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Hearing Things
Hearing Things is a meditation on sound’s work in literature. Drawing on critical works and the commentaries of many poets and novelists who have paid close attention to the role of the ear in writing and reading, Angela Leighton offers a reconsideration of literature itself as an exercise in hearing. An established critic and poet, Leighton explains how we listen to the printed word, while showing how writers use the expressivity of sound on the silent page. Although her focus is largely on poets—Alfred Tennyson, W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, Walter de la Mare, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Jorie Graham, and Alice Oswald—Leighton’s scope includes novels, letters, and philosophical writings as well. Her argument is grounded in the specificity of the text under discussion, but one important message emerges from the whole: literature by its very nature commands listening, and listening is a form of understanding that has often been overlooked. Hearing Things offers a renewed call for the kind of criticism that, avoiding the programmatic or purely ideological, remains alert to the work of sound in every literary text.
On Form
What is form? Why does form matter? In this imaginative and ambitious study, Angela Leighton assesses not only the legacy of Victorian aestheticism, and its richly resourceful keyword, 'form', but also the very nature of the literary. She shows how writers, for two centuries and more, have returned to the idea of form as something which contains the secret of art itself. She tracks the development of the word from the Romantics to contemporary poets, and offers close readings of, among others, Tennyson, Pater, Woolf, Yeats, Stevens, and Plath, to show how form has provided the single most important way of accounting for the movements of literary language itself. She investigates, for instance, the old debate of form and content, of form as music or sound-shape, as the ghostly dynamic and dynamics of a text, as well as its long association with the aestheticist principle of being 'for nothing'. In a wide-ranging and inventive argument, she suggests that form is the key to the pleasure of the literary text, and that that pleasure is part of what literary criticism itself needs to answer and convey.
Spills
In Spills Angela Leighton combines poetry, memoir, libretto, short story, prose-poetry and translation, slipping between genres while hearing the conversations between them. 'You start from who you are, and walk and walk', she writes, in the spirit of free-voyaging that defines this collection. The prose tells, semi-fictionally, of the poet's life as the daughter of a composer-father and Italian mother, a life split between languages and places, north and south, often among curious and memorable characters. The poems address related themes of place and language, war and peace, the landscape of southern Italy and the Christian story of the Passion. The conversations between different forms an...
One, Two
In 'Pickpocket, Naples', a sonnet sequence reflecting on her Neapolitan background, Angela Leighton imagines a poem 'surprised in the act of finding itself'. Constantly alert to such surprises, One, Two moves from memory-scapes of childhood to elegies for her mother, quirky tributes to the creatures of the natural world to anguished poems about breath and breathlessness in times of coronavirus. Some of these poems are in formal stanzas; others catch the spaced freedom of dream or day-dream. Above all, this is a poetry which insists on the rhythmic footstep that walks in words, on the 'one, two' of a beat in language, whether the steps of a dance or the daily countdowns of sickness and death. The volume ends with some translations of the poetry of Dante and Pirandello which, either strictly or more freely, test the limits of translation. This is Leighton's fifth volume of poetry, and shows once again her characteristic sense of wit, music and formal invention.
Something, I Forget
while news love meant to keep foreveris wiped, so lightly, by this scanning weeper.'Another Lighthouse' Angela Leighton's sixth collection of poems turns on the strange arts of remembering and forgetting. From Rome to Yorkshire, Naples to the Fens, she sets contemporary moments of hope and loss against a classical or Christian backdrop, while tracking a path that goes, more impersonally, from winter's cold to the growth of a garden. There are poems about war, love, childhood, age, and the wiping of memories they (differently) encourage. Whether elegiac or humorous, each tightly written poem is its own imaginable place, where words have the keen touch of things, yet things – a creaky old lift in a palazzo, a glass harp played in a backstreet, the CDs hanging on a tree, a clay doll in a museum – resonate like memorials to 'something' beyond themselves. Whether in strict or free form, in rhyming stanzas or verbal openwork, this is a collection that tests the sound-shapes of language while always listening for the tunes and rhythms that make it sing.
Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology
This reader contains sixteen new and recent essays addressing work by, and issues raised concerning, Victorian women poets. Among those discussed directly are: Elizabeth Barrett Browing, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Michael Field, Felicia Hemans, Adelaide Proctor, Christina Rossetti, and Rosamund Marriott Watson. Key topics dealt with include the nature of home,the market, the fallen woman and the moral law, the mother, and the muse. Critics represented are: Isobel Armstrong, Kathleen Blake, Susan Conley, Stevie Davies, Sandra M. Gilbert, Gill Gregory, Terrence Holt, Linda K. Hughes, Angela Leighton, Tricia Lootens, Jerome J. McGann, Dorothy Mermin, Margaret Reynolds, Dolores Rosenblum, Chris White, and Joyce Zonana.
Trinity Poets
For over six centuries, Trinity College, Cambridge (UK) has spawned more poets than any other institution. Now in this landmark anthology, literary giants including Herbert, Byron, Tennyson, Housman, Marvell, Dryden et al, sit alongside contemporary voices such as bestselling poet and crime writer Sophie Hannah, leading African poet Ben Okri, and Eric Gregory Award winner Jacob Polley, plus others. Past and present meet in a unique showcase of poets from one of the most distinguished and admired colleges in the world. The poems are accompanied by over a dozen illustrations.
Victorian Women Poets
The work combines biographical material with theoretical readings of the poems, and offers new reinterpretations of some original and intriguing literature. Much of this had been by-passed or forgotten before Angela Leighton's work.
Reading Walter de la Mare
Walter de la Mare (1873-1956) was one of the best-loved English poets of the twentieth century, his verse admired by contemporaries including Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot. This volume presents a new selection of de la Mare's finest poems, including perennial favourites such as 'Napoleon', 'Fare Well' and 'The Listeners', for a twenty-first-century audience. The poems are accompanied by commentaries by William Wootten, which build up a portrait of de la Mare's life, loves and friendships with the likes of Hardy, Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas and Katherine Mansfield. They also point out the fascinating references to literature, folklore and the natural world that embroider the verse.
On Form
On Form assesses both the legacy of Victorian aestheticism and the nature of the literary. It tracks the development of the word 'form' since the Romantics and offers readings of, among others, Tennyson, Yeats, Stevens, and Plath. Original readings of poetry are combined with a powerful argument about the nature of aesthetic pleasure.
