“I have a passion for paint and am compelled to push through boundaries in order to resolve things which I do not fully comprehend. The result is always a surprise and leads on to further discovery.” An exhibition of beautiful paintings by Anne Lever (and poems by Michael Fox), opens shortly at Chester’s Grosvenor Museum (27 Grosvenor Street, Chester), until …

A RED RED ROSE – O, my Luve’s like a red, red rose, that’s newly sprung in June. O, my Luve’s like a melodie, that’s sweetly play’d in tune. As fair as thou, my bonnie lass, so deep in luve am I. And I will love thee still, my dear, till a’ the seas gang dry. Till a’ the seas …

“Valeria Victrix“, it was the name of the Roman legion XX, the one that was headquartered on the right bank of the River Dee (south of Liverpool). But if you want to observe the Roman foundations of the ancient fortified place, this is not possible, because the walls that still surround Chester were made on precisely those ancient foundations. Visiting …

A DAUGHTER OF EVE – A fool I was to sleep at noon, and wake when night is chilly beneath the comfortless cold moon. A fool to pluck my rose too soon, a fool to snap my lily. My garden-plot I have not kept. Faded and all-forsaken, I weep as I have never wept: Oh it was summer when I …

You’ll have to travel 30 km to the northeast, leaving Stratford-on-Avon behind you, to get to Winchcombe and its sixteenth century castle.  That architectural marvel, it houses the memory of a famous woman, Catherine Parr, last wife of Henry VIII. To know where that woman from 1548 rests, you will need to enter the chapel of the castle, where she …

ANDRE KOHN 1/3 – He was born in Stalingrad, raised by an artistically gifted family (his mother was a symphony violinist and his father a noted linguist, writer and sculptor), near the Caspian Sea in southern Russia. In Moscow, at age 15, he began studying fine arts (as a trainee) at the famous Impressionist artists studios. That experience has been …

At the age of 46 – in 1974 – she won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Anne Gray Harvey was born in Massachusetts and lived in San Francisco and Baltimore. In 1954 she was diagnosed with postpartum depression, and in 1955 (on her birthday), she attempted suicide, but was encouraged by her doctor to pursue an interest. Writing poetry. Reading, …

She is best known as a key figure in feminist poetry. For she, transformation goes beyond the act of writing, and Adrienne Rich (1929/2012) delineated her poetics relatively early in her career in a 1971 essay. The form of her poems, also you can discover that has evolved with her content, moving from tight formalist lyrics to experimental poems, also …

He was born in Illinois, and is an American novelist and essayist. He graduated from Swarthmore College in 1981 and studied thereafter at the Freie Universität in Berlin on a Fulbright scholarship. His debut novel was The Twenty-seventh City. His second novel was Strong Motion. Winner of the National Book Award for The Corrections (2001), Jonathan Franzen‘s recent novels have …