John Baker’s Blog

Dick Jones offers us a poem and talks about the poet, David Harsent author of the collection, Legion.
I think of Akhmatova’s famous encounter with the starved woman in the queue outside a Russian jail during the terror. The woman recognised Akhmatova and said: “Can you describe this?” When Akhmatova said, “I can”, a ghost [...]

Go to Otherwise and play around in the archives.
For several weeks she and her brother–she, a 55-year-old woman with a bad right kidney and strangling liver and arthritis in her wrists and thumbs, and brother, a 40-year-old 95-pound retarded man with alopecia and a worrisome white count–had struggled to pack up and carry away the [...]

BLDG BLOG reports (with photographs) on the bookshop constructed inside a converted Dominican church in Maastricht, which has won an architectural interiors prize.
. . . it achieves a weirdly ironic overlap in which two cultural spaces, both on the verge of extinction, at least in Western Europe – and I’m referring here to the [...]