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Stop! Look! Listen! Richard Tillinghast's Book Recommendation

Forster (1879-1970) is one of my favorite novelists, and I particularly like Howards End. The film version starring Emma Thompson, Anthony Hopkins and Helena Bonham-Carter is superb, and it captures some of the subtlety of perception and insight of the novel itself. The same might be said of A Room with a View, also adapted to the screen. Forster’s work shares some similarities with Virginia Woolf’s work, particularly with Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. Both novelists are as much concerned with sensibility as with incidents, the building blocks of plot. Though both outlived the Edwardian age—Woolf died in 1941, Forster in 1970—and even though Woolf is commonly spoken of as a modernist, I think there is something Edwardian about both their sensibilities. Both treat emotional states and the shared opinions that typify particular social classes in particular historical periods almost as a painter would do—as colours, tones, atmospheres. Clearly both of them write with something of a poetic feeling. 

Stop! Look! Listen! Bertrand Bickersteth's Music Recommendation

Except for hip hop or the occasional R&B-inflected jazz, I don’t really listen to much music with vocals. Last year, though, I started listening to the jazz vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant. Her latest album is Mélusine (2023) but I remain mired in and moved by Ghost Song (2022). I don’t just love her voice, its tone and timbre, I also love her intelligent lyricism, her confident pastiches of different musical eras, her jarring dissections of power in intimate relations, her masterful takes on great artists from Gregory Porter to Kate Bush.

Stop! Look! Listen! Lisa Russ Spaar's Movie Recommendation

I always assume that everyone has seen the classic cult film Harold and Maude, featuring iconic performances by Ruth Gordon and Bud Cort and a fabulous soundtrack by the young Cat Stevens.  But when I mention the film now to my students, often no one in the room has even heard of the movie, let alone watched it.  It is a unique and unparalleled love story that is very much of its time and place (California at the start of the 70s—Vietnam, ecology, weed, all manner of cultural and social revolution) but is very

Excerpt of "We Could Fill A River" by Douglas Walbourne-Gough

"We Could Fill A River" by Douglas Walbourne-Gough
 
The Wolastoq flows below me. Spring
ice is receding, this year’s first blue herons
bring sun. They call me outside to warm my
snow-weary bones. I’ve crossed this bridge
often, stopped to watch people fish, couldn’t
resist comparing this river to the rum-brown
water of the Humber I’ve never fished
but grew up convinced I’d drown in.
 
I’d watched The Country, broke down

Sue Sinclair: Summer 2023 Editorial

HURRAY! IT’S THE SUMMER POETRY ISSUE! The summer poetry issue has always been an event for me. Even before I was editor of The Fiddlehead, I looked forward to its arrival. The section titles, drawn from lines within the poems, always made the issue feel like an occasion, showed how closely the editors were reading the work featured, and I got to read some of the most engaging, reorienting, challenging and/or delightful poetry written that year. I still feel this sense of occasion, and I rub imaginary hands together in my mind as I anticipate what readers will find here.

Stop! Look! Listen! Ronna Bloom's Book Recommendation

Phil Hall’s new book, The Ash Bell, undoes me. His work makes me read below the below and out the corners of my eyes. Drops me down under understanding, echos of words like backlit other words waving their fronds. I read the word “worship" and see “warship." It's blunt, raw, funny and true. Cumulative. I do not understand, I stand under, happily. 

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