Monthly Archives: December 2011
“Flight Into Egypt,” by Joseph Brodsky, translated by Melissa Green
…where the drover came from, no one knew. Their affinity made the heavens slate the desert for a miracle. There, they chose to light a fire and camp, the cave in a vortex of snow. Not divining his role, the Infant drowsed in a halo of curls that would quickly become accustomed to radiance. Its […]
“mehitabel dances with boreas,” by Don Marquis
On a hibernal note, a cockroach types, regarding his friend Mehitabel the cat: well boss i saw mehitabel last evening she was out in the alley dancing on the cold cobbles while the wild december wind blew through her frozen whiskers and as she danced she wailed and sang to herself uttering the fragments that […]
“Live Like a Poet! At Home in the Bateau Lavoir,” by Rosanna Warren
On April 13, 1904, Pablo Picasso and his friend the Catalan painter Sebastià Junyer Vidal travelled from Barcelona to Paris and installed themselves in Montmartre in the studio just vacated by the Basque ceramicist and sculptor Paco Durrio. Junyer Vidal paid the rent. Called “La Maison du Trappeur” (The Trapper’s House), later renamed Le Bateau […]
“He was a kind of nothing,” Fiennes’s Coriolanus
f proof were needed of what verse can still do to us, it is abundant in Ralph Fiennes’s riveting new adaptation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. Set in a putative Rome that is actually, though not visibly, Serbia, the blood-soaked story plausibly unfolds against a European backdrop that seems both ancient and itchily contemporary. Coriolanus, hailed for […]