Search results for ""Author Angela Leighton""

In 'Pickpocket, Naples', a sonnet sequence reflecting on her Neapolitan background, Angela Leighton imagines a poem 'surprised in the act of finding itself'. Constantly alert to such surprises, One, Two moves from memory-scapes of childhood to elegies for her mother, quirky tributes to the creatures of the natural world to anguished poems about breath and breathlessness in times of coronavirus. Some of these poems are in formal stanzas; others catch the spaced freedom of dream or day-dream. Above all, this is a poetry which insists on the rhythmic footstep that walks in words, on the 'one, two' of a beat in language, whether the steps of a dance or the daily countdowns of sickness and death. The volume ends with some translations of the poetry of Dante and Pirandello which, either strictly or more freely, test the limits of translation. This is Leighton's fifth volume of poetry, and shows once again her characteristic sense of wit, music and formal invention.

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while news love meant to keep forever is wiped, so lightly, by this scanning weeper. 'Another Lighthouse' Angela Leighton's sixth collection of poems turns on the strange arts of remembering and forgetting. From Rome to Yorkshire, Naples to the Fens, she sets contemporary moments of hope and loss against a classical or Christian backdrop, while tracking a path that goes, more impersonally, from winter's cold to the growth of a garden. There are poems about war, love, childhood, age, and the wiping of memories they (differently) encourage. Whether elegiac or humorous, each tightly written poem is its own imaginable place, where words have the keen touch of things, yet things – a creaky old lift in a palazzo, a glass harp played in a backstreet, the CDs hanging on a tree, a clay doll in a museum – resonate like memorials to 'something' beyond themselves. Whether in strict or free form, in rhyming stanzas or verbal openwork, this is a collection that tests the sound-shapes of language while always listening for the tunes and rhythms that make it sing.

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Hearing Things is a meditation on sound’s work in literature. Drawing on critical works and the commentaries of many poets and novelists who have paid close attention to the role of the ear in writing and reading, Angela Leighton offers a reconsideration of literature itself as an exercise in hearing.An established critic and poet, Leighton explains how we listen to the printed word, while showing how writers use the expressivity of sound on the silent page. Although her focus is largely on poets—Alfred Tennyson, W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, Walter de la Mare, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Jorie Graham, and Alice Oswald—Leighton’s scope includes novels, letters, and philosophical writings as well. Her argument is grounded in the specificity of the text under discussion, but one important message emerges from the whole: literature by its very nature commands listening, and listening is a form of understanding that has often been overlooked. Hearing Things offers a renewed call for the kind of criticism that, avoiding the programmatic or purely ideological, remains alert to the work of sound in every literary text.

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Poems on death and mortality accompany memoirs of the poet's childhood between Yorkshire and Italy

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An anthology of poems by members of Trinity College, Cambridge from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. This landmark anthology celebrates six centuries of poetry from Trinity College, Cambridge. Over the years, Trinity may have harboured more great poets than any other comparable institution: Herbert, Marvell, Dryden, Byron, Tennyson, Housman, and Nabokov all feature in these pages. In the modern period the college has welcomed poets including Thom Gunn and Sophie Hannah, Rebecca Watts and Jacob Polley. Readers will find here old favourites ('To His Coy Mistress', 'She Walks in Beauty', 'Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam', 'In Memoriam', poems from Winnie-the-Pooh) and much that is startling - old and new.

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