Synopsis

The London Magazine - August / September 2007 by Sebastian Barker

Ben Okri is interviewed by Rima Devereaux and Seamus Heaney is in conversation with Valentina Polukhina about Joseph Brodsky. David Wilson visits the Barbican's exhibition on art in the punk years and Peter Lee-Wright considers Tate Britain's retrospective of British photography. Jeffrey Meyers returns to Dracula and Duncan Bush reviews Ian McEwan. Mike Niblett welcomes new books on Black British history and the slave trade. Fiction by Anita Jackson and Luke Stegemann.

FICTION
'Back to the Square Hole', Anita Jackson
'Shore Leave', Luke Stegemann

POETRY
'Cricket Bat', 'The Runners', 'After Primo Levi' & 'Two Portraits', Dannie Abse
'Youth and Age', James Kirkup
'Andante Cantabile', Julie Whitby
'One Afternoon', Derek Stanford
'Harvest: For N.H.', Sydney Giffard
'Prayer Wheel', Christopher Nield
'Tenebrio' & 'Sand', Tony Williams
'The Body Pastoral', Catherine Ormell
'In the Square Rameau at Lille', Marjorie Sweetko
'Undertakers', Martin Edwards
'Lauds and Gauds for a Laureate', Seamus Heaney
'Irene’s Siege', Thomas Ország-Land
'Nirvana', James Harpur
'24 Sentencias', Dan Liebert
'A Villanelle', Simon Darragh
'Kids Like You', Swithun Cooper
'The Saddest Girl in the World', Vanessa Austin Locke
'Hive' & 'Night Time', Mina Gorji
'This Hill Country', Togarepi Piwayi

FEATURES
'Anarchy in the UK', David Wilson
'Dracula's Loneliness', Jeffrey Meyers
Seamus Heaney and Valentina Polukhina in conversation
'How We Are', Peter Lee-Wright
Ben Okri and Rima Devereaux in conversation

REVIEWS
John Greening on C.K. Williams
Simon Darragh on Jim Greenhalf, Richard Burns, Bill Manhire & Tony Lopez
Mike Niblett on David Dabydeen, John Gilmore & Cecily Jones' Oxford Companion to Black British History and James Walvin's study of the slave trade
Rafe McGregor on Andrei Sinyavsky's history of Russian folk belief
Geoffrey Heptonstall on Colin Wilson
Sean Elliott on Luis Buñuel
Anthony Rudolf on Rochelle Ratner
Duncan Bush on Ian McEwan
Cover: Candy Darling on her Deathbed, Peter Hujar (1974, silver gelatin)

Dannie Abse, b Cardiff 1923, FRSL. In 2003 his New & Collected Poems received the Special Commendation of The Poetry Book Society. Running Late won the Roland Mathias Prize in 2007. Hutchinson recently published his memoir The Presence.
Duncan Bush. Poetry Midway (Seren). Co-editor of The Amsterdam Review.
Swithun Cooper, 23, MA from Manchester University, lives in Leeds. Published in Avocado, Glasgow Herald, Times Educational Supplement, The London Magazine, and New Poetries III (Carcanet).
Simon Darragh, poet and translator from the Greek, divides his time between England and the Greek island Alònnisos.
Rima Devereaux lives in London and works as an editor, researcher, and writer.
Martin Edwards teaches in Bournemouth. Pamphlet Coconut Heart (Redbeck). martinlloydedwards@gmail.com
Sean Elliott, poet & essayist. Teaches at Birkbeck College, lives in Margate.
Sydney Giffard lives in Wiltshire. Japan Among the Powers (Yale 1994). Editor Guns, Kites & Horses (Radcliffe Press 2003).
Mina Gorji, b Tehran 1975, grew up in London. Research fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford, specialising in Romantic literature. Poems in The Delinquent and The Oxford Magazine. Essays Rude Britannia (2007). Critical study of John Clare (2008).
John Greening’s book on Thomas Hardy’s poetry recently appeared from Greenwich Exchange. Poetry Iceland Spar (2008). http://www.johngreening.co.uk.
James Harpur. Fourth collection The Dark Age published by Anvil this autumn along with Fortune’s Prisoner, his translation of the poems of Boethius. His non-fiction includes Love Burning in the Soul, an introduction to the Christian mystics.
Seamus Heaney, b County Derry 1939. Nobel Prize for Literature (1995).
Geoffrey Heptonstall writes for Contemporary Review. Published in magazines and anthologies. Collected essays online from Questia. BBC radio feature writer. Teaches Creative Writing in Cambridge.
Anita Jackson, 1935-2006, worked as a teacher and in race relations. Her stories have been published in Stand, Midstream, and The London Magazine.
James Kirkup, the poet, b 1918, lives in Andorra.
Peter Lee-Wright, Senior Lecturer, Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths College, University of London. Documentary filmmaker for 30 years, mainly with BBC TV and Channel 4.
Dan Liebert lives in New York and Lawrence on the Ohio River. Published in Yale Review, Barrow Street, Michigan Quarterly Review & co.
Vanessa Austin Locke, 24, lives in Brighton. Masters in Writing and Authorship at Sussex University. Poetry: This Was The Start (PublishAmerica 2005).
Rafe McGregor, b 1973, lives in York. Freelance writer specialising in history of popular fiction and military history. Published two crime fiction novellas. http://www.rafemcgregor.co.uk
Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, recently published Impressionist Quartet and Modigliani: A Biography. Biography of Samuel Johnson (Basic Books 2008).
Mike Niblett teaches at the Centre for Translation & Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick. Co-editing Perspectives on the ‘Other America’.
Christopher Nield lives in London. Poems in PNReview, Ambit, The Rialto, and New Poetries IV (Carcanet 2007). Won a Keats-Shelley Prize 2006.
Catherine Ormell worked in the City as a freelance journalist for the national newspapers. Non-executive director of a design agency. Poems in THE SHOp, Poetry News, Magma, Smiths Knoll & co.
Thomas Ország-Land is a poet and foreign correspondent. Working on an anthology of poetry translated from the Hungarian of Holocaust survivors.
Togarepi Piwayi teaches in a school in Zimbabwe.
Valentina Polukhina is Emeritus Professor at Keele University, England. Specialist in modern Russian poetry and the author of several studies of Joseph Brodsky. She edited with Daniel Weissbort An Anthology of Russian Women Poets (2005). She has also organised the visits of 40 Russian writers and poets to British universities.
Anthony Rudolf, Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, FRSL.
Derek Stanford, b 1918, lives in Hove. Veteran poet, writer, and critic. The poet Julie Whitby is his Muse.
Luke Stegemann is an Australian writer, translator, and teacher living in Valencia, Spain. His fiction has appeared in Wet Ink, Quadrant and Island.
Marjorie Sweetko. Poetry published in Orbis, Envoi, Chimera, Equinox & co. She teaches English language at Marseille University.
Julie Whitby. Poetry: The Violet Room (Acumen) and Poems for Lovers (Agenda Editions).
Tony Williams. Published in The Rialto, Smiths Knoll, TLS, The Dark Horse, Staple, Anon, and nthposition.
Professor David Wilson’s new book Serial Killers: Hunting Britons and Their Victims, 1960-2006, is published by Waterside Press.

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