MY BOOKS
Keats's Anchovy (2021)
‘An anchovy a day keeps the doctor away’ – the startling recipe for health for an ailing John Keats in Rome in 1821. If they thought an anchovy could nourish a poet, why not the famished reader? This book of poetry opens with a chance encounter with a humble anchovy and goes on to take in a sequence of love sonnets to an elusive fellow Irishman, snapshots from the lives of people with AIDS in New York City, a homage to the artist Isabel Rawsthorne, and poems about politics and family in London and Buenos Aires. Artwork is by the brilliant Italian multimedia artist Andrea Aste. For what's in the book and links to some YouTube clips of the author reading click More info
Of Purest Blue (2020)
A translation with Claudio Tedesco of poetry by Francisco Brines (1932-2021), with the original Spanish. In 2020 Brines was awarded the Cervantes Prize for Literature, widely regarded as equivalent to the Nobel, for a 'poetic work that goes from the carnal and the purely human to the metaphysical, to the spiritual, towards an aspiration of beauty and immortality'. Translation was conducted with the poet and supported by the Ministry of Culture in Spain. The book contains a memoir of Brines by the English novelist Rufus Gunn. Artwork is by the painter the late Alain Roselló.
F. R. Leavis: The Creative University (2016)
An introduction to the educational thought of F. R. Leavis (1895–1978), probably the most controversial and arguably the greatest English literary critic of the twentieth century. It provides the first in-depth examination of Leavis’s ideas in relation to contemporary mass higher education. Based on original research, the book gives an overview of the critic’s life, work and influence. What was Leavis like as a teacher? Was he really so ferocious? The book ends with my account of being taught by Leavis as an undergraduate.