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

Jessica Mayhew reviews Stag’s Leap by Sharon Olds , winner of the 2012 TS Eliot Prize Arranged chronologically, Stag’s Leap begins at the instant, ‘While He Told Me.’ Here, the poet’s clear gaze is drawn to the minutiae of separation, from the face of the bedroom clock, to the ‘cindery lichen skin’ of her husband’s chest (‘While He Told Me’). This immediately situates these poems in the everyday, a world that seems unbearably familiar, and yet distant. Olds writes of how her husband wakes early on the morning after, and goes to read on the sofa: as he often did, and in a while I followed him, as I often had,   and snoozed on him... (‘While He Told Me’) In the repetitions of Olds’ explanations of their actions, the reader can feel the pain of being forced to confront and unlearn the routines of a marriage. These lines have a sense of delay, showing the poet’s attempt at adjustment. Later in the collection, ‘Tiny Siren’ examin...

JAMES A. GEORGE, EYEWEAR FILM CRITIC, ON THE NEW, POETIC MALICK FILM It has just passed midnight and I’ve just arrived home from seeing To The Wonder from American auteur, Terrence Malick . Usually I would let a film settle in a day or two before writing about it so that I can come across as informed. As if all the nuances and aspects hit me straight away, and that I am in fact perfectly in tune with the cinematic language. If you’re familiar with Malick’s work since Badlands (1973), up to his most recent The Tree of Life (2011), you will know that the impact during viewing – whether it’s first, second, or tenth viewing – the emotional impact is at its most potent during the film. This is in part due to the stylised aesthetic of his recent work and lack of plot and scenes as you might typically imagine them, which makes it hard to recall moments, like trying to recite a fading dream at breakfast. I gave myself a slap when I described this film as quaint to a frie...

Alice Willington reviews Instinct by Joel Lane Instinct is a pamphlet of 23 poems, and its subtitle is poems of desire . These indeed are “poems of desire”; but the poet’s focus is the end, or the death, of desire, and the aftermath of physical passion. The images are strong, “After breakfast, I’ll walk you/ (on hollow feet) to the bus stop.” Or, “You need these souvenirs. /Your body’s an empty plate on the pavement.” It is a rare event in this group of poems for the joyful centre of passion to be articulated and for happiness to be told unadulterated. In the poem ‘The Cries’:             “a boy whoops softly, and a girl             Laughs, once, with such complete             Tenderness and repose that the bare             walls cannot use the...