Channel Link
By Richard Price

Even stations move.

Can I meet you fifteen years ago
by the sprung chainlink?

We could watch together those ever-afters
waiting for a platform. The go-ahead
and they're polite about it.

Sandstone dust, or not now the long settled past -
construction grit in a suspension of air.

I could meet you fifteen minutes ago
at the same co-ordinates.
I'm watch-wiping on the interim platform.

For once I'm not about
to be all that late,
give or take, and if you'd show up
not even half apologising (not that you -)
between yesterday and now, or simply tomorrow
I'd class that on time.

The price tag on Shakespeare's Folio makes my book-buying habit look like chump change. A cool 3.5 million quid. Just think how many paperbacks that would buy.

February Evenings
by Andrew Crozier

I begin with a name. It isn't you
profiled against an orange skyline.
Nor the light that dazzled me when I opened a door
and realised after, I don't know how long
I stood there holding on to the doorknob, I faced
due west. It is early morning in March
which is the name of nothing I might hold to
since I can speak only from my temporary place
in the solar system. It is a February evening
the nights are drawing out and I love you
driving your car so attentive to the hazards of traffic
while I observe the passing skyline which so exactly
defines the way your hair falls onto your shoulders
alert to whatever should show up next.
Where were we going? I don't remember arriving
till I enter a room to see the sun setting
framed in the window and know that I still love
while you are elsewhere in its presence there is only
the light it sheds about us as I step into the area
where I can speak your name into a silence
which answers me.

Call me shallow, but I do find it very satisfying when a great book has a great cover:



Naomi Alderman's Disobedience is a moving insight into the Orthodox Jewish community of Hendon, North London. But it's also apt and funny on what it's like to be a Brit living in New York.

Each chapter starts with a reading and explanation of some part of the Torah. And the rest of the chapter illuminates that reading with a further bit of story. A simple device, but very stylishly done. Again, a bit like the cover, the curlicued design of which represents the carving on the candlesticks that hold the Sabbath candles of her childhood.

Alderman sounds like a pretty savvy character too, if this Guardian article is anything to go by. She has high expectations from literature. She says "maybe I expect too much social campaigning from literature" but, by her actions, she is also clear that exposing a community's prejudices in literature is, in part, her objective. In fact, the fact that this exposure may have positive benefits for the community itself "quite delights" her. Good for her.

Ian Hamilton Finlay, poet, artist, gardener, and proponent of concrete poetry died yesterday.

Prudence Carrison, whom I think is his publisher, describes the common theme of his work thus:

Common to all of Finlay's diverse production is the inscription of language - words, invented or borrowed phrases and other semiotic devices - onto real objects and thus into the world. That language inhabits, for Finlay, a material or real dimension gives rise to the two seemingly opposed but signal characteristics of his work.

And one of his poems:

The Dancers Inherit the Party

When I have talked for an hour I feel lousy –
Not so when I have danced for an hour:
The dancers inherit the party
While the talkers wear themselves out and
sit in corners alone, and glower.