Culture
From reflections on the work of other writers to investigations into the nature of language and its ultimate value - the central theme of my 2019 book Savage Gods - via whimsical dreams of literary resurrection and all sorts of other uncategorisable things: this is a collation of some of my writing on human culture and its manifestations.
The Earth Does Not Speak in Prose
An interview with Charlotte Du Cann, director of the Dark Mountain Project, to mark its ten-year anniversary. 2019.
The Circling
The novel gives way to poetry, poetry gives way to silence, silence gives way to God. Emily Dickinson, Samuel Johnson and Rumi explain. 2018.
The Language of the Master
The language we use creates the world we see. How are you speaking, and who is controlling your words? 2019.
A Storm Blown From Paradise
An essay on time and progress. The failing promises of modernity are linked to a very peculiar view of time. 2018.
The Great Work
An essay on writing, magic and alchemy, and how the transformation wrought by each is intimately related. 2018.
Four Poets’ Houses
Four accounts of visits to the former homes of great poets, and some musings on their meaning. 2016.
The Call of the Wild
What would contemporary fiction look like if wrietrs took seriously the possibility that places, not just people, can be characters? 2016.
The Speaking of the Stones
A tribute to the work of the English writer Alan Garner, commissioned for a book on his legacy. 2016.
The Sole Business of Poetry
‘To feel / Greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly, the natural / Beauty, is the sole business of poetry.’ The text of a talk on poetry in the age of ecocide. 2011.
Upon The Mathematics of the Falling Away
On suicide, collapse, chess and Charles Bukowski. This is not a short story. 2011.