Tag: English poetry
Chaos describ’d
These days chaos as a concept has been captured by mathematics and physics. (Sometimes it gets re-exported to the popular imagination through tropes like the butterfly effect.) But before that it was available to anyone. It was especially attractive to philosophers, theologians and mystics, and to creative people like writers and artists. Chaos has always […]
After Offa: Mercian Hymns
We weren’t just following his Dyke on foot. We were also tracking its maker, Offa, king of the Mercians. Or so it was said. We’ve no contemporary evidence that Offa was the one responsible. The first person to make the claim was Asser, a Welsh monk from St Davids (his original name may have been […]
Nightwalking
The literature of walking is large. It’s grown quickly in recent years, in part as an offshoot of the ‘new nature writing’. Most of it, though, is concerned with walking in the light of day. Nightwalking has received much less treatment. Frédéric Gros, in his recent A philosophy of walking (2014) fails to mention it. […]
