David Wheatley

A poem by John Ash, whose new Selected is launched later today. I notice his poems use the word ‘memorial’ a lot. An abiding presence and no mistake.

Stoirm faoi lán sheoil lasmuigh den teach anois. Sean-taithí ag an Ríordánach ar a leithéid. /Spot of bad weather outside so why not some Seán Ó Ríordáin.

Is the past tense of the verb ‘to ping’ ‘pung’.

The great Donal Lunny, fons et origo of just about all traditional Irish music over the last half century and more, has died. What a loss. What a maestro. Here he is in a rare appearance on vocals. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam dílis. www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wS1...

"In the converted ballroom that then housed his library, he stomped all over my poems like Gene Kelly in combat boots." Beautiful tributes to Douglas Dunn - who would've been 84 today - from @dharmabam.bsky.social, @nemoloris.bsky.social, Greenlaw, Muldoon, Hofmann, Armitage, &c.

The young Robert Browning recreates the siege of Troy with his father.

Tennyson claimed that there were only two lines of Browning's Sordello he understood, and both were lies. They were the opening and closing lines: 'Who will may hear Sordello's story told' and 'Who would has heard Sordello's story told'.

JM Synge’s The Aran Islands is a rare example of a Penguin Classic whose introduction (by Tim Robinson) is also deserving of Penguin Classics status, in which case perhaps it warrants an introduction of its own, which ideally could become a Penguin Classic in its own right too, and so on and so on.

All the courses I teach at my workplace come with an alphanumeric code, one letter of which I have learned is my workplace codename! In the eyes of the system. How exciting! My codename is F.

'These books fit small envelopes, go for a minimum stamp and are perfect for cold bedrooms - only one hand and a wrist need suffer exposure'. A lovely William Barnes Selected from JL Carr’s Quince Tree Press.

My children sat in on a lecture I gave today. Afterwards my son said he liked the bit where I described assuming the statements in a poem are addressed to you, then wondering if they are or not, ‘like when you got a card saying “Best dad in Inverurie” and then we worked out that wasn’t true.’

Who doesn’t love a Victorian book with paste-ins and gnomic annotations.

A beautiful poem by Douglas Dunn which everyone should memorise and recite by water while rain gathers in a nearby glass of single malt.

I am terribly sad to hear the great Douglas Dunn has died. I turn to a treasured copy of Terry Street, inscribed by both the author and its previous owner Derek Mahon!

Very sorry to report that Douglas Dunn has passed away. He was the finest Scottish poet of the post-war period. Dougie was also someone we knew and loved as a dear friend, mentor and teacher, and he will be deeply missed.

At the spy-hole, Castle Fraser.

Weekend reading. Willing to look people up in the index if asked nicely.

'Whistler told of [Dante Gabriel Rossetti's pet wombat] being brought to table with brandy and cigars as Swinburne read from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855).'

An inscription of Veronica Forrest-Thomson's for JH Prynne, from the catalogue reviewed for the LRB by Iain Sinclair. Poignant to see.

8,000 words on Prynne by Iain Sinclair. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

The entry-level immortality of featuring in a literary anecdote.

Reminded by the Scottish politician who wants to employ a personal writer/scriever in residence of the time Osip Mandelstam was summoned by a Party commissar who requested that he draft an official telegram. He left him alone in his office to do so, at which point Mandelstam fled the building.

Beguiling all my cares this evening accompanying my wife as she sang a Purcell aria, I thought of Hopkins’ sonnet on that composer, and how he wanted him to ‘lift me, lay me!’

Imagine a Dostoevski novel compressed into six lines and you might get this, from Half Man Half Biscuit:

Colloquial idioms with my daughter: ‘Morven, I know you like the back of my hand.’ ‘Daddy, I don’t like the back of your hand.’

At Crathes Castle.

‘Poetry has nothing to do with who we are.’ (Iain Crichton Smith)

Seals that float past with only their heads visible are reminiscent of nothing so much as passing teenagers on bicycles neither pedalling nor holding the handlebars but appearing to have some manner of magical inside track on the laws of motion.

Ringing for convenience food to the tune of a Half Man Half Biscuit song.

Eadar-theangachadh ùr, làn-lùthmor is mìorbhaileach de Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair. Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair rides again in Taylor Strickland’s flavoursome new translation.

Morven modified this leaf.

Ruskin on lichens. Reposting if only to be able to use this in a class on Ruskin tomorrow!

Congratulations from Sappho to Anne Carson on her Nobel Prize win.

One small effect of Anne Carson's Nobel Prize win is to double Iceland's already highest-in-the-world statistical proportion of Nobel Prize winners to general populace (given that Anne Carson is now an Icelandic citizen). www.theguardian.com/books/2026/o...

What a great sentence: 'But man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave.'

This evening young Morven insisted on a chapter from War and Peace so that she could accompany all the scenes featuring Princess Vassili with a prop she was calling ‘Prince Vaseline’.

Workplace open day hits the spot.

A last look at young Morven’s vision of David Copperfield before binning it for reasons of (outrage!) cat spray.

Found this thing of mine about Irish WWI poet Francis Ledwidge in an old anthology.

Poets do not often announce their new books as their last, but Eamon Grennan’s That’s It is one such sign-off collection.

An unexpectedly quaint anecdote of someone sleeping with Jacques Derrida at an academic conference, from a book called Earthly, Transcendental and Spiritual Logic, by Scott Elliot Hicks.

Friends, come and talk to me about Irish poetry in Aberdeen and we can catch up over a single malt or two. www.abdn.ac.uk/riiss/news-e...

Few enough English poets have engaged with the matter of Northern Ireland, over the last century, but here’s Donald Davie contemplating some Orangemen. Could he have been the first poet to use the bat comparison?

Apple pie with miss-en-abyme ouroboros crust homage to The Neverending Story, which the children are currently reading.

How autumn’s caught on among the fly agarics of bosky Cottown.

Soon to teach Dante Gabriel Rossetti, I thought I might give my students this to chew on too, by @pmcdthisandthat.bsky.social (opening page of four).