John Baker’s Blog

Poetry Online has Willy Maley’s poem, On My Father’s Refusal to Renew his Subscription to The Beijing Review, together with comments from the author and his editor.

Once you’ve read the poem you’ll want to hear what the author and editor have to say about it.

When Daddy died, his papers consisted of two passports, one issued in 1930, just after his own father died, when he was emigrating to America, the other issued in 1996, when he returned to Spain - his first time out of the country for over half a century - to revisit Jarama, the scene of his capture almost sixty years earlier. The rest was photographs and a photographic memory. Books were to be borrowed and loaned, read and retained in the mind, not the home. When we were young, he’d bring a pile of paperbacks from Gilmorehill Book Exchange and give us a week to read them before they went back to the store. A few weeks before he died, I took him a printout of the latest Beijing Review, now online. He liked that.

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