt) that leads to the election of ever-more extreme right-wing, libertarian, and pro-capitalist parties and politicians - in the UK, Cameron-Clegg , in the USA, Tea Partyers to the Congress, to thwart the shellacked Barack .  Capitalism perpetuates itself, a cancer. I offer no immediate or short-term solutions, but it seems clear to me that the only way out of this circular mess is to break the cycle - we need a new system of governance and economic distribution.  Such a shift is epochal - think the Medieval Age moving into the Renaissance, the Renaissance into the Industrial Age of modernity - eggs got broken, millions died or suffered, empires collapsed, whole ways of life became extinct.  That sort of upheaval has to happen, surel...