Anglo-Saxon poetry

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Interplanetary Postcards: Lessons from the Martian School of British Poetry

ByLara Palmquist

Emerging in the late 1970s and already diminishing by the early 1980s, Martianism was a short-lived yet influential movement in British poetry. Principally associated with Craig Raine and Christopher Reid*, it derived its name from the title poem of Raine’s second collection, A Martian Sends a Postcard Home (1979), in which the eponymous alien recounts…

A Gathering of Particulars: On Building a Word-Hoard
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A Gathering of Particulars: On Building a Word-Hoard

ByLara Palmquist

It is fitting that the bowerbird roosts in the opening lines of Ted Hughes’s poem “A Literary Life,” for there is perhaps no better mascot for reader and writer both. The species is a known collector, spending the better part of the year building complicated huts from assorted novelties: colored glass and aluminum tabs, bleached…