Dan Rattelle's poetry and criticism has been published or is forthcoming in First Things, Modern Age, Crisis, Catholic World Report, Alabama Literary Review and elsewhere. He is a graduate student at the University of St Andrews. Follow him @Drattelle.
The Elegy Beta by Mischa Willet Mockingbird Press, 98 pages, $12 paperback No one, apart from a few oddball formalists, wants to write light verse. James Tate maybe but he is dead.[1] Simon Armitage, sometimes, but the English are a different matter. On the whole American poetry is very serious business indeed—a business that is…
Film Review of Emma (2020) If it is true that, as Alison Milbank puts it, film adaptations of the novels of Jane Austen are marked by “careful visual authenticity in details of clothing and furniture with equally anachronistic dialogue,”[1] then Autumn de Wilde’s new version of Emma fits in with the crowd. But it is…
Able Muse Press, 126 pages, $19.95 “You try/ to sort through images cluttering your mind’s dark attic,” says the opening poem, “Change Ringing”, of Sally Thomas’s debut collection Motherland, as if to announce the book’s humble preoccupations—a mere rummage round in the poet’s private memory. But that picture quickly complicates as she works out what…
From Caledonian Postcards Was it just legal fiction brought us here?The batteryIs silent on the question, gone cold for fearThey’d wake the dead. They won’t but you know me—A “ruin bibber,” unreformed, Romantic. The morning’s clear, if cold. I sit in choir,Intone a requiem in foreign diction.Communed with gulls, asperged by the Atlantic,Would that I sang…
A bum—a holy fool all I knew. I’d just redeemed some cans, a case or two And grabbed a single by the checkout queue. Not my proudest move. Remember though, Throwing stones is often quid pro quo. His robe of castoff clothes, his beard askew. He grabbed a bottle, then he bade adieu, Handing over…
For my dead father 1957-2017 Here is artifice: these books, this grain— The knots and notches severed from a pine, The gilded words on every leather spine, The lumber scraped and straightened by your plane. You’d measure twice, cut once, then dull your pain With work and whisky, sharp as turpentine. But here is artifice…