Sophie Oliver

Jan 15, 2025 | the-tls.co.uk | Miranda France |Sophie Oliver |Kathryn Gray |Stephen Henighan

A novel about political awakening in free verse might not set every heart racing, but when the author is Mario Benedetti, one of Latin America’s best-loved poets, you know to expect humour, observation and inventive wordplay alongside the social criticism. Benedetti (1920–2009) was born in Montevideo into an Italian immigrant family. His parents, admirers of English literature, baptized him Mario Orlando Hamlet Hardy Brenno Benedetti Farugia – a long name for a small man.

Jan 15, 2025 | the-tls.co.uk | Stephen Henighan |Sophie Oliver |Kathryn Gray |Miranda France

The publication in 1888 of the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío’s collection Azul changed the way the Spanish language was written. Darío became the representative poet of modernismo, a movement that renewed Spanish verse, and later prose. As the poet moved to Chile, Argentina, Spain and France, the influence of his poetry spread.

Jan 15, 2025 | the-tls.co.uk | Sophie Oliver |Kathryn Gray |Stephen Henighan |Miranda France

Two poems by Virginia Woolf have resurfaced. I found them tucked in the back of a folder of letters to her niece Angelica Bell in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin. Light verse, quickly drafted for her niece and nephew (Quentin Bell) in pencil on two sheets of the same grey-blue paper, “Angelica” and “Hiccoughs” delight in fantasy and invention.

Nov 27, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | Andrea Brady |Alison Shell |Sophie Oliver |Juliette Bretan

In one of his “Notes on Militant Poetics” (2012–13), the British poet Sean Bonney comments on the transformation of Satan and the devils into snakes in book ten of Paradise Lost. Satan has just returned from Eden, and is bragging about his successful temptation of Eve and Adam. He expects to hear a “universal shout and high applause” (X.505), but the angels have been turned into serpents and can only hiss.

Nov 20, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | Sophie Oliver

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