Search results

Glimmerings of ecofeminist theory that would emerge a century later can be detected in women's poetry of the later Victorian period. Patricia Murphy examines the work of six "proto-ecofeminist" poets - Augusta Webster, Mathilde Blind, Michael Field, Alice Meynell, Constance Naden, and L. S. Bevington - who contested the exploitation of the natural world. Challenging prevalent assumptions that nature is inferior, rightly subordinated, and deservedly manipulated, these poets instead "reconstructed...

Set in the almost mythical summer of 1940, A Flame in Your Heart tells the story of the al-too-brief love of a Spitfire pilot and his girl. Written by two young Scottish poets born after the War, A Flame in Your Heart was broadcast on Radio 4. Its 'intense' atmosphere earned praise in The Times: 'The true feel of the period was there.' For Catherine Lockerbie, writing in The Scotsman, it was a 'languid' atmosphere: 'A most beautiful and musically constructed gaze at life and death over the ripen...

In 1948, aged eleven, the baker's boy from Beeston took up a scholarship at Leeds Grammar School. So began the education that would put 'books, books, books' between Tony Harrison and his working-class background, books that turned him into a major poet and dramatist. This edition of Harrison's poetry has been selected for students. It shows the poet finding his voice, staking a claim to a seat in 'the school of eloquence', and talking with his predecessors - Milton, Keats, Lawrence. It shows th...

Keeping Mum is the latest book of poems in English from Wales's bilingual virtuoso. It is a psychiatric detective story which explores the effect of a dying language on its speakers and looks at how abuses of language might lead to mental illness. Her investigation begins with a police interrogation, then broadens to take in a mental hospital, where the subject is questioned by a psychiatrist. Finally she uncovers angels in a sequence of sonnets,finding messengers from another realm inside our e...

This new series of recordings of contemporary poets has been originated by the British Council with Bloodaxe Books. Each two-hour double-cassette is a poetry quartet of four poets reading and talking about their work, each with a half-hour selection. This project revives the classic recording archive set up by the British Council in the 1960s under Peter Orr in which many leading poets of that time were recorded and released on a series of compilation LPs called The Poet Speaks. For The Poetry...

In an average classroom, in an average town, on an average afternoon it is not only the pupils who are starting at the clock longing for the bell to ring. The teachers are waiting too... THE PUPIL CONTROL GADGET Science teacher Robert West built a gadget which when pressed caused consternation far and wide by zapping pupils in mid stride. It froze all motion stopped all noise controlled the rowdy girls and boys and on fast forwards was great fun. It made them get their schoolwo...

This aims to provide a new kind of introduction to "The Canterbury Tales" which avoids excessive amounts of background information and involves both lecturer and student in the discovery of how Chaucer composed his famous work. A well-informed and practical guide, it presents a series of sources and contexts to be considered in conjunction with key passages from Chaucer's poems. It provides sets of questions encouraging the reader to examine the text in detail and build on his or her own observa...

Count Pietro Gamba (1801-27) was the brother of Teresa Guiccioli, Lord Byron's mistress, and a member of the Italian revolutionaries known as the Carbonari. He accompanied Byron on his mission to Greece in 1823, and was described by the poet as 'one of the most amiable, brave, and excellent young men' he had ever encountered, 'with a thirst for knowledge, and a disinterestedness rarely to be met with'. This account of the mission, and of Byron's death and the subsequent controversies over its ca...

The Lady of the Lake is a narrative poem by Sir Walter Scott, first published in 1810. Set in the Trossachs region of Scotland, it is composed of six cantos, each of which concerns the action of a single day. The poem has three main plots: the contest among three men, Roderick Dhu, James Fitz-James, and Malcolm Graeme, to win the love of Ellen Douglas; the feud and reconciliation of King James V of Scotland and James Douglas; and a war between the lowland Scots (led by James V) and the highland...