Recent posts

David Jones Poems

 

David Jones, was a 20th century English poet who was one the early exponents of the British modernist movement. He was also an accomplished watercolour painter, specialising in portraits, religious subjects and landscapes, and an occasional wood engraver. A lifetime of artistic and literary achievements earned if many honours and awards including a Companion of Honour and Companion of the British Empire. ...

Rolando Hinojosa Poems

 

Rolando Hinojosa is a Chicano (Mexican-American) writer who is still active well into his 80s. He is sometimes referred to as Rolando Hinojosa-Smith. As well as being a poet, essayist and Professor of English, he is most famous for a lifetime project that he calls Klail City Death Trip, a series of novels now numbering fifteen. The story in each book relates ...

Michael Casey Poems

 

Michael Casey is an American poet who is generally acknowledged as the first poet to address the horrors of the Vietnam War in a way that really spoke to the readers, using humour and candour in equal measure. So many Americans were so detached from the war, both physically and emotionally, and Casey used the language of the soldiers and precise descriptions of events to ...

Brian Turner Poems

 

Professor Brian Turner is an American poet and former soldier. Much of his writing features his experiences fighting as a combat soldier in Iraq and his first collection of poems, called Here, Bullet won him the Beatrice Hawley Award in 2005. Since then he has won many more honours and awards and, in 2010, his second collection (Phantom Noise) was shortlisted for the T ...

Ellis Parker Butler Poems

 

Ellis Parker Butler was a much-loved American poet, essayist and short-story writer whose best known piece of work is a cautionary tale called Pigs is Pigs concerning an over-fussy railway station master who insists on charging too high a rate for the carriage of two small domestic pets and ends up with a house overrun with the animals. Butler’s literary output was considerable, running ...

Gaius Petronius Poems

 

Gaius Petronius Arbiter, to give him his full name, was a 1st century AD Roman poet and novelist. He is well known for being a voluptuary, in other words a pleasure seeker, seeking out carnal adventures by night and often sleeping through the day. He was a royal courtier, part of the Emperor Nero’s inner circle, and it is believed that he ...

Emily Holmes Coleman Poems

 

Emily Holmes Coleman was an American-born poet, novelist and diarist of the 20th century who lived much of her life in France and England. In 1930 she wrote one remarkable novel called The Shutter of Snow which was the story of a woman incarcerated in a mental hospital. She used her own experience of being similarly confined as valuable research for the novel. She ...

Clinton Scollard Poems

 

Clinton Scollard was an American poet, novelist and teacher of English. He served as Professor of English during the last decade of the 19th century at Hamilton College in New York. He was married twice, the second marriage being to fellow poet Jessie Belle Rittenhouse, with whom he collaborated on a number of writing projects. He was born on the 28th September 1860 in ...

Alfred de Vigny Poems

 

Alfred, the Comte de Vigny, was a 19th century French poet who was at the forefront of the Romantic movement in arts and literature in his country. He was also a novelist, playwright and translator of many of Shakespeare’s works into French. At the age of seventeen his noble background enabled him to be appointed as an army second lieutenant in the ...

Conrad Potter Aiken Poems

 

Conrad Potter Aiken was an American poet, short story writer and novelist of the 20th century who, at the age of 11, survived the tragedy of finding his parent’s bodies after his father had shot his mother and then turned the gun on himself. A multi-prize winning author, his collection of poems called Selected Poems won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1930. He was ...