Volume 48, Number 19 · November 29, 2001
Beautiful Objects
By James Fenton
Mermaids Explained
by Christopher Reid, with a foreword by Charles Simic
Harcourt, 129 pp., $24.00
Electric Light
by Seamus Heaney
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 98 pp., $20.00
In the late 1970s I was asked to judge a small but interesting prize, the Prudence Farmer Award, which was given to the best poem that had appeared, that year, in the New Statesman. The best poems that year seemed to me to have been written by two poets, Craig Raine and Christopher Reid, and I divided the award between them. Raine's poem was called 'A Martian Sends a Postcard Home': it presented human life as seen through the misunderstanding eyes of an alien. Here for instance is a description of a telephone:
Review, 2287 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |