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Author: Peter Steele

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The contours of exile: The poetry of Derek Walcott

    • Peter Steele
    • 29 August 2024

      Good poetry stops us in our tracks, visited as we are by whatever it is that has stopped the poet in his tracks. This agency may properly be, as in Walcott's case, something stemming from cultural marginality, from a fascination with the dramatic, from an equipoise between the lyrical and the epical, or from the interweaving of all these. (From the Eureka Street archives)

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Joycepoem

    • Peter Steele
    • 16 June 2024

      'From window and doorface painted in carnival, and / your foxing spirit here for a term / becoming again and again the flambeau it carries, / dear dirty Dublin a thing of fire.' A poem recollecting visits to the Jesuit-run Belvedere College, in the north of Dublin, where James Joyce completed most of his secondary schooling. (From 2007)

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    To exhilarate their minds

    • Peter Steele
    • 03 July 2012
    5 Comments

    Here's the mint still on my hands. A wreath, so Pliny thought was 'good for students, to exhilarate their minds'. Late in the course, I’ll settle for a sprig or two.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    After the Latin

    • Peter Steele
    • 04 May 2010
    1 Comment

    They change the sky but not their soul who run .. across the sea: the impartial earth .. gapes for the child of a pauper as for a princeling ... (For Peter Porter)

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Peter Porter in the capital of the English language

    • Peter Steele
    • 30 April 2010
    1 Comment

    Feed and clothe this Australian poet and lodge him in a library attached to a music venue, and remarkable things would happen. He made of London a country of the mind, its vices, virtues, constant features and mutability there to be inspected and eventually portrayed.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    German author wed lucidity to mystery

    • Peter Steele
    • 09 May 2008
    1 Comment

    W. G. Sebald wrote as somebody evolving a new sensory capacity or a new vein of intellectual attention. The Emergence of Memory offers five interviews with him and four essays about him, which show that while he considered life to be 'a grave affair', he also knew sources of joy.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Mutual charities between saints and beasts

    • Peter Steele
    • 01 April 2008
    1 Comment

    Did Colman's mouse, nibbling his ear, provoke him.. indeed to worship?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Joycepoem

    • Peter Steele
    • 25 July 2007

    A poem recollecting visits to the Jesuit-run Belvedere College, in the north of Dublin, where James Joyce had most of his secondary schooling.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The human as such

    • Peter Steele
    • 08 July 2006

    Peter Steele reviews Terry Eagleton’s Sweet Violence: the Idea of the Tragic.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The creatures & their words

    • Peter Steele
    • 06 July 2006

    Peter Steele looks at poetry about the birds and beasts.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The brush and the pen

    • Peter Steele
    • 01 July 2006

    Art speaks, but we sometimes need translation

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Consumers

    • Peter Steele
    • 15 June 2006

    Peter Steele unlocks the hidden treasures of fine food.

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