Neglected and Loved Treasures of Ancient and Modern Literature
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| Cover of Sister Outsider Audre Lorde Crossing Press, 1984 via Wikimedia Commons, Fair use |
I was revising too much instead of writing new poems.
[...] poetry is not Play-Doh. You can’t take a poem and keep reforming it. It is itself, and you have to know how to cut it. And if there’s something else you want to say, that’s fine.
The eternal virtues of literature are sincerity, clarity, breadth, force, and subtlety.— Sir Walter Raleigh (the literary critic, not the Elizabethan courtier), in Romance
Iraq is believed to have more missing people than any other country, according to the International Red Cross, with estimates ranging from 250,000 to one million.
Nobody could accuse the article of having a cheerful topic. But this look into forensic work in Iraq is not just the type of reporting of real significance that used to be far more widely financed and printed when I was a teenager.
It is also timely in the context of neighbouring Syria: as Germany's Tagesschau evening news broadcast reported recently, the White Helmets there are also struggling to document and bury executed civilians properly. — Resources for forensics are still hard to obtain.
Bright Star (2009), directed by Jane Campion, has just left Netflix's collection in Germany. It is a thoughtful, detailed look at the early 19th-century romance between John Keats and Fanny Brawne.
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